In this episode, Jenni talks about impactful communication skills, identifies the chaos that comes from not training people in communication, and shares six things to consider when it comes to being impactful in turning chaos to calm.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
How a ham and cheese baguette can help you listen – Calm Edged Rebels
David Oppenheimer research: Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
Read about the Six keys to impactful communication
To keep the conversation going, connect with Jenni on LinkedIn and Twitter; ask questions and share your thinking!
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today, I’m going to be talking about impactful communication skills because when it comes to chaos, communication is always the solution. I wrote in my book that communication is the fundamental component. It’s the golden thread that runs through everything. It’s representative of culture, it’s the articulation of the strategy, and it’s what we need to function as a group or as a community. I want everyone to understand the power of communication in the workplace today. It’s why I do what I do. So today, we’re going to talk about the chaos that comes from not training people in communication and the six things to consider when it comes to being impactful. There are six things that will enable you to go from chaos to calm.
So how does poor communication lead to chaos?
Well, relationships are built on good communication, and while relationships is a word we don’t use much in the workplace, we are all in one. Whether that’s with the organisation itself or with the team around you, relationships are everywhere. And when a team is in chaos, it will look like people not getting along, teams not working well together. Shift work issues can often play a role around misinformation. There can be power struggles. You can have toxic people or blockers. That always feels uncomfortable when I talk about the word toxic around people but there are probably some around organisations that you know, and all of these chaotic areas are linked to communication and relationships. Now, from a leadership perspective, communication skills are so important and for line managers. This is a big one. I know from my own research that communication is more one-way than it should be, and communication works both ways. You know, if we aren’t listening, having conversations, then it’s not really communication. In a recent episode of My Calm Edged Rebels podcast, we talk about listening, and the episode is called How a Ham and Cheese Baguette can Help You listen, I’ll let you figure out why. But between the three of us that co-host that, we have quite a debate on the role of listening, and I’ve popped a link to that show in the show notes for you because it’s worth a listen to get some different perspectives on that role of listening inside organisations.
But if I come back to chaos, poor communication will generally lead to things like ambiguity, people making assumptions, misinformation. It can also lead to poor customer service, inefficient operations and processes. So, what do we do? How do we diagnose that communication is the issue? And specifically, that it’s a skill issue too.
Now you can diagnose that communication is an issue through a survey and through conversations. The survey will tell you whether there are blockages and where they are. And that will enable you to have some conversations to identify why they exist. Now, that’s the important bit. We have to know why something is happening because it’s easy to assume that it’s skills-based, but actually it could be down to time and then the skill that you need to coach is around attention and time management. So, it’s important to get to that root cause. And when I’m working with clients. There is always a process element in terms of how things get done. So, it is only through the sitting in the meetings, having conversations and questioning certain things that you can get to that root cause of the issue. And when it’s communication, that’s the issue. It’s about having the right people in the room, the clarity on purpose of meetings and outcomes. And there is so much there because communication touches every aspect of organisations and it directly impacts success.
So how do we go from chaos to calm?
Now, there are six things to think about when it comes to communicating effectively, and these are six things that I often talk about in the workshops that I run to help non communications people so anyone in any function understand the power of communication.
The first is the importance of focusing on the audience. So, no matter what role you do, remember that when you are communicating, you have to focus on the people you are communicating with. It’s not about you, it’s about them. So, if you are leading a team or an organisation, then remember that you are not always the intended audience for the messages that you are giving. You need to understand your audience. You need to know them well, know what they read, know what they understand, find out what they already know about initiatives. Making sure that you realise that you are not the audience is a fundamental part to making sure that you are focusing on the audience. I often advise clients to know the sort of things people are reading, watching, listening to. It just helps to know whether your audience are reading newspapers, what kind of newspapers they’re reading, or if they’re listening to podcasts, reading things online. Get to know the people that you are talking to.
The second is to have a clear goal, so making sure that you are very clear about why you are doing what you are doing. What are you hoping to achieve by writing an email, having a meeting, doing the presentation? What do you want people to do with that information? How do you want them to feel? Are you just informing them about something or do you want them to change their behaviour? As a result, being very clear on your goal is really important. It’s also a good question to have with those around you if you’re being asked to communicate anything.
The third is around getting the tone right, so making sure that tone reflects either a personal style or an organisational style. Depending on the type of content you are writing, the tone will need to be adapted based on who the message is coming from and who it’s going to but making sure that you’re not using jargon, you’re explaining acronyms, and just keeping it very simple is a really important part of communication.
The fourth is keeping it simple. So, there’s actually a study that was done by Daniel Oppenheimer in 2006 that found that people actually think you are less intelligent and less credible if you use long words, when shorter words will do. So, you need to think about that, especially if you’re looking at trust in leadership or looking at maybe the way you might use longer words when actually shorter ones will be fine. I have a personal bugbear when people use the word myself in sentences, they might say, Jenni and myself will be coming to see you, when actually me is absolutely fine, or I is absolutely fine, but we tend to overcomplicate things, so just keep things a little bit simple.
Now, the fifth is using structure. Now we have to use structure in everything that we do so we are guiding people with whatever we are communicating with them. Whether it’s an email, whether it’s a presentation, always think about telling them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them. So your opening paragraphs or any emails or anything should include the who, what, where, when, and how makes your messages aren’t buried in long emails. But important to help people feel where they’re going with you on that journey. So be logical with that structure. I always say to think about a supermarket flow, we all know that the fruit and veggies traditionally at the front and the wine is at the back. If that was suddenly to change, we wouldn’t know where things were. We’d be confused. Very similar for when you are communicating, depending on what kind of channel you’re using.
Now the sixth point is to adapt the way that you communicate, and this is important when our attention spans are getting worse. If you’ve listened to previous episodes, you’ll know that I talk about attention management and how we can switch focus so quickly. In fact, it’s every four minutes. So, if we are looking to communicate and cut through some of the noise, that’s every day, we have to make sure that we are using channels that are interesting to the people that we’re talking to so channels will be things like video, audio, presentations, meetings, whatever it is that you are using, think about how you can change the content to suit that channel.
So those are six tips for you to think about in terms of how you can go from chaos to calm when it comes to general communication inside your organisation. It’s important skill for all of us to be able to understand because that power of communication, that importance of relationships in the workplace is what makes organisations thrive.
If you want to find out more about communication skills and how to have influence inside your organisation then my book Influential Internal Communication is available in most book stores and online. It’s a book that I wrote to help anyone in organisations understand the power of communication. I wrote it because I read a lot of books and I thought if everyone reads just a little bit of each of these books then they will be able to understand a bit more about how communication can make organisations more efficient and more engaging. So, the book covers chapters on the importance of understanding people, how to understand organisations, it talks about chaos and it talks about my model, the field model and how you can apply that to growth, how you apply it to fixing teams, how you can apply it to anything inside an organisation that might be causing chaos. Now for many organisations internal communications can really slip down that list of priorities when there are high pressures and high stakes in business but this sense of chaos and confusion comes when we are not focusing on that communication and the importance of it so if you do grab a copy, let me know, there’s loads of reviews on Amazon and I would love to hear what you think. But it is something to look at if your looking at how you can have more influence inside your organisation no matter what role you are in.
Now in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about fear and trust. It’s quite a big topic, but it’s a topic that I know is on the minds of those I’m working with specifically how to manage both inside organisations. There are links here to leadership, but I’m going to be talking about the science of fear, the importance of trust, and the things that we need to consider to be credible as we lead organisations. Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn and thank you so much to those of you that have already shared feedback, thoughts, questions about future episodes so please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and there are details in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
