What We Get Wrong About Communication
By Vasundhara Sawhney, Senior Editor
Shashi Tharoor is a revered Indian politician and author. His writing—even when it’s in the form of a tweet—introduces me to words I’ve never even heard before.
How beautiful these words look on paper. But I often have to pull out the dictionary to learn their meaning before I can unpack his message. Whenever I daydream of casually dropping them into conversation—impressing all my peers and colleagues—I wonder if anyone would appreciate the effort. Or might I just cause confusion?
In the real world, we rarely have time to stop and research the meaning behind each other’s words. Sadly, this can lead to a lot of misunderstandings. This is especially true in a remote workforce where cross-cultural and multigenerational teams are common. We end up using idioms, acronyms, and phrases very specific to our locations and experiences.
I remember a couple of months into my first job, when my supervisor asked me to send them “the RAG status” of a client proposal “pronto.” I spent the next 20 minutes googling the acronym, which either seemed to mean “a worthless piece of cloth” or “Retrieval Augmented Generation.” Eventually, my colleague came to the rescue. “RAG means the Red, Amber, Green status,” they said. “You just have to tell him if everything is on track.”
If my supervisor had asked “Is the project going as planned?” it would’ve saved us both a headache.
Work jargon, of course, isn’t the only thing that can be misinterpreted. When we don’t consider our audience and their interpretations of our words, we can miss out on the chance to connect with people different than ourselves. Here are a few articles to help you learn more about communication in the workplace, what we get wrong about it, and how we can do better.
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Poor Communication May Be Slowing Down Your Team?
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How to Avoid Common Miscommunications at Work
To get on the same?page as our colleagues, we need to develop our ability to make our thinking more visible.
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Managing Director (Information Technology, Management, & Research) at TIM TECHNOLOGY SERVICES LIMITED and an Author.
1 年Thank you for sharing!!
While leading the organisation through a period of change, you will need to over-communicate to create alignment and avoid false rumours and speculations. A few tips: (i) Visuals will focus people’s attention (e.g. the problem or the vision) (ii) Facts will substantiate the business logic and convince people intellectually (e.g. the market, the economics) (iii) Storytelling will appeal to people at an emotional level (e.g. anecdote or metaphor) (iv) Questions and feedback will help to adjust the narrative where needed (v) Repetition will imprint the message