Communicating Many Levels Above

In a large organization, it is difficult, to communicate to someone who is much above one's level. Even meeting up with one's manager's manager is rare, and meeting up with someone who is higher up than that is almost impossible.

I've heard in many companies the "Open door policy" that CEO's have with all their employees, and wonder if anyone has actually used the policy with any efficacy. It would seem strange, if not downright weird, for an average employee to walk over to the CEO's office, even if the matter is relevant. The "standard" procedure is to talk to one's manager and never higher up than that. But apparently, IBM's Open Door Policy was indeed used by several workers who were dissatisfied with their immediate manager for some reason or another.

What is Conflict?

The definition given for "Conflict" at the beginning of the tenth chapter is, "the interaction of interdependent people who perceive incompatible goals and interference from one another in achieving those goals".

The textbook elaborates that "interaction" refers to communication, "interdependent" is for people who are close to each other in an organization, and conflict primarily stems from perceptions.

The most important part of the definition appears to be "perception", because from my experience, it is difficult to have two people share the exact same perceptions on any topic though they attend the same meetings and listen in on the same discussions. Even if the communication process is the same, there is a difference in perception of the same issue because no two people share the same history or the same sense of risk-taking, which is difficult to communicate to another person.

For example, presented with an identical project, one team-member may see the project as "doable" because 90% of the time the work yields good results. However, another team-member may feel that this project is important enough that 90% is not a good enough sense of certainty. This may result in a conflict with the first person voting for the project and the second voting against it, even though they both agree on all the basic data and theory that goes into the project.

The Human Touch

The textbook refers to how employees respond to "The Human Touch" - feeling that they matter and are bringing something valuable to the organization. If the employees feel that they are important in the management's eyes, they are more motivated to do their job and the organization benefits as whole. The example given in the book is that of a hospital that greatly improved after the CEO treated people with a more human touch.

Treating people as valuable is an important part of leadership, and it stretches beyond only the employees to one's customers and colleagues - and in fact any human being (!). I remember reading about the patient who left everything in his will to only one doctor among many who treated him - because that doctor not only treated and cured his patients, but he also comforted them with compassionate words.

Leadership Skills and Experience

The beginning of the chapter 7 on Leadership in the textbook talks about the thousands of available textual materials (books, articles, etc.) on the topic, but there still exists a great difficulty in translating the essence of leadership purely by means of language to a beginner. This is probably an inherent problem with communicating leadership principles without giving the student the experience of what it means to be in the leadership role.

To clarify what I mean: I once attended a talk on managing in a leadership role, and asked the speaker a question about how one can understand the "boundaries" of what it means to be authoritative as a leader. The leader must be willing to let go of his/her authority in certain contexts - how does the leader know when to be authoritative and when to relax it? After a lot of hand-waving, the speaker finally said, "It comes from experience". Evidently, it is not easy to explain what it means to be a leader to a student who has no practical experience on the subject.

It's like the old catch-22: you need experience to get the job, but you need the job to gain experience!

Miscommunication with New Communication Technologies

I believe that the possibilities for miscommunication with new communication technologies is more than ever before, and may get progressively worse in the future.

Most of us use mobile phones, and it is quite common to experience dropped calls. In the ad campaign for Cingular cell phones, commercials illustrated just how devastating a dropped call can be. In one particularly strong commercial, a person calls the suicide hotline from the top of a building, and while the counselor at the other end is trying to convince him that taking his own life is not a good option, the line goes dead, and the screen turns black, hinting at disastrous consequences. The slogan is "Fewer dropped calls". (View the commercial online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRNkHugEu6w)

There are also problems with emails. Sometimes, one misunderstands the "tone" of an email because one cannot actually hear the voice behind it. I've heard complaints from friends about how their emotions are constantly misinterpreted if they do not explicitly use emoticons [:-) :-( etc.]. In cases where emoticons are not appropriate (e.g. a semi-professional setting such as being a club-member), it is difficult to correctly interpret a person's tone under many circumstances.

Communication Skills in a Changing Technology Landscape

In the discussion on Contemporary Communication Technologies, The textbook says on page 350 that "...communication knowledge and skills also count as communication technology." The implication being that it is not only the engineering and science behind the "hardware" side of internet and email functionality, but also the "soft" skills of using the internet and email as means of communicating that constitutes "Communication Technology".

I find this to be an important take on communication technology, because buying pieces of hardware and giving it for people's daily use is simple, but getting them to use it productively and constructively for the sake of organizational interests and development is difficult. For example, although the technology for Online Shared Folders has existed in our organization for several years, it is only recently that people began using it fruitfully as a communication vehicle. The reason for this lapse is because it took people some time to figure out exactly how to make most of the new technology to work for them.

Technology and Impersonal Information

The textbook talks about new technologies becoming "impersonal" vehicles of communication. For example, page 362 discusses personal, impersonal and hyperpersonal communication. Page 357 states: "Thus, the so-called 'cues-filtered-out' model has promoted an image of electronic media as impersonal, impoverishing interpersonal relations and reducing the quality of organizational life. Think of examples that support this view."

One example I can think of is in the area of doctor-patient communication. In the distant past, doctors used to visit their patients in the patient's own home, and communicate with them face-to-face on a very personal basis. In the mid-twentieth century, doctors might even converse with their patients over the phone, thus dispensing the face-to-face meeting altogether. But with the advent of emails, the doctor-patient interaction does not happen with immediate effect - it may take the doctor hours if not days to reply to a patient's email. I believe that much of the personal communication with one's doctor has diminished due to reliance upon emails in the medical field. It is no doubt convenient, but lacks the personal comfort that face-to-face communication brings to the patient.

Some doctors also ask the patient to "google" (has happened to me!) in order to learn more about their medical condition. The patient finds out about his or her illness via a medium that has no empathy for their personal situation, which is certainly hard on the emotions of people with serious medical conditions.

Globalization, Communication and the Internet

I enjoyed reading the book "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman, which is about the business world becoming increasingly globalized. In this book, Friedman makes the bold assertion that the economic world of today is now "flat" in the sense that the business playing field has been leveled, and that all countries can now compete with one another in the global market-place on almost equal footing.

One of the major reasons for this leveling is due to the invention of the internet. Companies in the USA can now easily transfer work - especially software-based work - to other parts of the world via the medium of the internet, and people across the globe can communicate and work as though they are across each others' desks. This medium of communication was unavailable a few decades ago, and has since revolutionized communication and job functionality. Whether it is by emails or web-based software applications or online shared folders, there are innumerable ways that the internet has changed the way we communicate in the workplace.

According to Friedman, in the future, it is not going to matter whether someone is born in America or China or Australia, but whether that person is able to deliver value-added goods to any part of the world. The internet is one of the chief inventions that is responsible for this change.