Every living organization has some form of communication in its biology. The more complex the biology, the more complex is the mechanism for communication. As humanity evolved from nomad hunters and food gatherers to more complex walled cities, its system and culture of communication also changed.
In modern societies, communication fosters understanding and clarity of thought. It brings people closer together in spite of human diversity. It created nations and kept citizens of countries in harmony with others.
One of the essential ingredients of good leadership is competence in communication. Without competence in communication, collaboration is difficult, and defining a common vision will be a challenge. Communication is critical on many levels.
Communication happens person-to-person, within the team, among communities, between institutions, and even among warring states.
As an enterprise owner, you need to communicate your value proposition. You need to send a message to your stakeholders about your purpose. They need to understand it.
You need them to change their behavior for you to achieve the desired outcome. To be able to harness communication as a tool you need to understand its elements.
As a personal framework in understanding communication, I came up with a guide I call the IEC loop or the Information, Education, and Communication Loop. I used it as a guide to addressing the elements of my communication process.
To achieve the outcomes you want, you need to exploit what each element in the communication process offers.
Element 1: The Sender
The sender is the element in the communication that creates, sends the message, and hopefully receives feedback. The sender can be a person or a device.
The credibility and integrity of the sender are crucial if we are to exploit this element. Only with a certain level of trust can we expect listeners or stakeholders to pay attention to the message.
The significance and importance of the message are tied to the level of trust we bestow the sender. Trust in the message is directly proportional to the integrity of the sender. Trust is becoming less and less of a currency. Citizens around the world are no longer finding their respective governments and institutions trustworthy.
Gallup collated surveys of the confidence level of US citizens in institutions like the church, Supreme Court, Congress, organized labor, public schools, big business, newspapers, the Presidency, television news, and the criminal justice system.
The surveys showed steadily declining trends in the level of trust in these institutions from 1993 to 2021. It is most certainly the doing and undoing of their leadership that these institutions are no longer worthy of their citizens’ trust.
In business, in spite of the ease of delivering messages today, 94% of customers will discontinue communications with companies churning out irrelevant promotions or messages. This data comes from a leading digital marketing agency, Hubspot.
Today, leadership means being a good communicator. If communication drives people to action, they refer to you as an influencer or brand ambassador. Your status as an influencer is your currency.
Are you a business founder? Are you a community, trade, or business association leader? Are you embarking on a journey of influencing other leaders? How are you seen by your most immediate peers? How does your own organization see you?
Are you confident that you represent the values of your organization? Are you known to take a stand on certain issues in politics, community, or business?
You need to be confident of what you represent because in one way or another you are always a sender of something to someone.
Element 2: The Message
The message could be text, sound, image, or even code of relevance to both the sender and the recipient. It can come in a form that is tangible or intangible lending to translation in raw form by the recipient or through a device.Messages only make sense if the sensory faculties of both the sender and the recipient are functional. Technology has been able to bridge the gap of our human limitations.
Humans through technology can now send signals like radio waves through the “ether”. It can send electric signals through wire via telegraphy or telephony. Now we use light via fiber optic wire to send data to any point in the globe.
The message is the content. Content facilitates understanding, learning, and even modifying human behavior. Content creators today are our Vincent Van Gogh of marketing. Their ability to influence people through their content is highly valued by businesses.
Remember: A message does not come exclusively as a set of alphanumeric characters. Different sounds, pitch, volume, and frequency can be a set of messages. A picture as we know very well can convey a thousand messages to a thousand people. Certain technologies allow the creation of messages projected directly into people’s minds.
If you are aspiring to be an influential leader, you need to be conscious about how you create messages by the tone of your voice, your manners or behavior, the kind of leaders you follow, and the kind of people you lead. Now we have professionals coaching leaders on the way they dress and the way they talk.
You might be surprised there are some courses just to teach men how to walk and improve their gait to project what they call the “Alpha Male” image. And there are even coaches who just help female executives improve their “fashion sense” and “power poses” in public and in the workplace.
Talk about simple poses as a message!
One of the most intriguing and disconcerting messages is silence.
