Mike Clark's Business Bites: Are you communicating to be understood?

Is your definition of communication making your team unhappy? Photo / Unsplash

What does communication mean to you? Are you an effective communicator? How would you rate your team's communication out of 10?

Whenever I ask people to define communication the same string of answers are given: "listening", "letting people talk", "transferring information", "getting your point across", etc. Having worked with people and teams for decades I concur these answers are important but they do not constitute effective communication.

I love the quote by George Bernard Shaw who said: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." There have never been more ways to communicate and each passing day sees more information shared.

Three years ago a study found that in 2017 and 2018 alone 90 per cent of the data in the world was generated. That is a lot of shared information (2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day in 2018 for those more tech-minded readers). With the advent of 5G that is only going to increase.

A temptation in business and as a people manager is to share information and appease our conscience that mere sharing is enough - it is not. I learnt this the hard way. As a trainee production manager I was fortunate to work under a great communicator. Morgan was a man who had worked his way up the ranks and earned the respect of the team.

One day I approached him asking for help in my communication. I had noticed people often did not follow through on my instructions, or did it differently to what I thought I had asked, which was in stark contrast to when Morgan gave instructions.

Morgan was a great teacher - he never gave you an answer. He used to get you to work it out through a series of questions or through experience. On this occasion he used the experience route. His instructions were simple - go and ask the floor supervisor to do a semi complex task. The difference was I had to take full ownership of communicating the message.

Once I told the supervisor what needed to be done I then said, "to ensure I have been clear in my instructions, can you please tell me what you are going to do". The answer was surprisingly different. Knowing immediately I had not been clear allowed me to clarify the parts of my message that had obviously been misunderstood. I again asked, "to ensure I have been clear can you please tell me what you understood me to say".

As humbling as that experience was, it taught me an incredible lesson: communication is the understanding between two or more people. As Dr Stephen Covey observed "most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply". This results in people not feeling heard or seen and led to Covey's famous fifth habit: "seek first to understand, then to be understood".

Which team members do you need to work on understanding more? Could you benefit by taking ownership of your relationships and communication and checking you have been understood before marching on with your conversation?

• Mike Clark is director and lead trainer and facilitator at Think Right business training company.