Communication, the engine oil of life -1

Hello Everyone,
Barka da Sallah and I hope you are enjoying the extended weekend due to the muslim holidays. I have been asked what skills are critical to growing up the corporate ladder. There are a couple in my view which are critical, leadership communication, thinking and problem solving, wisdom/sense of judgement ability to work effectively with others and agility.  I will over the course of the next few weeks write about each one of them but this week I want to start with communication skills.

Communication Skills  is sometimes described as a "soft skill." makes it feel like it's a nice to have. Communication is important because it is at the heart of leadership, critical to problem solving and ability to work with different people.  My analogy is to describe it as the engine oil of business. Try to run your engine without oil and you will appreciate how important the "soft engine oil is. Anyone aspiring to a senior leadership position has to build strong communication skills.Why is this a challenge then for most people even if we have in most businesses one language we communicate it?

I think this is driven by the fact that we all have different experiences ,emotions ,  perceptions and lenses through which we view everything written or spoken , and a lot have not learnt how to put these aside when interpreting messages received or when sending. The second is the assumption that a message has been passed across because we focus on the intention and assume that the receiver should understand our message and we end up with a different outcome rather than the one intended.

In the bsuiness world, lots of communication happen either via emails or formal presentations. I have seen people with good technical skills struggle to progress to higher levels at work or little issues escalate and damage relationships between functions and co workers because of a wrong word or phrased used or a  badly written email. Sometimes the damage is so severe it silently consigns the person who made the error into the "not good for senior position" box.

Early in my career, I learnt two principles that are helping me guide my communications. The first is the golden rule of communication, "seek ye first to understand and then to be understood". The second was to apply the KISS(Keep it simple stupid)  princinple in communication. Like one of my former bosses will say, explain it so my grandmother can understand.Communicate in very simple terms such that if what you said or wrote was printed on the front page of the New York times, will everyone have the same intepretation?

Next week I will share some more on these principles, some tips to help build the skills with some examples. Until then , have a great week.

Kind regards,
Alex Goma aka Teranga Lion.