It is a truism that communication is essential and important in leadership and in all kinds of human relationships. There are also countless communication models that explain the phenomenon of communication to us in a more or less instructive way. According to the sender-receiver model, communication begins with the receiver and not with the sender, as many people believe. You can send a lot – even out into space.
Friedemann Schulz von Thun's four-ears model is also useful, because we hear or send messages using four aspects: subject matter or content, self-revelation, relationship, and appeal. Everyone should ask themselves whether they have a favorite ear or a favorite tongue. It is important to understand communication in all its complexity and to let go of the truth of one's own subjective reality. As leader , we must leader work on expanding our "communication repertoire." This means constant critical self-reflection and empathy. Only in this way can we come close to recognizing the reality of other people and adjust our communication accordingly. In my opinion, almost all conflicts in this world are based on different perceptions. Reason enough to explore this topic in greater depth.
Everyone has their own style
Today, I would like to link communication to the different types of tasks. As we know, there are several aspects of tasks that can be distinguished. There are divisible and uniform tasks, maximizing tasks in terms of quantity, and optimizing tasks in terms of quality. Tasks can add up, as in shoveling snow, or we may have an acute problem to solve, in which case the expertise of an individual may provide the solution. There are connecting tasks that may also depend on the weakest member of the group, such as mountain climbing. And finally, there are distinguishing tasks, the completion of which depends on the best possible use of all individual skills in a team that complement each other accordingly.
Why is this important? Well, everyone has their own communication style, even if they know that other styles exist. But always communicating according to your own habits can also waste resources or cause confusion. So we are back to the "keyboard" of communication that a leader should leader . Let's start simply and use a model that I find useful: the Media Richness Model, originally developed by Robert H. Lengel and Richard L. Daft.
Just as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow model of inexpressible happiness requires a suitable balance between abilities and demands in order to forget time and be happily immersed in the flow, media richness theory relates the complexity of the task to the type of medium.
Complexity vs. Medium
What does that mean exactly? Who hasn't seen those emails that fill the entire screen with long-winded sentences, where you can see on the right that you still have to scroll a long way to get to the end? Who hasn't experienced a colleague who constantly wants to talk face to face, probably because he or she can't be alone? And then there are the phone addicts, the Skype fanatics, the presentation fetishists who indulge in slide orgies – and much more.
Ultimately, the whole thing is very simple and can be neatly plotted on two axes: the horizontal axis indicates the complexity of the task or the degree of difficulty – from simple (close to the origin) to very complex (far to the right on the X-axis). On the vertical axis, we now enter the media and start close to the origin with the written word, which nowadays in business usually takes place via email or chat. In my opinion, 90% of all emails are too long. The writer thinks of something and hacks it into the keyboard. Everyone knows people who think out loud, so that the words that come out of their mouths can sometimes be described as "logorrhea" (derived from diarrhea ...). Accordingly, the emails mentioned above could well be described as "tiporrhea." If we then add the cc culture in companies, we end up with an incredible waste of time spent sending and reading such messages. Not to mention the "Reply All" button.
At this point, I would like to quote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who once wrote a letter to his friend. It began as follows: "My dear friend, today you will receive a long letter from me. Unfortunately, I did not have time to write a short one." This quote has become one of my most important mottos for my email communication. When dealing with important customers who have very little time, I revise an email up to 10 times to eliminate anything superfluous and get to the point with a view to making it as easy as possible for the recipient to reply.
Back to the Y-axis of the Media Richness Model
Written communication is followed by telephone calls and conference calls, then video calls and corresponding web sessions. Finally, the richest media experience is the personal experience of the individual or group. Here, we also have all the nonverbal signals perfectly in front of us, which we can pick up and process accordingly.
The goal is to strike leader right balance between the complexity of the task and the richness of the media in your own communication as leader . In this respect, you don't meet in person to deal with or resolve simple matters. And you don't write emails to explain complicated issues. Sounds simple, but it is often disregarded. Another important point in this model is the issue of uncertainty, which is becoming increasingly apparent in our times and causes stress accordingly. If there are many changes in the company, the media richness should tend to increase, i.e., on the Y-axis (see image). This can help avoid uncertainties and make ambiguities easier to tolerate.
The model helped me.
How do you communicate in your daily management work?
Yours, Uli Vogel
