3 Unforced Errors Influencing Others

Communication is probably the major challenge for us as society, and humanity.  Moreover, at work it could be even more challenging with all the different cultures, backgrounds and experiences we are part of. Also, there are many factors that can affect communication, some of them are really complex to develop, like intonation, pronunciation and pauses, because it would take some time to improve them. But there are some others that I called unforced errors that can quickly enhance our communication skills.

Unforced error #1 - Forget the client

When we talk, write an email, or a romantic letter; we usually want to express what is in our mind or heart, just from our point of view. We don't stop and put some strategy behind. We potentially do that only for important meetings, but most of the time we don't. We get into meetings without a strategy. We rarely try to define our customers during our communications.

The objective of the communication is to set an idea in the other person. This means that sending the message is not just enough, only after the others processed the message through their models, values, experiences and principles the idea formed is the intended one, if that idea is not the intended one, we are not accomplishing the objective of our message. 

We need to understand that our client is the most important person, and the product is the message we try to convey. We need to take us out from the center of the communication process and focus our effort on our clients. We need to understand the people around us, their filters, experiences, and beliefs if we want to influence them with our message.

Unforced error #2 - Use the “scientific method”

We all probably remember from school the steps of question, hypothesis, test, analyze and results we used for different projects. This is ok for acquiring knowledge and solving problems, but we are programmed to present and share results in the same order, although this is not right in general but worst at a business context. The problem is that we are using the order we follow to think or drive into a conclusion to communicate an idea. However, this wasn't built for that reason. We need to use a different approach to influence and communicate effectively.

We need to capture the audience’s attention, starting with the main point of our message. Initiate with the reason for our message, and later join the concepts and arguments to the core idea. Some authors called this top-down communication, the consultant’s way or starting with why. At the end, those are nice variations of the same ideas, and we should learn about all of them and use them all together.

In today's world, people's attention is really short, there are too many noise sources around. Furthermore, we encourage and celebrate multitasking skills, yet this is affecting communication. We need to be careful with the order of the ideas we express, and capture our audience’s attention as soon as possible, just with the value of our message.

Unforced error #3 - Un-Linkage of ideas

Our mind is naturally processing and grouping all the information, based on logical patterns, trying to sort that information, and transforming them into ideas. The unforced error is not to sort and link the ideas in a logical and explicit way. When we don't link the ideas, the other’s mind struggles to understand the message you want to present, and how everything gets together. This is common in presentations when the speaker asks to wait a couple of slides, to get the right linkage, to understand why he is showing something.

The other problem occurs, when the link between the ideas is not communicated in an explicit way. In this case, we let people’s minds do this linkage by themselves, and potentially could do it in a different way, understanding something completely different from what you were trying to communicate.

We need to be explicit with the connection or relationship between the ideas, to ensure they are communicated correctly, keep the audience’s attention, and also enable others to remember the different parts of the message. The process to do that is by doing something similar to a decision tree, or the pyramid principle (Barbara Minto). The idea is to start with the main message, then with the next level, explaining the relations between the levels top-down, and the ones of each horizontal level.

These 3 changes, definitely imply that communication needs to be premeditated and we need to work to make it effective in our organizations. Usually, we prepare our message for important meetings, but not for the day to day conversations, and this is a risk for our company’s performance, at these conversation levels, we execute most of the job.

To sum up, without effective communication, it is impossible to be agile as a company needs to be. We need ourselves and our teams to work on: 1) keep in mind our client and the objective for each communication, 2) start with the core value of the message, and 3) link and sort the ideas in a logical way to speed up our performance.

Regards!

--Dani Diaz