The Lost Art Of Clarity

In healthy organizations, interpersonal communication takes place openly, honestly and fearlessly in all directions at all times, though with varying levels of impact.

The following is focused on the noise and confusion that you the speaker/writer add to a conversation. At the time of this writing, it seems that communication from the top-down gets most of the attention and has the farthest-reaching impact.

When people start to refer to you as “Her Majesty,” what you spew is going to be considered crucial and, if you are lucky, imperative. In addition to being enlightening and inspiring, the best thing a leader can do is to always be clear.

Types of Communication Error

When performing a Select, Copy and Paste from one human head to another, there are plenty of opportunities for the imparting of data error from one buffer to the next. Being flawlessly clear in your communication is one of the absolute requirements of leadership.

Without absolute clarity of transmission, any value stuffed within your message will be filtered, distorted or refracted before it is archived in the recipient’s cloud, as such:

Filtering: Such signal dropout is what happens when the waitress relies only on her incredible memory to take your lunch order and you never get your side order of sweet potato fries.

Distortion: Defined simply as misinterpretation introduced though innocent alterations of the data between source and destination, such as “Oh, you said that I should feed the baby ‘yesterday,’ not ‘tomorrow’…sorry.”

Refraction: This is the most dangerous type of clarity loss. It involves the bending of information due largely to the recipient’s interpretation and personal motivations.

For example, if the boss announces, “One of our business prospects, The D’Agostino Organic Mushroom & Hazardous Waste Company, has filed for restructuring and we need to conduct ourselves accordingly.” The controller hears, “We need to manage risk and hold them to cash-in-advance terms!” The sales manager hears, “Get their next order before they go under!”

The Elements of Communication

Let’s look at the components of interpersonal communication, suggest ways to assure a lossless transmission and make sure you get your sweet potato fries.

Error-Prone Steps of Interpersonal Communication

[1] …and sits down. The puzzled bartender eventually walks over to the kangaroo who then orders a Brandy Old Fashioned and puts a 20 on the bar. The bartender brings the kangaroo the drink and seven dollars change. A little later, the still-perplexed bartender says to the kangaroo, “Ya know, we don’t get a lot of kangaroos in this bar.” The kangaroo says, “Well, I’m not surprised at these prices!”

In civilized terms:

You can appreciate the fragility of it all. In detail:

1. The source has something in their mind that apparently needs to get out before it turns moldy. The first thing to do when you get the urge to share is convince yourself that what you are going to communicate really needs to be. If not, save the bandwidth.
2. The thought must now be carefully constructed to ensure that it has all the parts needed to get the point across, being mindful of the audience at hand. A great self-test at this point is to ask that little voice in your head if there anything in what I’m about to convey that could be misinterpreted or require the recipient to make assumptions? Any time debugging the message and getting it right before transmission is leadership time well spent.
   2.1. An invaluable subcomponent of message construction is the quest for brevity. Odd as this may sound coming from me, if you can get a point across clearly in 11 words, don’t use 45. People will be looking at their phone when you get to word 13.
3. The medium you choose has great influence on how the message is transmitted and interpreted. Other than triple exclamation points and/or a smiley face, it is hard to convey passion in a tweet and even harder to assess the reaction of the audience. Conversely, it is impossible to proofread and correct an interactive, live conversation. Carefully select your medium based on the nature of the message and who’s on the receiving end. And remember, anything you write may be forever immortalized and forwarded while anything you say may be misquoted.
4. Once you press Send, you can’t make the recipient unknow it. You can, however, improve the probability for success by controlling the environment. Venue, distractions, and audience size all affect the accuracy of transmission. Getting called into the principal’s dank and quietly terrifying office invokes a level of clarity and attention that one does not feel when one is simply getting yelled at on the playground. I know.
5. The recipient has plenty of involvement here as well. Being a good listener is an underappreciated skill but one we can never stop developing. Rarely do you hear someone say, “Yes, Vince won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 but, more impressive than that, he’s a very good listener.” In this step, what the source can do is request confirmation, just short of offending the recipient. “So, are we all clear that nobody is allowed to microwave leftover salmon in the ISO 3 Materials cleanroom here forward?”
6. Finally, whatever unrecognizable sliver of your original message that survived the previous 5 steps will be loaded onto the floppy drive of the recipient. Even if it doesn’t land on a corrupt sector of the disk, the information will still decay faster than ricotta cheese. Thus, I remain a firm believer in immortalizing important communications. If it was verbal and particularly if it was a directive, there is nothing bad about documenting the details in an email that will haunt and hold accountable the assignees. People can be naturally or conveniently forgetful; that’s why the Apostles took such good notes. In your case, it’s not a Bible, it’s an action item list for the people who were in your meeting.

Style and Content

Beyond removing the static and decay from how the message transmits, you need to consider the style, and personality with which your message is crafted. Though unfashionable, there is powerful value in communicating with grammatically correct, thoughtfully assembled sentences.

For example: “On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, six geese-a-laying” Putting aside the horrific mess such a thoughtless gift would leave in your living room, the reader is perfectly clear on who is doing what for whom and when. At least as important, the author took the time to structure the sentence with the requisite noun, verb and well-placed adjective.

As a recovered Fortran 77 programmer, I do cherish a highly efficient message that employs minimal keystrokes and bytes to get a time-sensitive point across. (For example: “yer flys opn 😉”)

However, when you are not in a flaming aircraft hurtling toward earth, take the extra 12 seconds to show respect for the reader with the best grammar you can recall from the 6th grade. Besides the flattery that such a well-wrapped gift brings the recipient, the message is inherently clearer and less prone to misinterpretation when you thoughtfully architect it…and we all now agree on how important clarity is.

What I’m not going to do now is give you guidance regarding content. That’s your fingerprint and I wish you the best in your decisions…except for these two things:

First, let’s address the topic of cursing. I’m neither for or against the use of words that your mom would smack you for saying in a business setting, but be aware that people will remember you for your lowest level of behavior and, what the leader does sets the standard for what others understand to be acceptable behavior.

Personally, I work very hard to avoid the use of vulgarity in professional communication. That said, if the personal leadership approach that you are building will allow it, a rare and well-placed sprig of profanity can get a point across like no other. Again, to be effective, to minimize the tarnish on your image, and to not overpower the message, it must be used very sparingly, like cilantro.

(For example, if once, just once, in front of exactly the right audience, at exactly the right time, Saint Francis of Assisi would have said, “Be nice to the f–king animals!” I firmly believe that there would be more caribou in the world today.)

Secondly, please don’t feel an obligation to apply all the current business jargon in your dialog. You may feel that using the clever words of established veterans can be a compelling way to illustrate your readiness for advancement for the same reason that minor league baseball players spit a lot.

There are two flavors of such jargon. There’s the Hipster Intellectual version that goes like, “I’m going to scrum with my workstream collaborators to bifurcate the narrative before we storyboard our ask.”

And then there’s the Cutesy Metaphor version that goes like, “We asked to taste their secret sauce and found that it was just smoke and mirrors.

So now that we’ve seen them make the sausage, we need to tell them that their baby is ugly.” In either case, you sound silly. Trust me on this one. It just interrupts the otherwise smooth lines and flow of the conversation. Strive for clarity and don’t spit.

Is that clear?

Mike Kotecki, an engineer by education, served as a senior executive in the supply chain industry for several decades, leading others in the areas of sales, service and operations. After graduating from that career, he formed MK Tactical Leadership, LLC where he contributes to various boards, consults, and educates.

The following is an excerpt from a book he recently published called “Leadership for Engineers: How to Turn Perfectly Good STEM Professionals into Management“, available on Amazon.