That good management depends on good communication is something every manager knows. But how easy is it to ‘send out a clear message’, as we are sometimes encouraged to do? There are moral undertones to the expression which imply taking a principled stand: managers should be clear, but they should also be prepared to take the necessary and hard decisions. The phrase carries an aspiration for both clarity and moral purpose.
There are any number of helpful training courses and web sites offering advice to support managers achieve clarity by decluttering their language, by avoiding jargon, by thinking about their audience, and by matching body language with the intended message. Then there are a variety of tips and tricks for cutting out vague and ‘weakening’ words. Some consultants advise how to ‘cut out the mush’ of misunderstanding so that management and leadership can be offered clearly. These are sometimes accompanied by appeals for communicators to be authentic, honest and transparent. We are invited to be good selves, clearing away misunderstanding with the purity of our intentions and honesty about ourselves. The more authentic you are, the more your authority will be heeded.
The idea that we can all get along better by learning to communicate clearly, being more open and honest with each other and acting with authenticity, is of course very edifying. There is a duty on all of us to try and say what we mean, and mean what we say to the best of our abilities, and to let people know what they need to hear: perhaps taking the decisions that lesser managers would be loath to.
Depending on how you think about the expression, however, it merits further exploration.
Firstly underpinning a recommendation to send out a clear message is an assumption that what people intend to communicate is exactly what will be communicated, and that it will be understood by the receiver of the communication unambiguously. However, whatever our intentions about what we want to say and the way we want to say it, it will be interpreted and filtered through the hearer’s experience and in the context in which they hear it. So, for example, if managers ‘send out a clear message’ that one of the organisation’s values is collaborative working and respect for each other, then such a gesture would provoke a whole array of responses from those who hear it, partly depending on how respected they are currently feeling and how they have experienced the manager, or group of managers saying it in their previous attempts to collaborate. This will have little to do with the authenticity of the speaker(s) and how fitting their body language is to the message. What we say as managers will be further interpreted in the light of people’s experience of us and the organisation in which they find themselves working. No message, no matter how clear, comes into a world made new.
So, since the abundant recommendations about how to communicate clearly focus predominantly on the communicator, and not on recipients of the communication, this renders much of the advice politically naïve and only partially helpful. It comes independent of context and locates the responsibility with the communicator alone.
The second aspect worth exploring is the important role that lack of clarity plays in organisations, because of the implication in the expression that if only we could communicate clearly all of our problems would be solved. If you accept the points made in the previous paragraphs that human communication will always be imperfect, then in the back and forth between communicator and the people to whom they are communicating there is always room for misinterpretation, misunderstanding and ambiguity. And it is from this very ambiguity and difference that emergence, movement, creativity, are possible. Creativity arises in organisations through every day ensemble improvisation to get the work done, the slips and adjustments that create the regular irregularity of organisational life. Creativity is as much happenstance as it is planned. The only problem is that it may not be movement or difference or creative response that we want or need: misunderstandings might be helpful or unhelpful, and only time will tell.
The third aspect worth thinking about is the moral implications of taking a stand inherent in the idea of ‘sending out a clear message’. On occasion managers do need to take a position in response to the emergence of some organisational pattern which needs them to take a view. That’s what they are paid for. However, this isn’t the end of the story. If the ‘clear message’ provokes a variety of responses from staff, as it is likely to, then managers are still in charge and still obliged to respond again. Having acted, they are then required to act again in response to the reaction. There is no end to the cycle of managerial responsibility.
Another way of thinking about the idea of ‘sending out a clear message’, is that it is a further iteration in an ongoing conversation. It is a response to something which has been identified by managers as needing attention. But the ‘clear message’ itself doesn’t put an end to things: it will be met in turn by a range of responses from staff which will need further engagement as everyone works out together what is needed to take the next step. The requirement to go on exploring our mutual responsibilities constantly evolves and the ‘clear message’ is just another episode in the story.
There’s a parallel post here about the “communication” of research findings…..