“If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.” -- Dr. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Learning cannot be disassociated from action.” -- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

“The most important measures are both unknown and unknowable.” -- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis

Are Your Messages Getting Through? by Kevin McManus

If I had to pick one thing to teach people about communication, I think I would have to select the concept of communication style. When I first came across the concept of neurolinguistic programming 15 years ago, it was presented more as a tool for manipulating others. As I learned more about it, and thought about its implications in our organizations, I realized that the way it was being sold was not the only way it could be used.

In short, people have preferences in terms of how they send and receive information. The majority of the population is visual - they like to see pictures and use pictures to describe their message. The auditory communication medium comes in a close second. Kinesthetic communicators however tend to make up only 10-15% of the population. On the front lines of our workplaces however, we tend to have many more people who communicate by doing or touching.

In order to succeed in our formal education system, you have to have visual and auditory communication preferences. If you don’t, you might do well in shop, art class, or gym, but you will struggle in a lecture-based classroom. In our culture, the visual and auditory people become managers, and the kinesthetic people work on the front lines. The foundation is thus laid for significant communication failures.

We tend to teach others as we have been taught. We try to send our messages to others in the styles we personally tend to prefer, which is usually visual and auditory. If a high percentage of our hourly workforce in particular is kinesthetic however, they may not be ‘listening’ to our messages.

Emotion further complicates the communication issue. If we send a message that is perceived as being negative, our listeners shut down - their brains won’t allow that type of stuff into their memory banks. Failing to appreciate diversity also triggers a negative, communication killing reaction. To make matters worse, we all perceive things differently in general, so the words mean different things to different people.

You can’t construct and deliver a perfect message, but you can take steps to increase the odds of your message getting through. What types of messages do you send? Are your messages getting through?

The Daily Log In

Just ten years ago, we still had to rely primarily on bulletin board postings, flyers in mailboxes, break room gossip, and face-to-face meetings to send and receive messages in our organizations. With the advent of the internet, intranets, and e-mail, that all changed. Now, we seem to swinging the communication pendulum in the extreme opposite direction - if you don’t have e-mail, you might not have much of a voice or be very well-informed.

It is true that e-mail provides a much easier means of sending and receiving messages, especially when a large group of people are involved. I think we are beginning to hide behind our typed messages however - when we are only commenting to an inert screen, we can be bolder, express different emotions, and even say things that we might not have said in person.

This shift will correct itself in time, and I look forward to the time when it does. A company intranet offers a lot of promise in terms of reaching our people and letting them reach back. Some companies have recognized this already - they provide each employee with an e-mail address and send a majority of their information out via this medium. Some are going as far as to survey their people regularly as well by using pop-ups that appear when each employee logs in each day. How are you using today’s technology to communicate?

What are Your Communication Costs?

I look at communication costs from two perspectives - what does it cost to deliver the communication and how much money is wasted in attempting to communicate to people in organizations. The first cost total is much easier to come up with then the second one is. In the past, non-labor communication costs were paper, travel, and phone line-based. Currently, we are using much less paper (unless you are one of those people who still print out each of their e-mails) and travel, and much more wired communication.

The labor costs could be considered to be any time we spend with other people or we spend reading or writing messages. When you look at it from that perspective, communication costs represent a high percentage of the cost in most products and services. Needless to say, communication, and the ability to do it well, is very important. That’s where the waste perspective comes in.

One of the more common ‘areas of improvement’ that you will find at the top of the list on most attitude surveys is ‘we need better and more communication.’ Have you heard that sentiment expressed in your organization? If that area of improvement heads many such lists, then there must be some waste lurking behind those concerns. Why don’t we communicate well? Where are our communication waste streams?

To look at communication cost and waste further, let’s refer back to the pie chart that most of us have seen regarding how messages are really communicated. The percentages go something like this – 7% of the message comes from the words we say, around 35% of the message is communicated by our tone of voice and voice and inflections, and the remaining 58% of the message is conveyed by our physiology. What degree of potential message interpretation errors exist given these percentages? How many millions have been made selling body language books?

To make matters worse, communication is a two way street - there is both a sender and a receiver involved, and both can misunderstand or mistranslate a message. Our workplaces are getting more diverse, increasing the potential for diversity-based communication waste. Different cultures see (and hear and read) things differently, and I see this trend continuing in the current direction.

I may not be able to put a dollar value on communication costs, but I can say with a lot of confidence that there is a lot of waste in our communication systems. If words only convey 7% or our message and we are using e-mail more and more (which is a words only medium), we are creating more and more waste by the minute!

There is a way out - we can improve communications. We need to use our event time more wisely. We need to manage the different communication avenues that we use. Most importantly, we must each learn to appreciate the perceptual differences that we each have, and structure our messages accordingly.

Would You Like Some Help?

Over the past 20 or so years, I have been involved with helping to improve communication systems in five different companies - both small and large - in the manufacturing and service arenas. This experience has helped me discover value added, simple ways to help improve the ways in which you send and receive messages in your organizations. Relying on one way, infrequent, and often negative communication approaches is the primary power restrictor for this power system - redesigning your communication system helps you better resolve such issues on a daily basis, and if done properly, will significantly reduce the communication costs you are currently investing.

If you are interested in the communication system ideas that I have to offer, send me an e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com. Better yet, give some thought to working further with me to help you improve your approaches to designing communication events, collecting input from your people, and keeping them better informed through my interactive communication system improvement workshop. If you don't want to go after the big system, consider working with me to help you install an effective event management process that will help you get the most out of the variety of meetings and training events that you spend a lot of money to have.

Keep improving! -- Kevin McManus, the Systems Guy

Would You Like to Learn More?

Click on one of the following links to learn even more about Great Systems! and the types of systems improvements I can help you make:

	The Great Systems! home page!!
	"How to Develop a High Performance Work Culture" book
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	Systems Change: The Key to Getting Better Results
	Do You Need Great Systems!
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“The only thing I know is that I do not know it all.” -- Socrates