Today’s post is short because reading the articles to which it’s linked is critical.

Are you a good communicator? Do you provide clear, complete, timely information to your team? Do you ever worry that it’s not as understandable as you think?

Have you ever read or heard a professional communicator and wished you could do that, too?

You would expect the two top people of an innovation consultancy to be good communicators and not make the assumption mistake.

They recently wrote an article in Business Week describing the three types of people to fire immediately if you want to increase innovation in your company.

The article was the most read for eight days and generated in excess of 1000 comments, mostly negative.

Why?

Because the way the article reads it’s the workers who should be fired, not the bosses.

So they wrote an apology and explanation.

“And that brings us to the ultimate irony. When we talked about firing people, we were thinking about those higher on the org chart, not lower. We meant the boss and senior management team. … We thought we made this implicit in the article. Judging from the response, we didn’t. We should have made it clearer.”

Communicating takes effort and the number one rule of clarity is no assumptions.

Read the articles and save them to read again whenever you find a disconnect between what you communicate and your team’s actions to be sure that you aren’t the source of the problem.

Flickr image credit: zedbee

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 at 1:15 am and is filed under Communication, Ducks In A Row. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: assumptions, clarity, clear communications
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