Where Management Intentions Die
It’s not enough to send a message … it must be understood
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In This Edition - Manager/Worker Communication Is Core to Success
My February 19, 2024 post talked about the way that remote work made poor management worse and placed the blame on poor communication processes. This post shows how the best of intentions come apart when managers and employees talk past – instead of with – each other. Keep reading to determine if you are working in an environment where poor communication has created inconsistent expectations, frustration, and poor performance. You cannot fix a problem if you don’t know you have one.
There isn’t much argument about the need for effective communication within the workplace. Everyone talks about the importance but how many of us work hard to make that happen? Be honest. When writing, how often do you focus first on what your audience will understand instead of what you want to say?
Most people make the mistake of assuming that after they have taken an action, such as sent an email or made a presentation, that they have communicated. This is taking an action and not necessarily communicating. Why?
Because communication doesn’t show with your actions. It happens in the heads of your audience in response to your actions. When your actions promote and confirm message understanding in your audience’s mind then communication has happened.
Short of this definition, all your action did was allow you, as the message sender, to move forward under the false pretense that the audience understood what you intended. They might have understood something completely different from what you intended and you may not know that. This belief on your part creates a breeding ground for all kinds of misunderstandings which will eventually undermine the employee-manager relationship. See my October 16, 2023 newsletter for a deeper dive into complete communication if you are interested in learning more about this incredibly important and often ignored topic.
At its most basic level, managers and leaders want their organization’s employees to work on tasks and projects that all contribute to their desired overall direction. The MBA term for this alignment of objectives is goal congruence. A simple definition of goal congruence is “when the same goals are shared by top managers and their subordinates”1 and there is no question that goal congruence is important to organizational success. To create and monitor goal congruence, leaders and managers send messages to employees about desires and expectations, and employees send messages to their managers about their progress toward expectations. Sound familiar? Sounds easy. So why doesn’t it work well in practice?
There are many things that can interfere with the creation of goal congruence. These include cultural clashes that arise from mergers or acquisitions, personality conflicts, and global cultural differences, to name just a few. To not be respectful of the impact these issues can have on organizational performance is asking for trouble. And these differences are made worse when poor communication is involved. You can learn more about the intersection of communication and culture by following
For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on the most basic and critically important aspect of organizational communication: the communication between managers and their immediate subordinates. After all, this is where the action happens, and communication at this level is intrinsic to determining if you can successfully function in a remote work environment which we will look at in the next few posts.
Anecdotally, I have observed a few things working within organizations as an employee and working with clients. An important one is that managers rarely complain about employees who they believe are on track to complete the objectives that their managers had in mind. On the other hand, managers will often express concern or frustration about the employees that they feel are not performing well as judged by their lack of performance toward the objectives the manager had in mind. When I meet with the employee, it is not uncommon for the employee to be unsure as to what their boss wants from them. Take a moment to process that statement. It is troubling for any number of reasons.
It takes conscious effort to be an effective communicator and in my experience this is a lifetime process or learning, adapting, and self discovery.
Bosses are upset with their employees based on a perceived lack of performance based on criteria that bosses have in their minds, but their employees are unsure about the criteria. How do employees choose their daily actions if they are unsure about the overall goals that their management wants them to achieve from taking those actions? They know that they must do something, so they will pick the actions that they think best, which may not be the most productive towards meeting objectives. This is a lack of goal congruence at the most basic level. It is exceptionally rare for a person to do things that are specifically contrary to the wishes of their boss or of their overall team. Yet, it happens all the time, and I have seen it happen with the best of intentions. This is why I believe that poor communication is at the heart of poor management results. I believe that the vast majority of employees do what they think their bosses want them to do, and a major reason why they go off course is because of misunderstanding.
Another important observation is the frequency with which employees tell me that, “My boss wants me to do achieve certain goals and then gives me action items that have nothing to do with those goals. How am I supposed to do both?” I regularly hear this work complaint in my management university classes where my students are generally working adults over 30 years old. They have a good point in my opinion.
This brings us back to managers and their communication effectiveness. Emails are a form of communication that is often used for explaining expectations to employees. Verbal requests are a form of communication and giving employees action items that do not align with their written objectives tells them that their prior objectives aren’t as important as the action items they were just given. Or are they both equally important? How is the employee to choose which action items to prioritize? They want to make their boss happy and just don’t know how?
