Delivering Successful Communications

Here’s a fun exercise: at your next team meeting, ask the group members to recall a hugely successful project they’ve worked on sometime in their career; then ask them to identify the top reason for its success.  Then ask them to recall a failed project they’ve worked on, and the top reason for its failure.

Did you find any commonality in their responses?  If they’re like many teams, the answer for both reasons is “communication”. Communication is the largest single contributing factor to either a program's success or its failure.  Think of examples of success and failure from your own experience – how did communication rank?

We all communicate every day, on multiple channels; so why is it so challenging to communicate effectively?  Why do we so often fail at getting our ideas, our intentions, and our meaning understood by the message recipient?

The typical suspects appear when analyzing communication success or failure – frequency, content, channel, translation, and response. 

• Frequency: messaging happens too often or too seldom
• Content: terms, acronyms, or topic sequencing can be confusing or unfamiliar
• Channel: face-to-face, email, phone, and video enable collaboration – use the right tool for the right interaction
• Translation: ensuring the message is clearly understood
• Response: based on the in/correct usage of the above

Recognizing the delicate interrelationships between leadership elements and audiences is key to understanding how to generate momentum across multiple enterprise initiatives.  Finally, ask your team how communication could be improved across all channels, and what successful communication looks like for them. Discuss ways to introduce new standards, tools, and team norms to improve collaboration.  It’ll be an interesting conversation.