Communication

Communicating is a behaviour

Communication gets talked about a lot and taken for granted a lot. It gets treated as an accessory to the work, when in fact it already is the work: communicating is a behaviour, and like every behaviour it can be observed and changed.

Communicating well means one thing only, and it’s checkable: that the message arrived the way it was meant. How elegantly it was phrased is a separate question.

Being right, or getting aligned

In companies people often argue as though the purpose were to be right. That has its logic when you’re choosing between two options, and it stops having any the moment the discussion has to be followed by joint action.

If the point is to move together, the purpose of the conversation becomes alignment. Aligning someone asks for a different way of speaking from the one that convinces them, and almost nobody changes register between the two situations. Persuasion is a competence in its own right, and it’s the bridge between this page and the Language of Leadership. The same holds whichever way the communication points: inwards, to inform, involve and motivate the people who work here, and outwards, where it has to sell. Clear, effective, persuasive, in both directions.

Putting feelings into words

The hardest step is translating what you feel into words. It sounds like a soft exercise and it’s actually the most concrete part of the work: while a tension stays unnamed it acts anyway, and it can’t be discussed.

In the sessions we use brainstorming exercises built on exactly this. A situation gets put up, each person is asked what words they’d describe their own reaction with, and then you watch what happens when those words are put side by side.

It often turns out that in words people hold one position and in practice they do something else. Almost never out of bad faith: more simply, nobody had ever put the two things next to each other.

The questions you ask yourself

The first people we communicate with are ourselves. Before every conversation with a colleague there’s an internal one, and the quality of the second depends a good deal on the first.

Closed questions, the ones you answer yes or no to, produce oscillation: I can do it, I can’t do it, and on it goes for days. Questions that ask how and in what way force you to look for a route instead. It’s a small difference in form and a large one in effect.

The musical metaphor

When the work needs to be on listening to each other, the format we use is the Corporate Orchestra. Music is a language everyone understands without having studied it, and it carries the tone of whoever is playing with a precision that words struggle to reach.

You work in a circle, and that on its own erases the hierarchy, because in a circle nobody is at the head of the table. The activity has two movements. In the first you learn a shared rhythm, and you hold it only by listening to the others. In the second each person in turn offers a musical phrase and the others answer it, the same or different, exactly as in a conversation. Anyone who doesn’t leave room for the others, in there, can be heard.