But Where to Begin?
It Can be Painful
Sometimes communication improvements get shuffled to the bottom of the to-do list because it’s so difficult to know where to begin, especially when there are issues across the entire organization. How do you get heads, hearts, and minds around improving something everyone takes for granted? Here are a few ideas that might help you take those painful first steps.
1. Just Start
The best place to begin is to get your biggest pain points on paper. Are you drowning in email? Embarrassed by what’s going out the door to your partners and the public? Would your people rather send a text or email than walk down the hall and have a face-to-face conversation or pick up the phone? It doesn’t matter what the challenges are, you need to begin by identifying them.
2. Commit
Once you've identified the problems, you can start to design solutions. Make a conscious decision to improve. You don’t have to shoot for perfection in everything, but committing to progress from where you are today toward something better makes the goal much more achievable. And saying it out loud to someone on your team will help make it real.
3. Become the Champion
Once you’ve made the decision, you must become a champion for improvement. This kind of organization-wide change needs to come from the top down. Your team must see and hear your commitment and understand that expectations will be set for everyone at all levels. Don't expect your admin staff to drive this; you must hold your people accountable.
4. Pace Yourself
Bad communication habits can become ingrained into the culture of an organization. Making changes to a culture takes time, discipline, and consistency. So, don’t try to change everything at once. Choose a few things you know are high on the list of annoyances and start there. Aim for a few quick wins to show the team that improvement is possible and give them a sense of how good that can feel.
5. Build in Accountability
Though the approach is one of expectation and self-motivation, it can be beneficial to reinforce accountability by helping your teams understand their role in the organization’s overall communication efforts and then building corresponding responsibilities into their performance evaluation framework. Communicating well should be a part of any job, but assuming it happens without spelling out what that looks like makes it nearly impossible to measure.
Good communication impacts the service, engagement, and staff morale in any organization or business for the better. And it’s something everyone, regardless of their role, does every day on the job. Having the courage and discipline to make improvements has no downside, it just takes commitment and effort.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
-George Bernard Shaw
Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.
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