Communicating Effectively

Have you ever felt that you are communicating clearly but people just aren't listening properly?

In fact, have you ever been in a situation where your communication has been 100% understood and effective?! This is far more rare!

In this article we explore why it is so hard for us humans to communicate clearly with each other, and we explore a practical model to help us communicate more effectively.

Human to human communication is one of the hardest things to get right and do well. We have developed these rich and complex languages that have set us apart from other mammals and enabled us to dominate the planet, and yet we still all seem to mess up communicating with each other on a daily basis. I know I do.

Chloe felt she should do better than this, why hasn’t this message landed? Over her career to date she had progressed from what she now sees in hindsight as a bungling novice communicator in her early developer years to a comparably well rounded and articulate communicator now as Head of Development for Commodities Technology,? and yet she still sometimes found herself in eddies of confusion and miscommunication. Realising the importance of communication to her department and stakeholders, she meticulously planned her messaging, but sometimes the messages still seemed to jarr and get lost in translation, with her technology teams and particularly some of the key business stakeholders.

She was right in one of these situations at the moment. For the past two weeks she had repeatedly articulated the priority to focus on stability and caution during a period of ongoing market volatility, but she’s just had a very uncomfortable conversation with the Head of Commodities Trading about the third incident in as many weeks that had left them out of the market for valuable minutes which had cost them on P&L and frustrated the traders.

Why weren’t her team taking her messages seriously and making decisions based on her clear messaging? Two of the three incidents seemed like just bad decisions that could have been avoided, and when she spoke to the people involved they looked at her blankly when she mentioned the clear stability mandate she’d been sending. How could they not understand? Still, she realised that to put herself into a position to resolve this and mitigate getting in more situations she should take full accountability for the communication and find a way to communicate differently to get them aligned with the need. How could she get this message through to them effectively??

Communication effectiveness is measured by the result

There are many models for communication. The Shannon-Weaver model (Sender - Encoder - Channel - Noise - Decoder - Receiver) provides a technical framework for generic communication which is far too simple to model human interaction completely and yet is still very useful to help us explore the nuanced and complex human-to-human communication that we frequently try and often fail to achieve.?

This basic model helps us see how easy it is for our context-rich and complicated communication to be misinterpreted and create confusion. Every blue box provides an opportunity for the message to be distorted, changed or drowned out:

Transmitter (encoder): Your filters - the values, models, experience and even the meanings you ascribe to words, phrases and concepts can create a difference between what you want to say and what is sent.

Channel: The channel you choose and the attributes of this channel can limit and restrict the flow of meaning around the message.

Noise: Various sources of other messaging or attributes of certain channels can distort or flood the message with distractions, changing the way it is transmitted or interpreted.

Receiver (decoder): Their filters - the values, models, experience and the meanings they ascribe to words, phrases and concepts can create a difference between what was communicated via the channel and what is heard and understood by the recipient.

Feedback: A sixth aspect of feedback was added to the model in later years. In this context, because we can’t measure the message exactly in the destination brain, any feedback still has to go back via encoders, channels, noise and decoders. Gathering and understanding feedback is critical for improving communication and follows the same communication model but with source and destination reversed.

One of the biggest distortions of human-to-human communication is the difference between the filters of the person speaking (Information source) and the target audience (Destination).? Think first about different languages and even accents and how much this can hamper communication effectiveness if two people do not share a common language or have very different accents. Two people without this impediment can still have very different filters, see the world in very different ways, and ascribe very different meanings to the same words. These filter differences are much more subtle, and yet because they are much less obvious this creates even more significant miscommunication issues.

The TC3 Tau Communication Model

All models are wrong, but all are useful in certain contexts. We will now explore a useful model we have created to help leaders develop the effectiveness of their communication. This model looks at the core aspects of the 2-1 Communicating dimension and specifically from the information source perspective. There are several key aspects from other dimensions that directly enable effective communication, notably Active Listening (1-3 Connecting) and Emotional Intelligence (1-2 Mindset and 2-2 Mastery) which are covered in these highly related dimensions of leadership.

The model looks at 3 T&Cs to help you deliver your communication more effectively. By no means exhaustive, this model gives you a powerful six step framework (that you can iterate over a few times for critical communications) to create more effective communication. Note, again, this model isolates the flow of communication one way in order to delve deeper, but the same principles can also be applied to 2-way communication.?

1 Target

Understand your Target: When first deciding what and how to communicate, understand the target. All other aspects may vary significantly based on who you intend to communicate to and how they like to be communicated with. The more you can understand the target(s), their filters, their current awareness and understanding and their filters, the more effectively you can tailor to approach and the message to them receiving it as you intend. This really is focusing on what you know of their ‘Decoder’ - their filters, position in relation to the message and their model of the world, so the better you know them, the easier it will be. If you don’t know them, how can you find out more about them?

2 Channel

Choose your Channel: Choose the channel(s) to be used based on the preferences of the target and the appropriateness for the message. Channels such as email, text message, voice notes, audio call, video call, face to face all have different pros and cons, bandwidths, provide different levels of richness of information to be transferred, and also have different types of noise to be considered. Email and text provide very little meaning (7% according to Albert Mehrabian[3]) and context to be conveyed compared with face to face communication with rich tonal and nonverbal messaging. Email has ambiguity as the main message meaning noise, but also has the volume of other emails as additional noise that hampers communication; you are less in control of when they read it and what they are thinking when they read it. Face to face communication has vocal tone and nonverbal body language to communicate and reassure around the core message, and also gives you the most opportunity for feedback on how the message is landing.

