Communication for the modern business is like air for the human body, and learning organizations inside today’s modern businesses have to contend with a variety of challenges. These include communicating across global business lines, evaluating the best delivery methods and creating influential learning activities that meet identified business strategies as well as personal and professional career development objectives for key talent in the workforce. No matter which task CLOs set for themselves and their direct reports, there will be some element of communication required, and the more effective the communication, the higher the potential for learning success.
Dianna Booher, president and CEO, Booher Consultants Inc., has done research on the ins and outs of business communication and has established 10 Cs of communication or strategies to communicate more effectively and purposefully. If you’re having problems, ask yourself if communication in your learning organization is: correct? complete? current? clear? purposefully un-clear? credible? concerned? competent? circular? If not, your work might be harder than it needs to be, and a communication overhaul might be in order.
Any senior-level learning executive must first ensure that all communications leaving the learning organization are correct. That’s a given. But communication must also be clear and safe from misinterpretation over cross-cultural or departmental lines. Learning and development language poses a big problem for clarity because it might change as frequently as new technology is introduced. “We make up terms, and that’s fine for any new field, but the difficulty comes when we try to go outside to talk to our internal customers, which are the line managers and the executives who are asking us to build a course or to change this performance problem,” Booher said. “Acting as a performance consultant with them while using language that is unclear, it sounds like we’re puffing up or building importance around the job we do. One of the key things I’ve learned in 26 years of consulting with senior executives, the higher they get in an organization, the simpler the language. We tend to think we’re making our job more important by using esoteric language that no one else understands, but it has the opposite effect and the degree of understanding that we have about a topic or about how to improve a problem is evident by the simplicity with which we can explain it to the average line manager.”
Communication also must be consistent. Consistency does not simply mean sending the same message to your partners, suppliers, customers and employees. Consistency also refers to senior-level learning executive performance and the performance they demand from their staff. CLOs should be able to tell employees and managers at all levels what they need to do, but they also have to exhibit those same skills. “We’re in a communication field, and the one I hear a lot about is presentation skills,” Booher said. “We do all kinds from conflict resolutions to running effective meetings to listening skills. For example, take leadership skills. People can’t see you for 30 minutes and know whether or not you have leadership skills. Presentation skills—that’s pretty evident. They can hear you for five minutes and know whether you have that or not. You can hear a senior executive in an organization say, ‘I want you sales people to learn how to present. You are not getting through to our customers. You are not learning how to build a solid relationship. You need to build trust relationship.’ Yet that executive can have the worst interpersonal or presentation skills of anybody in the organization, and it’s apparent every time they do a webcast or call some kind of assembly. They send people to training and say, ‘You’ve got to improve your presentation skills.’ Yet a month later, people see that executive doing a webcast, boring them to death and talking in a monotone. It becomes a joke.
“Communication also must be credible. The credibility of the CLO or the person delivering the message can have a serious impact on how well that message is received, internalized and/or acted out. “You can hear them preach ethics: ‘We’re going to have our financials examined. These are our numbers for how we train our people, and everybody gets X number of hours of training a year,’ and then behind closed doors with a small group of six people they say, ‘This is what we’re really going to do. We’re not going to tell this partner this, and we may decide not to buy this chip from this company, even though this is a small supplier and if we take the contract to so and so and end it Dec. 1 they’re going to go under, but we’re going to do such and such.’ If (employees) heard them out in the public or in the larger employee group making opposite statements they’re destroying their credibility. Once someone has witnessed an off-stage lie, everything else is up for grabs.”
Booher said that another thing that affects a learning executive’s credibility is the number of approval levels that any one thing must go through. “We hear a lot of sermons now, and we have for the last 10 years, about pushing things down to the lowest level. Train people to do their jobs and then get out of their way,’ but credibility is not there when they’re still requiring eight approval signatures for anything over X number of dollars spent.
“If you go all the way back, we’ve gone from writing on cave walls to open-air markets to shopping malls all the way to chat rooms today to people blogging and saying what they want without restrictions,” Booher explained. “The one commonality is the human touch in communication. That’s always been there, and it’s still there. The same communication issues come up over and over, and typically downward communication dominates, lateral communication is almost non existent, and upward communication has to be encouraged. In the majority of cases people depend on technology and forget that human touch, and that’s when we get in trouble.”
