Communication 1.1 (Eng): What Is "Good" Communication?

Communication 1.1  What is "good" communication?

Right from the start, in our professional life, as well as our personal one, any communication, in order to be efficiet, so "good", must be brief, concise and and precise.  Beyond that, confusion, or even worse, interpretation, may come into play.

Simple, is it not?

Have you ever played the "telephone game"? For those who do not know what this is about, you take

 a group of people, make them sit in a circle, and a designated person discreetly whispers a word or a sentence to his immediate neighbor so that the other will not hear what he is saying. In turn, the neighbor repeats the words to his other immediate neighbor and so on until the words come back to the person who initiated everything.

For example, the initial message could be: "The new director's wife is sick" and when the message makes a complete round, the end result could be something like: "It's sick! The new director is a woman!" (In some cases, variations to the game were made to accomodate 3-4 people who were then placed in different rooms. Even if the number of people was reduced, differences between the initial and end messages were significative.)

This proves that the message does not have to be long, complicated or elaborate to be misinterpreted or misunderstood. All the more reasons to be brief and to the point.

Let's take another example:

Sufraget is an administrative clerk for a big manufacturing entreprise. She is regularly late for work in the morning which causes various discontent with the rest of the administrative personnel. The situation had already been addressed a few times but, down the line, improvements do not last and therefore nothing changes.

One morning, when Suffraget comes to work, she finds an envelop addressed to her on her desk. When she opens it, she reads one of the two following notes:

"Mrs Suffraget,

It has come to our attention recently that your lack of punctuality in the morning creates some discontentment among your co-workers. We want to ask you to fix this situation otherwise other measures will have to be taken.

Thank you for your understanding,

The Direction."

OR

"Mrs Suffraget,

Regarding many complaints received concerning the time at which you come to work,  we ask you to be ponctual and present at your desk when the working day starts. Otherwise, we will be forced to ask you to seek employment elsewhere.

Thank you for your colaboration,

The Direction."

In your opinion, which message was the clearer? The most efficient? The one that is the best example of  a "good" communication?

Personnally, I really like the second one, even if it is not quite politically correct, it has the advantage of being crystal clear and straight to the point. Therefore, there is less room for interpretation.

But the REAL answer is: NONE

In a "good communication" context, Mrs Suffraget should be met by the direction so they can adress the situation directly in order to solve it. This is really an example of "good" communication because both parties are present so expectations from both sides can be expressed clearly.

We could elaborate a long time on the topic but, to sum things up, a "good" communication is:

• Brivety of the message
• Simple sentence structure (subject + verb + complement)
• Accessible and vulgarized (*) vocabulary
• Precision of the idea
• Request for action (answer)

(*) Not to be confused with "familiar". Just try to use as less as possible big long words that can hinder on the clarity of the message. I should also make a reference to the first article introducing the subject of communication in which I asked the following question : Who is the receive? To whom am I talking? (Hmm... I feel another blog coming up!)

I will come back on this small list many times through the upcoming articles. But, rst assured, I am going to stop here for today. This is a vast subject and there is still so much more to say about it.

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Your comments are always welcome!

Louis Carle

Director

Formation Linguistique L.C.