It’s a common enough occurrence in any organization in the minutes immediately following a high-level meeting.
Two of the participants leave the boardroom together and as they travel down the hallway they begin discussing that report by the CEO, the sales managers forecast, a fellow executive’s proposal and the ensuing discussion, or anything else they happened to hear at the meeting.
After a minute or two of comparing notes, the two colleagues suddenly stop in their tracks, turn towards each and sigh. It’s clear from their identical, somewhat pained, expressions that they’re both thinking the same thing: “Were you in the same meeting I was?”
Australian consultant Ron Crossland writes that whenever he addresses a group of managers he always asks them if they have experienced this scenario, and every time he gets unanimous assent. He stresses that he’s not talking here of the more understandable occurrence where one executive’s opinion of what the speaker had been saying differs from that of his colleagues. This is another case. What one participant at the meeting actually hears the speaker say, is different from what his or her colleague hears.
This kind of experience, laments Crossland, is the inevitable outcome of four mistakes - “common, ordinary and understandable things”, as he call them - that people in the echelons of power make when they are leading and communicating. These errors, are at the “root of most miscommunication, most continuing disagreement, and most inaction or alternative action, some of which may cause considerable rework”.
These mistakes, which are so frequent that they’re often made without any conscious thought, take the form of four fatal assumptions that leaders automatically make after they have communicated something, or at the end of a meeting. These leaders honestly believe that:
- Constituents understand what has been communicated
- Constituents agree with what has been communicated.
- Constituents care about what has been communicated.
- Constituents know how to act against what has been communicated.
Fortunately and interestingly, once these same leaders become conscious of what they are doing and begin to realize the big mess that their faulty assumptions have created, they are easily enough able to work out appropriate solutions. Crossland’s own analysis and suggestions are well worth reading in full.
One thing is for certain: there’s no greater enemy to effective communication than the human tendency to take things for granted. Who says that the intended act of communication has taken place at all?
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