Why Good Communication is Like “Glue”

By: Warren Rutherford

I thought I would share some tips to successful communications. These have been developed and implemented successfully over my career.

First, take the time necessary to develop a relationship with each of the employees in your company.
Second, have a passion to learn what they liked, disliked, what they were motivated by, when and why they had fun, what did they want to contribute to the company and why, and what they hoped to do after they had achieved their objectives at the company – their future dreams and ambitions.
You might say that there are not enough questions to be asked – and, of course, they will answer you to reward your inquisitiveness.
Simply put, the business communication process requires that we develop an understanding of each person’s professional and personal perspective before we can mix the ingredients together into glue that binds, and which creates a series of goals to which we could aspire.
Simple, but yet a good amount of effort, especially where you and your coworkers may not have previously been encouraged to share your perspectives.
There is usually some initial resistance from those in the company who think it is better to just “set the goal and tell others to achieve it.”
This does not work in the long term as the glue of short-sightedness comes undone quite frequently.
Since I am not intuitively autocratic, I prefer to develop longer term and more effective relationships.
So, for those who suggest otherwise, I smile and go about my business. It must work – I have been using this approach my whole career.

Now, this is where you can have some fun.
You see developing a business communications strategy for a company requires everyone to first participate in the goal-setting process.
The goals themselves are fine; no one will disagree with having them.
The question you will get from each of the staff is how they can reposition and refocus themselves to make sure they achieved their goals.

- Organizational restructuring,
- Job restructuring to leverage the most prominent talents of your respective staff members to maximize their natural talents,
- Retooling your marketing and sales strategy to ensure you can attract and encourage your customers to achieve your sales goals,
- Challenging your production staff to work more effectively to achieve production targets and decrease costs, and
- Freeing up your staff to work beyond their job descriptions and use their intuition to maximize their work efforts.

Once you have the opportunity to talk individually with each of your staff and understand what truly motivates each of them and why, you then have the capability of transforming the business strategy to match and mirror the natural abilities of your staff and to create an environment where they are not only aligned with their interests; they are also more aligned with each other.
To me, effective business communications is that key that unlocks the door to lasting organizational development and change.
Simply put, you develop a mission, a vision, specific and measurable objectives, strategies to achieve those objectives, a specific series of actions, including a set of procedures to review, discuss, modify, and implement what you have developed.
In essence, you develop accountability systems – job descriptions, methods to implement your programs, evaluate your successes (and failures), and processes to continuously improve them.

Lot’s of fun and lots of inspiration. Enjoy the development and implementation process.

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