3 Tone

Decide on the Tone: Clearly consider the tone you intend to convey, and how you will do this to the target(s) and using the channel(s) you have selected. This doesn’t just cover vocal tone, it covers the whole framing, approach and positioning of the message in the wider context of the situation and your relationship with them. How should you best frame this to invoke the intended understanding and response from the target of the communication?

4 Clarity ?

Clarify your core message: Now with target, channel and tone clearly understood, what is the core of the message? Use this to avoid creating your own noise within the message itself - go for as much simplicity and direct clarity you can create around the core message that you intend to convey. This will reduce ambiguity and increase the chances that your message lands and is understood as you intend it.

5 Timing

Decide on your timing: Then decide on timing, which can also have a significant impact on the way the message lands. This is both context timing in terms of the situation, the channel and when it will be received, and even down to delivery timing if delivering the message verbally via any of the richer media channels (voice note upwards). Pausing and allowing time for key points to be processed can have a significant impact on how well the message passes through their decoder.

6 Content

Curate your content: Lastly the content. This is usually the first thing people think about and pack their message with detail, but the preceding five aspects will set you up nicely to easily and effectively select the best structure, selection and priority of key aspects of content needed to deliver the core message. Less is usually preferable to more, and by following this process it allows you to select and design the minimum content needed to create direct understanding of the core message.

Determined to both deliver this message and learn from the experience, Chloe spent the next weekend reflecting on how she had approached communicating the message, how it was received and where it wasn’t working. She decided she needed to find out more about how this was understood, and what specific people had taken from her messaging via various channels.?

She spent a good amount of time with each of her direct reports confirming their understanding, and how they felt their teams had received and understood the messages. Most of them did have a good understanding of the importance, but it was clear that some of them shared her frustration that some of their teams just didn’t seem to get it, despite their seemingly clear communication. She then went and checked directly with other teammates too, not in a critical way but just to generally understand how they had interpreted the communications. She realised that a good number of people were missing the message because they were so focused on delivering functionality to production and saw any delays as personal failure, and others had a range of different beliefs distorting what they heard.

The insights were really useful, and she took an evening to think back on some of the biggest communication failures and leanings of her early career, and how she adapted to make this messaging more effective since then.

Armed with insights and a plan, Chloe started using more communication channels to remind and reinforce this message and making sure the framing and style of the messaging really hit home. She pinned succinct, clear and unambiguous messages on the key channels, particularly those related to release planning and production changes, and had her team design some amusing yet on point memes for the office walls. She was especially clear with how she framed and delivered this in her next all-hands call, leading with this as the most important topic and being very clear of the reason for the priority shift towards more cautious delivery of features, and making sure that people didn’t feel this was ‘as well as’ delivering everything on time, that there was always space for an open conversation about shifting dates, and that this was not a criticism of the quality of previous deliveries and just heightened caution during a period of heightened trading risk. Moreover she wanted them to push back, to her or others if what they were being asked to do was unreasonable, and this would be looked on favourably in performance reviews if done appropriately.

With a richer understanding the dynamics and perspectives from team members in different timezones, she planned and scheduled discussions on release planning and updates carefully to land the messaging live in conversations where key decisions were being made, and ensured that if she couldn’t be there she had someone in the meeting who really understood the situation to communicate on her behalf.?

The market turbulence soon passed with no further outages or issues, and over the next few months Chloe applied these principles to her communication about several other key themes relating to both what the teams were delivering and also developing the capability and maturity of their function. She also mentored others in her team on this too, and found that having others reaffirming the message more consistently made a huge difference to the organisation’s understanding. Chloe and her team’s upgraded communication skills helped them get to the core of her message, tailored their communication to the audience, and made better use of the channels, timing, and approach. This resulted in better stability, less delivery delays, better engagement and team cohesion, and happy and engaged stakeholders.

Reflecting on her journey, Chloe realised that effective communication was about delivering the right message in the right way for the people who needed to hear it. And with this insight, she knew she was equipped to lead her team to even greater successes in the future.

A major upgrade

Chloe unwittingly applied the TC3 model intuitively. She started developing a deeper understanding of and appreciation for her target audience and their filters, and choosing more effective channels for her communications with. By considering the tone and framing she landed the messages in a way that created much more support and involvement. She chose the timing carefully and curated the content to support the core message, removed unnecessary detail and used specific framing to get the message through other’s filters as effectively as possible. She also developed this skill in others to help back up her message further.?

With complex human dynamics, communication will never be 100% accurate.

You can increase the effectiveness of communication significantly by considering these factors and crafting your message and delivery appropriately.

[1] DALL-E provided the grotesque facial distortions on the screen in the title image, and I either decided to leave this as is to represent the encoder-decoder filters of Chloe and her communication targets, or couldn't work out how to prompt to fix it - I’ll let you decide which!

[2] C.E. Shannon (1948) A mathematical theory of communication - Pages: 379 - 423

[3] Mehrabian, A. (1967) 'Inference of Attitudes From Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels ,' Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31(3), p249-252.

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This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0