A great part of my work is framing messages. For a time, all I did was frame messages. When you are in sales, marketing, or branding, all you do is frame messages. It comes in many forms. It comes as a sales pitch, a presentation slide, a book, a catalog, a sales email, a landing page, or a blog.
If you are an influencer your message comes in the form of a speech, a long-form article, a video, a podcast, or just an image. A message must educate. It must engage. It must be your truth if it is to have meaning and relevance to those who took the time to experience them.
As a leader and influencer, you need to be the answer to the questions of the recipient. Maybe you are not framing the right questions. You should be asking questions such as:
What is it They Want to Hear?
What do you Need to Tell Them?
In What form will the Message be Delivered?
Pause. Think for a moment. Answer the questions.
Element 3: The Channel
Channel refers to conditions or to any vehicle delivering the message from the sender to the recipient. It could be a physical space like a venue for communication events. It could be electronic like sending data from one computer to another.When we discovered the need to leave our messages behind, we started to etch them on rocks. Our ancestors started telling their stories by etching them on rock walls. These ancient channels hundreds and even thousands of years later are still telling their story. After that, ancient histories started to appear on stone tablets.
The ink was invented, and then the world of storytelling changed when people in ancient Egypt discovered what we can do with a plant called papyrus. Man’s story, man’s inventions, and knowledge started to be handed down from one generation to the next on printed paper.
Today we most often look at our computer and mobile phone screens as a channel to download information. Television still illuminates our homes with a different message called entertainment.
We talk spontaneously and almost instantaneously now to people thousands of miles away from us through the internet. A channel made possible through the power of the microchip.
If you are an influencer, people are your natural channels. Your beliefs are their beliefs. Our bodies are the channel for our message, our intentions. People are still the most credible and most persuasive channel of all. If you are leading and you are telling a story as a medium, you need people to be channels of the message.
People are naturally drawn to stories. Storytelling is still the best way to pass on messages. Messages become more compelling, more colorful, albeit more embellished when people tell their own version of the same message.
If you want to tell your story the same way every time, you can always write a book. A book may take more time and use more of your energy but it will tell the same story every single time. It seals your story by the words you have chosen and delivered from your own perspective.
Element 4: The Filters
Filters are conditions, mechanisms, and even devices allowing the full, partial, or distorted versions of the message to come through from the sender to the recipient.We see environmental filters all the time. If you are a hundred meters apart, your screams will be transmitted differently on a hot summer day, a rainy day, and a snowy day. You get to hear someone clearly on a hot summer day, not so much on a rainy day, and practically not at all on a snowy day. Snow is a great acoustic insulator. Sound can’t bounce off the snow.
Our minds have natural filters. Our knowledge, our fears, our biases, and our general capacity to absorb stimuli create natural filters in the way we receive messages.
Our knowledge and our religious biases determine how we perceive someone like Jesus Christ. Perceived by the Romans as a rebel, believed by the Jews to be the Messiah, a prophet by the followers of Mohammed, and Savior by most Christians. This bias filters the messages we send each other. It either binds us or drives us to kill each other.
The way we use or harness filters will define the outcomes of our messages after it is received. Our reaction to messages by itself can unwittingly act as filters. Our decision to act, respond, or not respond at all to any message will amplify or negate the impact of the message.
When I was advising an executive on how to handle negative comments on social media, my simple advice was to do nothing. If you are looking at the very message on Facebook right now, I advise you to take your fingers off the keyboard this instant.
People who spend too much time on social media mistakenly assume that everybody knows them. They assume everybody is watching them all day, reading posts about them from other people. They validate their worth based on the comments and likes. They used social media as a filter of how they are perceived.
If you want people to stop responding to bad comments, stop making comments yourself. Just shut your trap! Or stop tapping the keyboard.
We simply should just stop using social media as the filtering mechanism of how the world sees us, and how we want to see the world. Don’t talk to the world. Talk to individuals. Talk to the ones who matter to you, and those who care about you. You really don’t need Facebook to do that.
