“Say What?!?”

Woody Hayes, legendary football coach at The Ohio State University once said, “Three things can happen when you throw a pass, and two of them are bad.”

I wish communication had such a high success rate – with one-third of the outcomes positive.

In communication, just as in throwing a pass, there is only one successful result – the message is received as intended. There are a plethora of unsuccessful outcomes ranging from slightly suboptimal to calamitous and everywhere in between. And, just like in football, success or failure is measured once the play has ended – on the receiving end. It doesn’t matter what words left your lips or your intention when you clicked the send button in outlook or the tone of voice inside your head when you pressed Tweet.  It matters only what was received or not. For this reason, Mark Horstman, Co-Founder of Manager Tools coined the phrase:

“Communication is what the listener does.” 

Or stated another differently: effective communication occurs at the point of receipt.

Of course there are some people (a frustratingly growing number it seems although I have no evidence to support that) who’s favorite sound is their own voice; they have little or no regard for recipients or even the innocent bystanders subjected to their noise. But, for most of us, we are communicating as a means of accomplishing something – building relationships, expressing emotion, participating in society, sharing information, motivating action, persuading thoughts, and so on.

People communicate because it makes sense to them. Logically or emotionally they expect it will achieve a desired outcome. Too often though, we communicate reflexively – autopilot, muscle-memory, and our subconscious hijack our intent and put us at great risk of a negative outcome.  With stakes as high as are often carried in our communication, we shouldn’t be satisfied in the dangerous territory that Woody Hayes warned against, “three things can happen . . . and two of them are bad.”
Horstman’s quote unlocks a potential antidote or insurance policy against the negative outcomes that communication can generate. If we reverse our perspective on the exchange and consider each communication from the perspective of the listener or recipient, there are tools and techniques that we can employ to raise our success rate. Understanding our receiver and modifying our natural inclinations around communication to match their perspectives, skills, abilities, and sensibilities can increase our chances for success and raise our completion percentage in the area of effective communication.  

Here are three practical tips for improving your communication:

1) Stop. Breathe. Think. – With something as important and fraught with risk as communication, do not allow muscle memory and auto-pilot to take control. Be intentional and thoughtful.

2) Consider all elements of communication. – Studies tell us that only 7% of communication is the actual words you use. 55% of communication is body language. 38% is conveyed through tone and voice. This is especially important to consider in our online world and email-based corporate cultures where we sacrifice 93% of our communication tools the moment we press send. 

3) Communicate in the way your recipient prefers. – Learn as much as you can about how your recipients like to communicate and work in the space that is most comfortable to them. There are several tools and models one can use to better understand others (MBTI, Enneagram, Strengths – Finder, etc.) and a good place to start would be the DiSC Profile. Originally published in the 1920s by William Moulton Marston and significantly advanced by Walter Clark in 1940, the DiSC Personality Profile is an effective model for observing and interpreting the preferred communication models of people around you. If you’re unfamiliar with DiSC or want to understand it better, take a look at the best management-based resource on the subject that I know: Manager Tools – DiSC Basics for more. 

Unless you’re just talking because you love the sound of your own voice, you have a goal in mind when you communicate. With so much potential for things to go so wrong, following these few steps can help you communicate more effectively and increase the chances that the person on the other end with make “the catch.”