In the first episode of this season, Jenni delves into why communication is the antidote to organisational chaos. This is the only episode of season four that Jenni talks on her own (in all the others this season, she speaks with experts from our talented collective team).
Do you know what chaos looks like in your organisation? Jenni will help you to understand and recognise those elements of chaos and ultimately bring you calm by guiding you through five things that can help.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance by Erica Dhawan
The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Coms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to kick off season four with an episode about why communication is the antidote to organisational chaos. This is the only episode in this season where you’ll hear just from me, but in the next 15 minutes or so, I’ll share with you a little bit more about what organisational chaos is and the five things you can look at to go from chaos to calm as an organisation.
What is chaos?
Well, I’m going to share a section from my book, Influential Internal Communication here, because I wrote a whole chapter in that about chaos in organisations. So it makes sense to share with you what I talk about there in terms of what it is and how it’s defined. When I write about chaos in organisations, people often jump to a mental image of people running around, a major crisis underway, and everyone in a state of panic, and that’s rarely the case. Chaos is all around us all of the time. And if we take the Cambridge Dictionary definition, it is a total state of confusion with no order. Chaos theory in mathematics suggests that the apparent randomness of chaos is false.
There are underlying patterns that show connections, patterns, patterns, and loops. And if we look at this idea alongside the dictionary definition, we can see how it can be applied to organisations. Chaos is a state of utter confusion, but there are
Patterns within that confusion that if you explore and delve into, you can calm. Even where there is complexity, you can find the ability to bring control. In organisations, chaos is everywhere because organisations are complex, and they are complex because they involve people, and in many cases, they operate in multiple locations around the world as well.
We bring order to this complexity with organisational charts and standard operating procedures, but elements of chaos will always exist.
What does chaos look like?
And you might think that chaos doesn’t apply to you, but chaos can take many forms. Now, I had a conversation in a previous role where I was trying to understand how things happened in order to move things forward. And the conversation shows not only a chaotic way of working, but it also hinted at an underlying issue that compounded the chaos internally.
I also said, what’s the process to get the presentation together for the management meeting? To which my boss replied, “We have individual meetings one-to-one, then we have smaller group meetings, then we have two pre-meetings, followed by a post-management meeting.”
Now, this isn’t pace. This is an inefficient process that’s born out of fear of being challenged. It’s not an agile organisation. It’s one that’s bogged down in the need to prepare for every possible eventuality. And even worse, in this case, there was a clear message that the organisation was transparent and open, but the processes and ways of working signalled something very different.
So, when it comes to organisations, this is chaos. It might not be people running around and things tumbling down, but it is chaos. There is confusion and disorder, the very definition of chaos.
Now, chaos for many organisations today comes from many things. It comes from things like mergers and acquisitions, rapid growth, a lack of strategic focus, hybrid working. It comes from a focus on financials, team friction, high turnover employees. There are lots of things that are contributing to chaos, especially after the pandemic. We are still navigating the changes that have been left behind.
How can communication bring calm into an organisation?
Now, before I get into the five things I want to talk about in this podcast, I want to explore a little bit about some insights that come linked to hybrid and fully remote organisations, because there is an aspect of communication and digital tools that are worth exploring.
The way we communicate in the digital landscape forms a big part of the antidote to chaos. And it’s something we’ve been talking to clients about a lot in recent months. I read the book Digital Body Language by Erika Darwin, and she shares four laws of digital body language: value visibly, communicate carefully, collaborate confidently, and trust totally. She says confident leaders never send emails scattered with typos. They don’t forget to include relevant team members in group messages. They establish norms in their digital communications that create guidelines for their teams on how and when to communicate, what is appropriate behaviour on each social channel, and more. And finally, they lead by example and follow these rules themselves.
Now, this is really important because when it comes to communication inside organisations, and especially organisations that are hybrid or remote, this element of leadership is so important when it comes to creating trust, when it comes to creating efficiencies, when it comes to creating a great employee experience. If we’re not demonstrating some of these, it becomes very difficult to calm the chaos.
Essentially, leaders need to be more intentional with how they communicate digitally and be aware of holding the power in the communication. If you’re a leader, there will be a power imbalance, and power is felt more in a digital space. Your weight of words, your actions, all of those things are important, and they are so important when it comes to being remote.
In recent podcast seasons, I talked about the importance of trust, and just coming back to a quote from Stephen M Covey, where he talks about the fact that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.
And this is the case whether you’re communicating in person or whether you’re communicating digitally.
What are the things that you can do to bring calm into your organisation?
Well, there are five things I want to touch on in this episode.
1. Use communication
If there is complete focus on financial aspects of the business, this can lead to a lack of focus on people and other elements of organisational success. So, to get around this and use communication as the antidote, you want to build communication around the story or the strategic narrative that can be linked to the purpose and the ambition of your business. We’re talking a lot about storytelling, about finding the stories that feel relevant and authentic for you. And that’s an important part of communication helping calm the chaos.
2. Be clear on everybody’s roles and responsibilities
If there’s an inability to get work done, then sometimes there’s a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. And we can often fall into the trap of meetings without purpose or outcome. So, to get around this, discuss where the accountability and the decision making is. Be clear on everybody’s roles and responsibilities and make sure things happen that drive action. This is where communication and culture start to really blend together. And we start to look at how communication can help an organisation be more efficient.
3. Addressing the communication of line managers
If you’re seeing people off with stress or off on sick, this is often down to communication skills of the line manager. We come back to the line manager as a root cause of engagement and the employee experience again and again. So, making sure that they have the skills to listen to people who are taking time off and we can find out what’s really going on is important. Addressing the communication skills of line managers is something that comes up again and again and again. So, it’s really important to invest in that if there is any element of organisational chaos for you.
4. High turnover of employees
So, we need to understand why people are leaving the company. So, doing leaving interviews and looking for any trends is really important. If you can conduct leaving interviews as soon as somebody says they are leaving, this gives you time to have more conversations and discussions about what might be the route cause of that and it allows you to look at development and training needs for the team to help as well.
You might have a merger or acquisition in progress and this is often solved with better communication. You need to be clear on decision making and allow space for people to go through that change. You need to define the culture of the new organisation and communicate in a way that aligns to it. It’s important here to demonstrate skills of being open and transparent as much as you possibly can with sometimes very confidential information.
5. Team friction
Now, this may happen more frequently in organisations where people are more remote than they are together. So, the antidote for this is around discussing with each team member what’s happening for them and looking at the motivations for each person and how to get them working better together. The antidote of communication can bring calm to an organisation, but being calmer doesn’t mean being slower. It’s more about finding patterns and bringing a sense of order. Even where there is complexity, you can find the ability to bring control.
Thank you for listening!
In the next episode, I’m going to kick off the conversations with our collective team by chatting to Advita Patel about inclusion and belonging. We’ll chat about definitions of both and how organisations can be less chaotic by focusing on some key things in this space.
Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation. So, please do join our community and mailing list from the link in the show notes.
