The response to this question is less about completeness than it is about frequency. In the midst of a crisis, leaders can have an unimaginable list of people competing for their time and attention. It appears that the people on their teams often go to the bottom of the list. I think this is a mistake. Your people will be patient and understanding because you have, of course, been straight with them before this situation arose, but they need something to be patient and understanding about.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you should wait until you’ve gotten everything figured out or have a complete picture before talking to your team. Frequent communication in settings where they can physically see you is best. Even when there is nothing new to say, visibility always works in your favor.

Take a deep breath before you talk. Calm yourself. Make good eye contact. Let your feelings show appropriately. Finish by promising an update and KEEP YOUR PROMISE.

Your goal in asking this question is to determine if you need to work on the quality of the decisions you make or the way you communicate your decisions. These are two different things. You need to determine if people don’t understand why a decision was made or find out if the way you delivered your decision was flawed. A review of the emotional reactions that decisions often evoke is seldom made before the decision is delivered.

Let’s deal with the emotions first. Employee survey after employee survey reports that one of the greatest motivators in the workplace is the connected feeling employees get when they understand what’s going on in their organization. If you need convincing, walk through a workplace after a news item that reveals a change in their organization appears in the media. Nothing makes people feel more like pawns in a grand chess game than being blindsided by company information from a source outside the organization. Trust me, no matter how logical the decision might have been or how practical the change is, when a decision or a change is announced in this fashion, people react badly, and the organization suffers. Hearing things from the newspaper is an extreme example, but many big decisions are delivered to employees without a well-thought-out internal communication plan, and most day-to-day decisions are delivered without any explanations at all. Underestimating the emotional reaction to a decision, based on its mode of delivery, is risky business.

How about the content of the decision? When leaders take the time to do a good job explaining their decisions, they have accepted the critical leader role of educator. No one in their right mind would empower a young teenager to jump into a car and drive alone before they were properly trained, had plenty of practice, and had passed the test. Yet very few of the organizations that preach empowerment take the necessary steps to make sure their people have a broad understanding of how their organization works, establish levels of learning that correspond to levels of decision making authority, and deliver a constant stream of usable feedback for all employees. A leader who helps people understand the process behind a decision is educating them for the time when they will have to make decisions on their own.

Audience: employees
Message: Clear communication builds credibility and the bottom line.
Tone: motivational, light
Timing: 14-15 minutes, depending on insertion of details about employee-involvement plans

You ask a teenager who is having problems with his parents to explain the difficulties. He’ll respond with something like this: “We just don’t communicate.”

You ask a professor about why those in his class aren’t making the grade and she’ll respond, “They just don’t communicate well.”

You ask a married couple whose marriage is on the skids about the cause of their difficulty. They’ll respond with, “We just don’t communicate any more.”

My thesis is that the whole world is in a mess because we don’t communicate. Students don’t listen to the teachers. Politicians don’t listen to the taxpayers. Suppliers don’t listen to the customers.

We’re not communicating. And I can’t think of anything more vital to our organizational health than communicating—and communicating well.

A friend of mine tells this story about her elementary-age daughter. The mother came home from work one chilly fall afternoon and found her little girl sitting out on the patio, wrapped up in a big sweater, with her head buried in a library book. She went to the door and called out, “Honey, what are you doing, sitting outside reading when it’s so cold?”

The little girl looked up, “Well, my teacher told us that if we wanted to be good students we should do a lot of outside reading.”

I’m afraid that’s been the story around (company) too often. Between management and employee…. Between Engineering and Marketing…. Between Service and Sales…. We’re just not communicating all that well.
So what I want to talk to you about today is your communication style and mine. About what’s happening. And how we can improve it. First, here’s what I see happening.

We’re not talking to each other at all. Many of us are retreating into our offices and writing memos about things that could be more clearly communicated and negotiated face to face.

Second, we’re ignoring all the formal channels of communication—meetings, face-to-face discussions, internal correspondence—and opting to listen to the grapevine. Not that the grapevine isn’t a viable rope—it’s just that it’s going to hang someone if we’re not careful.

And finally, we’re building paranoia because we’re withholding information that everyone has a right to know. Management has a right to know that we’ve discovered a better way to get something done. And employees have a right to know the why behind decisions and policies.

That’s the problem summary. So what’s the solution? Talk more…. Listen more…. Match behavior to words.

Personally, I used to have a communication style a lot like Calvin Coolidge. One Sunday night after he returned home from church, his wife asked him what the preacher had talked about. The president answered in a word:

“Sin.”

His wife probed further. “What did he say about it?”

