Carl's Corner
by Carl Pritchard, PMP (May 10, 2010)
Are you one of the team members who is cleaning up? Or making the mess? 
Communications Maturity - Clean-up In Aisle 3
by Carl Pritchard, PMP, PMI-RMP
Every communications event is an opportunity to enhance or hinder progress. The challenge is figuring out how to be on the right side of that equation.
I had a revelatory moment in the market the other day. A young mother had dragged her 3- or 4-year-old along for the early morning trip to the grocery store and had him firmly secured in the cart. He was pleading insistently for the opportunity to get down and walk as she was attempting to go about her business. “I'm a big boy, mommy. I'm a big boy." Ultimately, she relented, only to have him dart for Aisle 3 (soup and canned vegetables), where he proceeded to topple the Campbell's display.
This ties in, oddly enough, to the last time I cleaned out the kitty litter. We have four cats, so that's no small feat. Normally, my lovely wife tackles the chore, but she was off on other missions, so I decided to get it over with. When the last of the cats' "gifts" were bagged and outside in the trash, I walked into the house and sniffed the pleasant aroma of nothing. That's actually a lovely smell when you own cats. It means you did your job well. I reveled in the moment. And when Nancy returned home, she was exceedingly grateful that it was a task she didn't have to undertake.
These two seemingly tangential events made me realize something about communications maturity. In every communications event, we fall into one of two distinct categories: Those who are making the mess or those who are cleaning it up.
Those Who Make The Mess
Think about your last communications event. Tone. Message. Organization. Goal. Were those elements coherent? Cohesive? Were they aligned to the point that there weren't a lot of mixed messages? All too often, we take on the role of the child in the shopping cart, making demands without foundation or expecting others to latch on to our perspective when concurrence either hasn't been won or can't be achieved. Less mature communicators frequently lace their understanding with assumptions and contentions that lack corroboration.
They leave a mess behind. A communications mess occurs when there are multiple possible understandings or interpretations of a message. While no single version is technically wrong, the lack of clarification of the message can lead to misdirection and frustration.
Those Who Clean It Up
The other side of this coin is associated with those who clean up the messages left behind by others. Their role is twofold--clarify and move forward. In meetings, you have met these people. They are the ones who defuse arguments. They are the ones who know that it's time to take a ten-minute break and walk away from the discussion to allow tempers to cool. They are also the ones who reiterate, restate and affirm the messages being sent. They clean up the kitty litter.
The beauty of this role is that they also open the doors for a better understanding of the messages being sent and the intent behind them. The "cleaners" don’t go in with a chip on their shoulders. They go in with the seemingly simple assumption that no one is trying to subvert the relationship. Before replying, they take pause long enough to ask themselves, "Assuming this person wants to move the discussion forward, where are they trying to go?"
The Transition
When I teach communications management, I often emphasize the need to state communications objectives up front. Identifying the goals of the communication goes a long way toward ensuring the right messages are going to be heard. Imagine the amount of meeting time that would be saved if someone in attendance said, "My goal is to get you to adopt this new approach to system access," and the network administrator replied that all of that control was in place and wouldn't be up for review for at least a year.
Meeting over. Clean and simple. Is everyone happy? No. But for mature communicators, the messages have been sent and received. Both sides acknowledge the control and authority of the other. The party seeking a new access approach knows the time-frame for the next review. They know when the discussion can be revisited. And while they may seek clarification on review dates and so forth, the heart of the matter has been brought forward and addressed.
Is it totally satisfying? Absolutely not. Clear communications can be extremely frustrating, which is why mess-making is so popular. The aggravating thing is that each of us finds ourselves on either side of the coin in different situations. The challenge is to take pause and ask (and then share) "What's the end goal of this communication? Where do we want it to wind up?"
So often, poor communication is misconstrued as a "negotiating position." It's often not. It's simply a matter of someone straining not to create conflict or striving to soften the blow of a particular message.
The first time I met Rick Bilbro of the Innova Group (Raleigh-Durham) almost 20 years ago, he offered the somewhat bizarre phrase, "Carl, I want to build a psychological contract with you, with only one clause...I mean you no harm." I thought that was totally strange. In retrospect, he has my undying respect for opening our earliest communications with crystal clear intent. Granted, it felt weird at the time, but it was the most open introduction I had ever heard. It set a perfect stage for 20 years of clear, effective communication, as not once have I ever thought about what he's communicating without that phrase ringing through my head.
Communications maturity is evolutionary. We will always have those times when we don't communicate clearly. But when we can recognize the sweet smell of "nothing" in the air after a communications event, or when we're not the ones leaving a trail for others to clarify and clean up, we're making great strides forward.
Clean-up in Aisle 3!
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