EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION: THE MESSENGER’S ILLUSION!

In a leadership meeting today, my CEO made a thought-provoking statement pertaining to communication - “The burden of the message lies upon the messenger.” He reiterated his statement a few times to drive across his point amongst his leaders. Being an intended recipient, I allowed his thought to linger in my mind as I considerately ingested the essence and flavour of its meaning. And just as a drop of water does not sink in without creating ripples, here I am, putting my thoughts together for the benefit of those that might want to ask themselves the question today, “am I effectively communicating my message?”

It is no secret that communication is a two-way street. While there is a sender of a message on one end, there’s a recipient on the other, and the dynamics of how these two parties interact determines the outcome of the communication. Leaving out the throes of academic and scholarly imprints on the process of communication, I ask at a practical level - have you ever felt ‘responsible’ for what you communicate? In other words, how often have you as the sender of a message felt that the recipient of your message is equally responsible to understand what you meant? Sadly, too often would be my honest reply.

Within the world of operations where I draw my experience from, a significant part of my teams’ responsibility includes email support to our internal and external stakeholders. When seeing responses to emails, I’ve observed the above mentioned tendency to share the onus of understanding a message as intended, quite often. For example, an Associate seeking to address a query may know in his mind, who he is referring to, but if his response in writing merely states, “They are working on your request,…” how is the recipient expected to figure out, who ‘they’ in the associate’s response refers to? When I encounter such instances, I remind my team members as part of their learning that – the recipient does not live in their head and therefore they should spell out the specifics!

Thus I come back to my CEO’s thought, drawing from my own experience as well, that the burden of the message does lie with the messenger. So how do you as a messenger, carry this burden effectively? Here are a few thoughts from my experience:

1. Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes when sending a message so you can avoid the pitfalls of taking certain pockets of knowledge for granted. This way, when you read your own message, if you do not see it covering all the details that a third person would know 'only by reading your message', you’ll know you’ve eaten up some of your thoughts and can revisit prior to sending your message out.
2. Steer clear of the deadly ‘this, that, these, those, it…’ danglers that can make it easy for you to write your responses in a jiffy without fully realizing that your recipients may not know who or what you’re actually referring to. Where needed, reference the actual subject of the message you’re trying to convey. However, this is not to say you need to strike the above words off your vocabulary. Make sure that you’ve established a proper reference to your subject, before introducing ‘this or that…’
3. Ensure that you build your sentences correctly by following the basics of sentence construction – have a subject, have a verb, ensure that the subject and verb are in agreement, use punctuation, mind your spellings, choose your vocabulary and pay attention to the word order. Not being mindful of these basics can severely if not drastically distort your message, sometimes even leading to awkward if not untoward outcomes.
4. When you have to convey a message orally, err on the side of caution. It does not hurt to ensure you’re on the same page as the recipient of your message, by stating the subject and using techniques such as paraphrasing and summarizing so that you can ensure your message effectively addresses your recipient’s need.

While I am sure there are many more such means to ensure that the messenger not only carries but also delivers the message effectively, it all begins with taking responsibility for the fact that we need to articulate our thoughts the way we want our recipients to understand them. Such ownership behooves us as leaders and as individuals who want to take responsibility for our own lives as opposed to holding someone else responsible.

I end quoting the timeless words of George Bernard Shaw, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” May his words no longer ring true for you!