Communicating for impact
Overcoming 6 common barriers to effective communication.
Surely the most confusing, wonderful, infuriating, exciting, occasionally downright depressing part of being human is our ability to feel emotions. Yes, each day it’s all aboard a rollercoaster of feels for a thrillingly unpredictable ride through the highs and lows. A whitewater rafting expedition through turbulent rivers of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine.
Yet for such an inherently human condition, until recently, emotions have been an area of much debate and very little scientific evidence. The challenge has been in taking intangible, complex, highly personal and difficult-to-define feelings, and expressing them in words.
Fortunately, advances in brain imaging have allowed us to observe the intimacies of brain activity, a method far less prone to differences in interpretation. And the resulting research has uncovered a fascinating relationship between language and emotions.
Why does this matter?
Well, if humans are filled with emotions, and our workplaces are filled with humans, understanding how language influences emotions should be a fundamental part of any leader’s skillset.
There truly is a day for everything.
World Tuna Day; Sustainable Gastronomy Day; International Asteroid Day. These are all legitimate days devoted to very specific things. Yet as wonderful (slash delicious) as tuna may be, and as magnificent (slash terrifying) as asteroids are, some topics are worthy of more than just a day.
June (how is it June already?) brings National Effective Communication month. And this is certainly a topic worthy of more than a day, week — or even a month. We could spend an entire year focused solely on effective communication and see massive improvements across all aspects of business, from engagement, to performance, to culture, to safety, to learning and development.
Effective communication is fundamental to a great employee experience because it’s a fundamental part of the human experience — the way we’re wired to connect and interact.
Yet despite being inherently human, many global organisations get it wrong. Even in 2021, the communication status quo remains workaday and bland. Worst of all, though, is the resistance savvy leaders face when they try to do it differently.
Yes, if you’ve ever tried to push communication past predictable, chances are you’ve met with one of these excuses for why it can’t or shouldn’t be done:
Legal: We have to say it like this …
Branding: Our brand guidelines say we need to say it like this …
Complexity: It’s too complicated or technical to explain simply …
Cost: We don’t have time or budget to say it better …
Tradition: This is how we’ve always said it …
Fear: We can’t risk saying it like that …
To put it quite bluntly, these are all terrible excuses.
Whether it’s a legal document, policy manual or corporate strategy, if we want people’s attention — if we want to connect and make a difference — we need to push for better.
Legal
‘We have to say it like this …’
Many organisations have a warm and friendly tone… until it’s time for a contract or policy. Then the vibe turns frigid. But why does legal language need to have all the personality sucked right out?
Nowhere in any legal manual we’ve ever come across does it specify the need for bloated, excessively syllabled, jargon-heavy, impersonal language. The assumption that The Law demands such long-winded pomposity might simply be a leftover from a time when olde-worlde scriveners were paid by the word. Needless to say, with the lure of more money, much verbiage and verbosity ensued.
So, unless we’re being paid by the word, we’re free to approach legal communication in a whole new way. The challenge for us, and our pals who advise us on legal matters, is to translate legislation, regulation and policy into clear and concise language that matches up with our organisation.
Let’s push past word count and focus on comprehension and engagement. There’s such an opportunity to create better communication — simply by changing the legal language.
Branding
‘Our brand guidelines say we need to say it like this …’
Most companies have brand language guidelines, preached with varying degrees of fervour. These direct word choice and tone, vocabulary and attitude. They’re often formulated by branding and advertising agencies almost exclusively to influence the external market by defining and differentiating the company from all the others.
While we champion a consistent and unified internal/external brand, too often these guides become The Rules. Applied over and over as an inflexible one-size-fits-all approach to internal communication, saying things in exactly the same way, day in and day out, they inevitably fade into a background hum.
Communication doesn’t come from a brand or culture book, no matter how hard or frequently corporate comms bludgeon folk with it. No, language comes from the leaders; it comes from the people. It’s in the daily conversations with each other and our customers and clients. It can’t be fully controlled by a brand agency or single department — it lives and evolves throughout the entire organisation.
Complexity
‘It’s too complicated or technical to explain simply …’
Complexity isn’t the real issue. The world is complex, humans are complex, life is complex, work is complex — everything is complex. We deal with complexity daily; it’s naive to think we can, or should, solve complexity by eliminating the details. That’s just dumbing it down, stripping the function that makes it useful.
The problem is confusion.
Fortunately, simplicity is actually, ironically, quite simple. The blandest technical information can be made easy to understand. The driest legal document can be made palatable. Make things easy to understand, and they’ll seem simple. And when things seem simple, they become far more interesting, engaging and influential too.
Cost
‘We don’t have time or budget to say it better …’
There’s no way to sugar-coat this — saying it better is almost certainly going to require more effort, more time and quite possibly more money.
But what’s the point in saying anything if no-one’s listening? What’s the point in making any effort at all if it won’t be acted on? Investing a little bit extra makes all the difference to earning attention and making a difference.
The cost of mediocrity is undeniably higher.
Tradition
‘This is how we’ve always said it …’
Communication is changing, language is changing, business is changing, people are changing. Staying ahead today means staying relevant tomorrow. We must evolve — continuously.
This means shedding the shackles of tradition. Let’s allow our communication to shift, consider new ways to connect with and inspire the next generations driving our organisations forwards.
Fear
‘We can’t risk saying it like that …’
In terms of challenges, fear is one of the biggest hurdles we see at a leadership level. Fear of doing something different. Fear of putting ourselves out there. Fear of failure. Fear of causing offence. Fear of what people might say. Fear of responsibility. Fear that others will do the wrong thing. Fear of change. Fear of becoming irrelevant. Whatever it’s masked as, it often comes back to fear.
Fear is responsible for many of the unnecessary layers of confusion and complication. We see it when leaders hide behind vague, stilted corporate language — ass-covering, justification, death by committee. Systems at the expense of common sense. Endless policies and procedures written in mind-numbingly dry and indecipherable prose.
This confusion multiplies as we move through levels, as each function attempts to shield themselves from risk and accountability, or to cover a lack of understanding. It’s no wonder that by the time we reach the intended recipients, we’re left with bloated processes and strategies, with all the human sucked right out. This isn’t useful complexity, it doesn’t add function or purpose — it’s just confusion. And when people are confused, they lose interest and become disengaged.
Fear is responsible for many of the unnecessary layers of confusion and complication.
We get that this is far more challenging in practice than theory. None of these fears are unreasonable, and a culture that gives permission to do things differently — or even to fail gloriously — comes from the top. But the truly remarkable leaders we’ve worked with are the ones who move past fear. They’re willing to do what it takes to make a difference. They bring everything back to what really matters: humans.