The president thought a minute and then responded, “He’s against it.”

That used to be my communication style. Not a word to spare. Say what you mean, mean what you say. But I’ve wised up a little since then. I’ve realized that the effect of my words alone are minimal in conveying my message.

Communication experts tell us that only 7 percent of our message comes from the actual words. The other 93 percent of our impact results from our voice quality and our appearance. In other words, our tone and our body language. That’s the personal dynamic of one-on-one communication.

Now consider what I’ve just said in light of our organization as a whole. Multiply that 93 percent impact by the number of employees around here to see what’s going on. You’ll notice that a lot more gets communicated… than gets spoken.

How? Just as is the case personally, we as an organization sometimes communicate more by what we don’t say. We communicate by our selection of what information to pass on and what to hold back. We communicate by what policies we enforce and which we ignore. We communicate our values by what behavior we expect and what behavior we reward on the job.

You’ve just heard my first point. Communication and the lack of it up and down the corporate ladder involve much more than talking. We communicate by appearances, by actions, by policies.

The second intriguing aspect of communication is that it needs to flow in all directions—upward, downward, and laterally—to be true communication. A one-way flow is a monologue. A two-way flow is a real dialogue.

You’ll appreciate this communication dynamic a little more with this illustration used in many communication classes. Instructors often divide the class into two teams and assign some project to both groups, such as building a model with sticks or Lego blocks.

But the two groups play by different rules. One group leader must give all the directions without any feedback from the group. They can ask no questions. But the second group leader follows no such restraints. His group is allowed to stop him at any point for a repeat of something he said, to ask questions, to ask for clarification or illustrations.

Well, no doubt you know how this exercise turns out. The group that gives the leader some feedback—tells him when his instructions are unclear and asks questions—does a much better job at the task. Such exercises are a real eye-opener for participants.

And the exercise pinpoints a major organizational problem. When communication flows only one way, we’re in trouble. We’re misunderstood. We’re ineffective.

People don’t make friends,… make enemies,… make a marriage,… or make a living without the effort involved in talking and listening to others. Yet for all its importance, communication doesn’t get much formal attention.

Perhaps because everybody talks, we assume that communication comes as naturally as breathing. It’s not until we get communication hiccups that we decide to pay a little attention to the specifics.

Well, we’ve got the hiccups at (company) and we’re paying attention to the cause. One of our primary goals in this coming year is to open up the ears and mouths of management and employees alike to get messages flowing both ways.

And flowing correctly:

You may have heard about the farmer who stopped by the barn to see how his new roustabout was doing on the job. “Where’s the horse I asked you to have shod?” he asked the new employee.

“Did you say ‘shod’? I thought you said ‘shot.’ I just buried it.”

Like the farmer and the roustabout, we all can probably recall a few such miscommunications. And the consequences may have been more serious than a dead horse.

Those hurt profitability.

So, in the next few months we intend to improve our communication. We intend to put a process in place that will help you as employees analyze your jobs and suggest improvements to us. We expect to generate more involvement from you. And we intend to make managers better listeners.

Here’s how the process will work:

[Insert details about your plans for the employee-involvement program.]

We’ve learned, however, from other companies’ experiences that such an employee-involvement plan won’t work if people view it as an empty gesture. As I mentioned earlier when talking about the 7 percent impact of our words, we won’t communicate our earnestness in seeking your solutions with our words only.

We’ll communicate our commitment to this program by the priority we give it in allowing on-the-job time for your analysis and follow-up of problems and proposed solutions. We’ll communicate our commitment to this program by grabbing excellent ideas generated from the program and acting on them quickly. We’ll communicate our commitment to this program by rewarding those good ideas and those people that communicate them.

Having this program printed in a little booklet is easy. Having this program happen on the ground floor is difficult. But we’re committed to communicate.

We’re going back to our basic assumptions. At (company), we hire the very best people. When you get the job, it’s because we assume you have certain talents and abilities. That we can trust your judgment. That you can decide how to carry out your assignments without step-by-step instructions. If we hadn’t made these assumptions, we wouldn’t have hired you.

So we’re going back to our basic assumptions. You are very capable people to whom we’re trusting our profits. We want to hear from you. We need to hear from you. We’re committed to communicating with you. And we want that same commitment from you.

In short, we want you on the front line of corporate warfare with our competitors to improve on Silent Cal’s style.
Now we know good two-way communication won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen next month. But it will happen, a few conversations at a time. A few meetings at a time. A few suggestions at a time. And I promise the effort will be worth it to you—in personal satisfaction on the job and in corporate profitability that affects us all.