You’ve probably been in one of these discussions.
Open office vs. cubical farms.
Remote working vs. face-to-face.
Should we have “Meetings, feedback, evaluation, and more meetings?”
These are seemingly endless debates on worker productivity and satisfaction.
Interestingly, they all have one thing in common – communication.
What do your customers think of you? What do your co-workers think of you? What do your employees think of you? What does the market think of you? What do your friends and family think of you?
All these people arrive at their conclusion, whether accurately or not, through communication with you. Communication is at the core of all our relationships.
We have so many ways to talk to each other today like social media, cellphones, collaboration tools, emails, face to face, etc. Unfortunately, we have not gotten any better at it.
Online tools can help, but they are just tools, not a replacement for leadership. Other than just honest observation, there are many studies. Take this for example from Project.co, an online project management company:
“Even though 89% of people believe that effective communication is extremely important, 8 out of 10 people rate their own business’ communication as either average or poor.”
Most business leaders believe they are effective communicators. The people who work for that business leader usually don’t share that view.
At FiveFour, through all our combined years of experience in leadership, communication & marketing, we believe in a fundamental principle for communicating well: Show the warts.
Warts? What does that mean?
It means to be real. It means being honest about our strengths and weaknesses. It means to stop putting up a façade of invincibility that causes us to lose our people’s trust and they start to tune us out.
We all have “warts.” And it’s so tempting to hide them to project a picture of invincibility but it ruins our communication and destroys relationships over time.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to focus on this critical subject. We’ll explore our inability to see and hear each other and how that holds back your business.
We’d love to hear from you. Share your communication stories (successes and failures) & lessons learned in the comments for this article.