Communication as a critical business skill
sphericalcowconsulting.com
sphericalcowconsulting.com
There is an unaddressed problem of jargon spew, florid business speech which has become pervasive at executive levels inherently destructive to goals.
Particularly in startup and scientific organizations where every dollar matters. Persons who appear productive by volunteering for basic tasks which should be done by an administrative assistant. Productivity by empty volume not relevance or need. Passing on or delegating even basic technical tasks, advocating against fundamental safeguards simply because they do not want to deal with them.
I am not against learning as you go and this is not what i am referring to. These executives and managers are not ones who just have gaps, they are ones that don’t know and refuse to learn even basic concepts well known by high school students or college freshmen. Concepts which would take less than a minute to look up and understand.
They micromanage, take credit for work they have not done, and ultimately will cause your best talent to leave.
This article and those like them self-help fluff. We need to get back to our roots, allowing the fluff of executive culture to pervade instead of fostering creative tinkering has set us so far back. When did handicapping ourselves become the norm?
Thank you! Seeing someone recognize this is wonderful.
I have a disability that has resulted in me being screwed over by the idea that communication, “emotional intelligence”, and other “soft skills” are somehow more important than my ability to do the job. I often feel that I’m alone when I acknowledge that I’m bad at those things, and that I do not intend to change that by constantly fighting my biology (“masking”).
Communication is the fundamental problem of doing anything at scale, and lots of valuable things are only valuable at scale.
I think it's wise to be on the lookout for people and groups employing strategies, conscious or otherwise, that de facto degrade simple communication.
A lot of work happens in teams. A lot of team work requires frequent communication/ synchronization.
Is saying "for jobs that require communication, you and your team will succeed more if you communicate well" abelist?
Recognizing the immense value of effective communication is ableist?
Coding is the easy part. Deciding what to code or how to code it with a team is the hard part and that requires effective communication, there's simply no way around it. That's what separates junior engineers from senior engineers who see the bigger picture.
That's just how it works. Humans are messy like that.
And how can you tell? If a project fails, is that because people didn't have a shared understanding of the problem, or did they understand it fine and just weren't able to find a solution?
Being able to sound like a good communicator doesn't mean you are one. Recognizing that someone is spewing jargon without actually concisely delivering something valuable is also part of being good at communication. An equal amount of blame should go to those who nod in response to a jargon stream instead of interrupting, asking the right questions and clarifying what's communicated.
And I don't mean effective communication but specifically:
> the focus on communication OVER skills, capabilities, and curiosity
There was, are , and will be a lot of folks who get overlooked because of this and that sucks. But communication has, is, and will be a very important part of life and people. I guess the lesson in this is, if you are lacking in your communication don't handicap yourself unintentionally.
I wish there was more content about that, and less about this vague idea of "communication". It's much like telling people in relationships their problems are about communication, yes human life is about communication, now what can they actually do about it besides "talk more"?
Forcing a grammar extension to automatically fix spelling mistakes, or enforcing silly rules like "no emoji" doesn't do anything to improve communication - the opposite, it gives people the idea they're communicating well when they're still communicating the same exact way in a new style.
And unfortunately there are things in life that you can't just "teach" in a linear way. You have to be curious and self driven.
One example - let's say you and Bob always miscommunicate. Like you think you agree on something but weeks later it turns out you disappointed each other. What's your reaction? "Bob's a weird asshole?" Or is it more "I am curious, why does this always happens with Bob and me? Let me ask him. Let me ask others." Then you may actually have a chance to figure it out.
Many people and organizations transmit in UDP. We need to communicate in TCP. Get the ack. Confirm the signal was received.
Personally, If I get or take a task, I repeat the request, confirm the deadline, and document the delivery. This way when there's a conflict I can demonstrate that someone forgot or ignored or overlooked.
When talking to someone in person, if you say something, before they give a formal ack, their body language already tells you a lot about how they perceived the message.
If the reception was unfavorable, you have an opportunity to immediately add more to clarify if it was perceived incorrectly.
With a formal communication system such as an API, the API itself describes what messages it wants to receive and what the meaning of those messages are. But in human communication you’re not limiting yourself to messages the recipient has completely described. You’re creating new messages. New messages which the sender expects to be received ina certain way but there’s no guarantee it will be because we don’t know if the recipient is setup to handle it as you expect.
Yup. And also, what you're getting an ack to matters.
Not helpful: you say: Project X is now priority 1. I say: I think you said, project X is now top priority, right? you say: ack!
