Redefine Communication

The Ecological Vision, Reflections on the American Condition is a book by Peter Drucker containing 32 essays, including one on “Information, Communications, and Understanding.”  Now that essay, indeed the entire book, is well worth reading.  But Mark Horstman of Manager Tools summed the essay up into one sentence:

“Communication is what the listener does.“

As leaders, many of us are used to measuring our communication effectiveness based on survey results.  And we are often disappointed.  

If it’s what the listener does, then that’s a discreet action, something we can measure.  Salespersons, copywriters, and others in the sales field fully appreciate this.  The effectiveness of an ad is how many sales it drives.  If it’s not sales-related, most of us don’t tend to define and measure our communications’ intended outcome. 

As leaders, we would be much more productive if we defined each communication’s intended outcome and measured our results.  The act of being this deliberative has great benefits.

For example, in a staff meeting, you might have once just announced, “HR has updated our policy on parental leave; it’s posted on our portal.”  There communication done, you should have great results on communication for your annual employee satisfaction survey.

If you define communication as what the listener does, then you’ll need to define what you want the listener to do and how you will measure success.  The very act of doing this might change your announcement to “HR has updated our policy on parental leave; it’s posted on our portal.  It’s an improvement to our already robust benefits package. I’d like each of your to read it, and ensure that your entire staff has read and understood it.” followed by ” I’m going to randomly survey 10% of our staff at the end of the month, testing their knowledge of the parental leave program. Of those that got it right – one will be randomly selected to have my parking space for a week.”

Even if you didn’t announce the survey, wasn’t that communication much more robust than just “new policy .. on the portal.”  It gave clearer direction, and it underscored that you have a great benefits package.  Future communications will be much more effective if you share your measurement results with the team.  It reinforces that you are serious, and it builds friendly competition.  You could also measure by having your IT department report the new policy’s number of page reads and who read it.

A practical way to put this into practice is to do the following:

• Always have an agenda when you meet with a person or group.
• Each time on the agenda should have an identified and measurable intended action and how you could measure it.
• Always measure the most important items, and randomly measure rest.

Deliberative communication with intended results will yield excellent results to communicate to your board.