In large organizations, effective communication between the bosses and the workers is seen as the key ingredient for successfully bringing all the work together. When things work well, most people will cite good communication as the reason why. They will tell you that all the players understand what they’re doing and why they doing it. Unfortunately, good communication seems to be more the exception than the rule inside most large organizations and is becoming more problematic as the current pace of change continues to accelerate. The common sentiment heard among the workers inside many traditional organizations today is frustration with the almost complete lack of communication.
In a survey of more than five million people over 22 years, FranklinCovey has found that most workers rate managers low on their ability to provide focus and clear direction. This means that, in the typical company, most individuals couldn’t tell you what the corporate goals are and, therefore, lack the clarity to easily connect their day-to-day work with the corporate mission. When the frustrations and the lack of clarity begin to adversely affect business results and can no longer be ignored, the usual management response to the chorus of complaints is always the same: more meetings, more memos, and more reports. In other words, when the voices of complaints from the workers about poor communications reach a crescendo, the bosses’ retort is to amplify their own voices through the reengineering of one-way communication channels.
Managers often assume that, if they are more vocal, then the complaints from the workers will go away. However, far more often than not, this assumption turns out to be false, and despite the bosses’ best efforts to be more informative, the complaints of poor communications persist. The lesson from this common recurrent corporate experience seems lost on traditional managers: increasing one-way top-down communications rarely solves communications problems. Transforming the fundamental systems of interaction among managers and workers as well as changing the nature of the corporate conversations is usually what’s needed. Effective communication is almost never a one-way process, especially in the wiki world.