Technology and the internet are making us communicate faster. It also makes distortion worse. Technology and bandwidth may be man’s greatest boon to knowledge and understanding, but it has also become the most effective tool for misinformation and fomenting misunderstanding.
Just as we need to have integrity as a sender, we must have skill in framing the message. If we have little control over the filters that will ensure clarity or distort the quality of the message, we will still fail in delivering the message.
Element 5: The Recipient
The recipient just like the sender can be you, your boss, your neighbor, your colleague, your family, and just about everybody who is willing, available, and able to receive whatever message you’re sending or giving access to.In business, knowing the recipient is almost a requirement. The recipient is your customer, your employee, your supplier, investor, government, and even your competitor. They are stakeholders in the process of communication.
When we talk about the customer it is already a cliche to talk about customer profiles, customer persona, customer demographics, and a host of frameworks attempting to understand and measure the customer. Customers are people. Just like you.
The recipient has different information needs at different moments in their lives. They are people. They change hence the message should be evolving as they move through their journey with you. In business, we call it the customer journey.
Employees are now an integral part of business growth. Leadership is truly evolving in the context of inspiring employees to take the customer journey to a new level of engagement. Sadly, however, leaders are found wanting in terms of this role. People are disengaged hence customers are disengaged.
Employees are having higher expectations of their leaders and the message of leaders is not meeting these expectations. They are leaving. Enterprises are clearly not understanding the recipients of their messages.
As senders of messages, we need to understand how our messages are affecting our recipients. We have to get them engaged. We need them to become active participants in the process.
We need to know what outcomes we are actually achieving with our engagement with them. We have to design a system that allows us to get feedback.
Element 6: The Feedback
Feedback happens when an output of a message or an action is returned or as we say "fed back" to the sender or actor. In a way, feedback is a confirmation or observation of a recipient's response. The recipient validates the message is received or the action is completed.
On a person-to-person level, feedback can be straightforward. We can say something. We can do something. Give something. We observe the recipient's immediate reaction.
Simple.
Well almost simple until you hit a snag we call filters.
Remember element number 4.
At times we get our message distorted. Even if we deliver the message with success, personal filters as biases can get in the way.
For an employer, understanding feedback is important.
Negative feedback means calling out a mistake. Calling it within the context of work or a message received. Negative feedforward is when you provide feedback for future messages or actions.
Positive feedback makes the recipient understand the results of what they have done. Positive feedforward is affirmation in anticipation of future messages or actions. These kinds of feedback tell us the recipient does not need any change. The recipient understands things and is doing fine.
For an enterprise owner or enterprise leader responsible for customer experience, feedback is essential to gauge the quality of CX.
CX stands for customer experience.
CX is how your company's customers perceive the manner you treat them. Such perceptions have an effect on customer behaviors driving their buying decisions.
Enterprises that value CX have some system to capture customer reviews. This is a system specially designed to capture feedback about how customers perceive their customer journey with their enterprise.
If you are a leader, you need to engage your stakeholders. Your stakeholders are employees, your customer, your shareholders, and your community. You have to be consistent in the engagement. You have to follow through.
For you to be able to follow through, you need something from your stakeholders.
You guessed it!
It's feedback.
You need feedback from employees because you need to get them engaged consistently. You need to know the real score.
You also have to measure the impact and the role you play in their engagement. Communication is key and it is a continuous process. So is the feedback that goes with it. Studies after studies suggest feedback boosts morale. And giving feedback keeps employees motivated.
If you can get feedback from your stakeholders about your leadership, you learn more deeply. You will lead better in the long run. For your personal learning journey, feedback can be your cheapest tool for personal development.
Communicating gets people aligned behind a vision. Leaders need to articulate the vision to synchronize individual aspirations into a single driving force to get to where they want to go.
Organizations, especially their leaders have to be really savvy at harnessing all the elements described above.
Communication is important for leaders and the business enterprise. You can arrange a coaching session or a consulting engagement with me. I can help you in developing a communications plan for the enterprise founded on your value proposition design, your inbound marketing strategy, or your customer journey. Just send me an email: vyparalisan@virgilioparalisan.com.
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