Becoming a Better Communicator

 

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It's a lovely Sunday morning and Alia (an infant) is soundly sleeping on the bed.

Her dad Ajay is happily humming a song of his favorite composer and shaving in the bathroom. Alia's mom Vijaya is busy making coffee for the couple.

The next moment Ajay sees in the mirror that Alia is awake and has climbed over the safety pillow to the edge of the bed. One more step and you know what.

Ajay's brain impulsively tells him that there is no way he can make it to the the bed but his wife in the kitchen probably can.

He yells at the top of  voice: "VIJAYAA RUNN AND HOLD THE BABYYYY NOWWWWWWW....."

Should Vijaya feel bad/irritated that Ajay yelled at her ?

If we analyze the communication that happened, there are 3 elements to it:

Content: Ajay yelled at his wife asking her to do something immediately
Context: Baby was about to fall
Intent: Save the baby somehow

Communication is not merely about content. It is also about context and intent.

Knowing this it is not difficult to see why Vijaya doesn't feel bad but rather glad that Ajay communicated the way he did.

An effective communication is one in which all these 3 elements are clearly known both to the sender and receiver. In this example it is easy for Vijaya to understand the context because the context is existing in the present moment as a visual in front of her eyes. And being the mother of Alia, it is not difficult to empathize with the intent either.

In our day to day corporate communication this is not always the case. Many times the context is buried in a long email chain,  in some knowledge which is privy to select individuals, in some disparate tool...

The list is long. 

Unless the sender makes an explicit effort to explain the context and intent along with the content and unless the receiver makes an explicit effort to get the context and intent along with the content, the communication will not be effective. Attempting to communicate  solely through content and leaving out the context and/or intent can  have a result ranging anywhere from hazardous to ineffective.

In face to face communications, facial expressions and tone can be good indicators of emotions which is not explicitly conveyed in words. And these indicators, on probing, can lead to the context and intent behind the communication thereby closing the loop. In phone conversations, facial expressions are not conveyed but tone still is.

Written communication is more challenging. The ambiguity which arises out of the fact that there is no explicit tone conveyed but it is left to the reader to mentally fill it in only makes matters worse. It recently happened with me when a colleague pointed out to me that a particular line in a note of mine didn't "sound" well. How do I change an audio track which I didn't put in the first place ?

A team member shared this link with me the same day as a matter of co-incidence. It is a free online tool which ascertains the tone of a sentence and categorizes it as Impolite, Neutral or Polite. Further it assigns a quantitative score for the tone in the range 0 to 100 (100 being the best).

I quickly put my original sentence into the tool to get a score of 35/100 (Neutral). All I had to do was rearrange the words a bit to rephrase the sentence. The rephrased one got a score of 92/100 (Polite). And all it took was a few seconds.

Thanks to this incident, I have learned one more tool to improve my communication and avoid misunderstanding. I hope you too find this post and the tool useful.

PS. Originally published on October 23, 2015 on LinkedIn.