Can you imagine your frustration if you were an employee who worked 50+ hours per week, putting family commitments on hold in the hope of making their boss happy, only to discover that your boss believes that they are underperforming? Think how dispiriting this would be and how it would negatively affect future manager-employee interactions if not reconciled.
Maybe my personal history is showing here. When I worked as a regional sales manager in Silicon Valley, I never understood why my manager would call us all in from the field for three days of dog-and-pony show presentations with upper management, then would publicly chastise us in front of leadership for not spending time in the field talking to customers. As a group, we salespeople came to understand that these “shows” had little to do with helping us meet our quotas but were instead a conduit for him to demonstrate his power over us and to lay the groundwork for him to offer us up as a sacrifice should we not meet our sales goals. This created an environment where every person was out to protect himself and the hostility within the group escalated from there. It was not fun, and the company didn’t make it, by the way.
Key Point 1: Managers must continually monitor the messages that they send their employees, both formally and informally, about their expectations. If you find yourself offering confusing guidance, then you must correct this immediately or it will lead to a frustrating environment with underperforming employees.
Key Point 2: Managers should always question where they obtain the information with which they create perceptions about employee performance to objectives. Was this the best information to use or simply the easiest to collect? How was the information collected? How accurate was the information?
Key Point 3: Managers should incorporate some type of feedback mechanism whereby they confirm employee understanding of manager expectations. In addition, a mechanism should be available for employees to request clarification or help, in a nonjudgmental way, as they perform their daily work.
My Getting Through book looks deeply into the importance of feedback when creating effective communication and complete message understanding. FYI … feedback is integral to determining media richness. See the end of this post for a video explaining the book and ways in which you can read it.
We tend to believe that a communication action by us fulfills our part of the communication process, which is only half true. It is only after we have confirmed that our messages were understood as we intended that we have achieved complete communication.
#management, #feedback, #communication, #evaluations, #goalcongruence
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LEARN MORE ABOUT BUSINESS COMMUNICATION FROM MY “GETTING THROUGH” BOOK
New! Listen to Ed Paulson explain his latest book “Getting Through.”
(Short 3 minute YouTube Video)
To become a better communicator, check out my recently published book “Getting Through: A Systematic Approach To Being Understood” (ISBN: 9798987950807) available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers. It is only 130 pages long and can be read in just a few hours. Those few hours will change the way you communicate long into the future.
Getting Through: A Systematic Approach To Being Understood (ISBN: 9798987950807)
From the “Getting Through” book description on Amazon:
“Have you ever wondered why you are misunderstood? Would it shock you to know that it could be HOW you delivered the message? Did you know that the media you use to deliver a message affects the way it is interpreted by others? That’s right! Texting, email, video conference, telephone, and in-person meetings are not interchangeable, but nobody explains that to us, so we are forced to learn the best way to use them by trial and error. Until now!”
“Getting Through” Makes A Great Gift To A New Graduate Or Employee
It has been shown time and again that those who are perceived as better communicators are more likely to get ahead within an organization. “Getting Through” makes a great gift to a person who is new to working within a larger company and required to use their communication infrastructure. By applying the methods detailed in this short book, employees can increase their communication effectiveness and decrease the likelihood of making communication errors that can negatively affect their careers.
What Others Say About “Getting through”
"A must-read for anyone looking to improve their own or their team's effectiveness."
- Laura Pesek, Senior Vice President for Performance Optimization, Big Chalk Analytics
"Ed Paulson's best book to date. These simple methods changed the way my team communicates and how we relate to our customers. Read it and help everyone you know get a copy."
- Dan McManus, President, TeamFloral
"Ed Paulson has compiled the secrets we accidentally learn about communication reality into an easy-to-read guide that will affect how you communicate long into the future."
- Penny Giza, Former Financial Group Manager, Exelon Corporation
"This interesting, quick read perfectly explains the art and science of business communication. Dr. Paulson's pragmatic and intuitive approach is packed with real-life application. Simply, an investment one cannot afford to miss!"
- Tracy Heiner, Former Sales Vice President, Brink's
Copyright © 2024 by Ed Paulson. All Rights Reserved.
Thanks, Gustavo. I hope you take a moment to subscribe. I will be writing along these lines into the future. Keep up the good work.
Great piece, Ed. And thank you for the shoutout!