Communication

• Introduction
• Repetition

Introduction

Communication is a fundamental tool in management. It is also a time-consuming activity, and it has a great potential for getting things done, or wasting a lot of effort.

Hopefully some of the thoughts I'm putting down here will help myself and others be smarter about how we communicate.

Repetition

Repetition is communicating the same message in different ways to the same audience, to increase the effectiveness. In particular, it increases the "stickiness" of your message. It can be even more powerful than that vision document your CEO spent some much time crafting, so you have a great deal to win if you manage repetition correctly.

Let's recall for a second that basic 'communication system' diagram you probably learnt sometime in grade school. You've got someone who sends a message, the message itself, the channel, the audience, and some kind of feedback. What variables can we affect to increase communication effectiveness?

Starting from the sender, you might get your boss or his boss in turn to own some of the messaging. Having priorities set by someone higher up in the org chart typically helps to impress the importance of what is being said.

All other variables can also be changed, but with a fixed sender, for a given target audience, you end up in a bad place: some of your messages will fight your other messages for the attention of your audience. Note that when I say "attention", I mean not just receiving the message, but internalizing and owning it. This process takes time and is not done with multiple messages at once.

An effective way to approach this problem is by repeating one message more than the rest. In this case, we are playing with a kind of "meta-variable": not how we communicate, but how many times do we send the message. Communicate everything your audience needs to know, but prioritize and select one message for stressing time and again, until you're confident that the audience owns it. Only then move on to the next message, and you can lower the frequency of the previous one.

A simple tool to help out with this exercise is to keep a numbered list of messages you feel are important in a Word document, prioritize them, and work from top to bottom (hint: Alt+Shift+Up and Alt+Shift+Down will swap the selected list item or table row with the one above / below). Include for the top item a date by which you expect to have had the message properly communicated (think of a two week time period), keep the most important message in a Post-It somewhere in sight, and be sure to schedule a followup for that date to make sure you move on to the next important message. Of course, the date is not a 'move-on' date, but rather the time to go through the exercise again: list all the things you need, prioritize them, assign a date for the top message, work on it.