It is not a Joke, Miscommunication Kills

I believe that everyone feels the importance of communication, and how the communication skills can affect our relationships, careers, and even our lives.

What we can agree is that the miscommunication is a possible thing can happen in many situations, however you are as a manager, employee, supervisor, worker should understand and evaluate the possible consequences which can happen due to that misunderstanding. What I mean by miscommunication comes in many forms as unclear message, misperception, misinterpretation or misconception and that may lead to many consequences as mistake, blunder, mishap, accident, or flounder.

Let’s clear it

What should be done and how should we behave while we communicate? As per the project management standard of PMI regarding the communication management and how to achieve highly interactive communication, we can refer to the following model which contains the main elements of any communication process. We have the message, message sender, message receiver and the medium of the communication. keep in your mind that the objective of any communication process is that the message to be understood in the same way the sender needs or really means.

There are many factors could affect the way how the receiver will be decoding the message such as any kind of distraction, the variations in the perceptions, or lack of appropriate knowledge or interest.

Up to this stage the message could be understood in different way than the sender wants, however the following steps could avoid misunderstanding.

1-    Acknowledge. The sender could ask the receiver to acknowledge receiving the message, and that does not mean the receiver agrees about the message content.

2-    Feedback/response. Here the receiver should respond to the sender stating what exactly he understood from the message which allow the sender to confirm that the receiver decoded the message in the appropriate way.

What do you think right now? You sent a message, you got the acknowledgment, and finally got the feedback confirming that everything is fine. I believe in that way you avoided any possible misunderstanding or miscommunication. 

What prevents you to do this process every time? In my point of view and reference to my experience many reasons are there.

1-    No time to do it all situations

2-    Misbehave of the receiver, so you want to keep it shorter as you can

3-    The channel of communication is not suitable to do so

4-    Feeling that the message is not much important

I think you do agree with me on some or all of what mentioned above, however we have to go back for the first statement “ you are as a manager, employee, supervisor, worker should understand and evaluate the possible consequences which can happen due to that misunderstanding”

At the end, remember that nothing is going to get you further along than to be able to communicate with people in the right way. Everything affects your word, voice tone, body language and many other factors. Do not underestimate the importance of proper and effective communication. It keeps you ahead, and in some cases, it saves lives.