Helpful: you say: Project X is now priority 1. I say: Just to confirm - we are going to pause project Y and Z, and move Alice and Bob to X. That probably means We are going to lose Acme as a client because they are waiting for Z. I can see how this might make sense, but just wanted to double check. you say: I didn't think about Acme. No, I didn't mean that - let's rethink.
One ack gives you no new information, one enables a really good communication. If you said "Ack" in the 2nd case, that's mean a lot!
I think this is one of the biggest points about communication: It requires both sides.
It doesn't matter if you have a clear and well-defined protocol for how you communicate if the other side can't, won't, or don't follow it.
It's like a web browser that only supports HTML. It may get the content your web server sends, but not the context and intent included in your CSS and JS.
And it's a lot easier to just say, "I only need the content, anyways."
A manager raising their voice does not change the message. Being more confident with myself, the volume, intensity, or cadence no longer impacts me in the same way as it did before. I now look forward to those moments of calm responses to the unprofessional interactions.
My brain is trying to relay information/emotion/experience/? to your brain. However, since it can’t be done directly, I have to translate those contents into a medium that you can understand (e.g. reading or understanding a language). My being goes further and also leaks information/emotion/? via facial expressions, body language, tone, etc.
Both the conscious and subconscious are probably lower bandwidth than the brain plus the translation machinery isn’t full fidelity.
Now the recipient has to do the same, but in reverse. This happens very rapidly but all along the way we lose fidelity and volume, so our two brains are never and can never be perfectly in sync. But we want that and so the task is to continue to hone and hone and hone. And listen and ignore the ego and establish trust and many other things that bring us closer to the almost having a single mind.
Since my youth, I've always had a visceral, perhaps a bit maladaptive, need to be understood and have been able to parlay that into a sort of communicational hyper vigilance. The end result is that I compulsively over communicate and go out of my way to meet the receiving parties more than half way. If I can, I consider their background and reference frames and preemptively build a semantic bridge to them. Working with international teams, it's important to suppress urges for idiomatic expressions or general folkseyness, which is hard since I _LOVE_ to indulge in mixed metaphors and intentional malapropism.
The end result of emails with those constraints tends to be a wall of text, but the upside is that it tends to get copied around as a contextual 'checkpoint' of the problem under discussion.
In the end, effective communication is empathy.. And empathy can often be difficult work.
One thing I noticed is that a lot of people are trying to reuse/apply contexts and context clues that would work in synchronous cases and non-remote communication cased in asynchronous cases and remote communication casess. Obviously, a lot of people aren't adjusted yet so there's some lagging indicator like this. Overcommunication is one short term negative but long term positive action I've seen work. At first it may seem detrimental but it actually helps with adapting to the person/people/subject. Eventually people adjust the scale of communication where overcommunication is not present anymore.
His eyes widened and was able to answer questions about whether the chair was alive or not. He said not because we have never celebrated a chair's birthday.
Takewaway - when communicating, you can either be technically correct or correctly understood, seldom both.
Perhaps a couple more analogies would be helpful for how animals and trees can be alive too.
I asked him our neighbor's dog was alive and he said no - but I blame that on my neighbors not celebrating their pet's birthdays...those monsters!
This abstraction is quite leaky.
Even when speaking, your listening is crucial to know if you're being understood (like an error message); and to notice the other's perspective (e.g. how they interpret terminology) so as to adjust to it. To persuade you need to hear and understand objections to counter them. To bargain you need to hear what is important to the other, to know what you have to offer in their opinion.
The smartest people I've met listen like a hawk.
And yet so few of the executives I've worked for have had good communication skills... or much in the way of technical, business, project management, or other skills. Mediocre in almost all ways except access to money.
This is very different than my experience (finance and FAANG) where the people I worked for were almost always excellent communicators able to line up hundreds or thousands of people to "row" in the same direction.
Another point of my own experience: I was always very technical, but iterating on my ability to communicate/lead has made me a thousand times more productive/ impactful.
2. for an experienced software developer (10+ years) transitioning to strategic roles (i.e. TL of multiple business areas)?
3. for someone looking to be less head-on and instead more diplomatic in conversation style.
Comms are a force multiplier, for better or for worse
But the majority of the gains from such a skill go to the OTHER person (or people) I am communicating with.
If another team member communicates nothing, I am the one lacking information. If I communicate everything, I am no better informed than when I started.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons.