Season 2 kicks off in a few months, but Jenni couldn’t leave you in a listening limbo without an episode! Are you looking at communication within your organisation, why you should invest in it, or what’s causing chaos? At just 4 mins 30 secs, this bite-sized episode sums up the five principles of why communication is important.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
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 bonus episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field.
Now as we get ready for season two coming out later this year, I wanted to share some of my thinking with you around why communication is important.
Now, this might seem like a strange topic. I talk about communication a lot. My whole business is around helping people improve communication, but in the work I’ve been doing with some of my clients. The kind of five principles of why communication is important keeps coming up again and again in the workshops and conversations we’re having. So it’s prompted me to do this bonus episode to just cover those five points to help you think about why communication needs to be invested in, how it can be such a huge, impactful tool for us in organisations and why it’s so important when we are creating engaging and efficient workplaces.
What are the five points around why communication is important.
Trust
Well, the first is that it builds trust in individuals and the organisation, how we communicate with each other, having communication is what helps us trust people. It helps us build relationships, and it helps us understand more about people. We often talk about the richness of communication, so using things like video or phone calls will build much more trust than just using text based communication, but that’s why we communicate. We communicate to build our relationships, and in turn, that builds trust.
Ambiguity
The second is that it removes ambiguity. Now, in times of significant change, it’s easy to not communicate, but it’s the communication that helps us feel safe and secure in the workplace. Now, whether there’s good news or bad news is irrelevant. The fact that there’s information and I’m being communicated with helps us remove any ambiguity or worry, which is incredibly important to us as human beings.
Different ways of communicating
The third is that everyone communicates differently and we have to spend a little bit of time to understand how we communicate. How you communicate will be different than how I communicate. How your team communicates will be very different and having those conversations around that are really important to enable relationships to really thrive. If you prefer a phone call, but I prefer a text message, we have to have some of those conversations to help us work really well together.
Communication through conversations
The fourth is around communication, being conversations. Now we often talk about talking to people or talking with people, but actually there has to be as much listening there as well. And importantly, we have to listen to understand. It’s not about listening to what we think we are hearing. We have to make sure we’re really understanding the questions or the points that are being made. Also important that in the conversations we are responding to those signals with genuine interest. So we are showing people that we are listening. We are not just looking around the room, we are present, we’re with people. And this is a conversation, not someone just talking at me. So incredibly important to think about the two way dynamic in there.
We are all human beings
And the final point is that we are human beings. You know, we want and we need social connection and communication is one of the main ways that we connect. So if we don’t invest in our skills, if we don’t invest in each other to understand how we can do that in the best way for all of us, it’s going to make those connections really difficult and in turn, the relationships difficult. And in turn, we then end up in places where people don’t necessarily trust each other and we end up in what I would call chaos situations.
So, I just wanted to share those five points with you. If you are looking at communication in your organisation you are looking at reasons maybe why you want to invest in it, or you are trying to think about maybe what’s causing some of that chaos. Quite often it’s some of these elements not working well together.
Now, I’ll be back for season two later on this year, and I hope you can join me for that. We’re going to be talking about things like mergers and acquisitions. I’m going to be sharing some advice around managing stakeholders. I’m going to be talking about accountability and also influence and persuasion so lots of big topics coming up for season two, and I hope you can join me there. In the meantime, don’t forget, you can always connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I’m really happy to continue the conversation there as well.
