But I do read more books than most.
I was just recently going back through a book called “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork”.
I like to go back through books because depending on when you read something it can have different meaning.
The 14th Law is the Law of Communication
The long and short of it is lack of or poor communication is one of the fastest ways to break down a team.
I’m forever trying to communicate better and while I’m getting better every year, I still get reminders that I have tons of work to do.
We regularly get feedback from all of you, both prompted and unprompted, and this is usually how it works:
Right when we feel like we are hitting on all cylinders, we get some feedback that is a smack in the face.
It has taken me years but I don’t get emotionally hurt by the feedback anymore. It just forces us to ask more questions.
Questions like:
What happened that this person was unhappy?
How did we fail to communicate that accurately?
How did this person come to that conclusion?
I’ll let you in on a little secret, the answer is always the same.
We didn’t communicate well enough!
So back to the drawing board we go asking ourselves all the important questions
How do we say things, who are we talking to, where are we saying it, and when did/do we say it?
When taking into account that effective communication needs to check all four of those boxes then it becomes really easy to see how we can miss the mark on something simple.
I’m not sure we will ever get it perfect, but we are going to try, and we are going to try as many ways as possible.
So I have a question for you:
How could we do it better?
In order for us to communicate better we need you to communicate with us 😉
Fern
