What is Communication - Wee Snippet from Hip and Sage

Although my latest book, Hip and Sage: How to Staying Smart, Cool, and Competitive in the Workplace is generally targeted at professionals and entrepreneurs 40-something and older, there are many parts that I think apply to everyone. This snippet shares a bit from one of these sections - it is about communication, or rather how we define communication and what our standard ought to be.

COMMUNICATE

An overused term if there ever was one, the word communicate can mean many different things. At work, inadequate communication gets blamed for cultural ills and project failures. Managers attend $99 one-day training sessions touted as teaching communication skills. Communication is included on many performance evaluation forms, although the definition of what communication is varies on these forms and is often absent and left up to each manager and subordinate to figure out.

We could declare that communication is any message we impart—in any medium (verbal, e-mail, signs, books, you name it). Using this definition, a leader who sends out lots of messages, talks a lot at meetings, and buys and hands out flavor-of-the-month management books like candy canes at Christmas would be considered a big communicator. And with this general definition, managers could call themselves hip if they sent lots of e-mails to younger workers. Don’t scoff, this is a common strategy in organizations—send more e-mail messages! Fill the inboxes! I don’t favor this definition of communication because it focuses solely on the act of sending information out and does not address how messages ought to be received. This is 50-yard-line communication, to use a football metaphor, because while you might have taken your message down your side of the field, you have not penetrated into the other person’s territory and you are only halfway to your goal.

I hold communication to a higher standard and assert that it does not exist unless and until the message is received by receiving party as it is intended by the sender. Using this definition, e-mail is only communication if the person reading it understands the information and interprets the tone and tenor as the author intended. If you send a vague message, it’s not communication. If you send a message written in the wrong language for the receiver, it is not communication. If you write a ten-page report that no one reads or comprehends, you have not communicated. If you send an e-mail that ruffles a few feathers because the receiver thought you were angry when you were not, you have not communicated. Using this definition of communication, how many of the messages you send are received as communication?

Compound this communication hurdle by adding a thirty-year difference in age between the sender and receiver, and communication becomes more challenging to accomplish because preferred methods and natural language patterns are likely dissimilar. As it relates to hipness, then, we communicate when messages are received by younger professionals in ways that they understand—when we come across as we intend to. This is an important distinction, and one that places the onus on us to find and use the best communication methods for our audience. Communication is the first of the three Cs of hipness and it is the bare minimum we should expect of ourselves in the work-place or in any professional setting.

Your thoughts?