A manager never operates in isolation and like a good leader, always keeps communicating his ideas to the people who work with him. The value of those ideas is ZERO if they cannot be transferred to the team members. I have come across many managers with a high managerial IQ who keep generating excellent ideas to solve whatever problems they face but are still unsuccessful as managers because they are not able to make their team understand what exactly these ideas are and how they need to be put into meaningful action.

The word "communication", in managerial parlance, is defined as a process by which an idea generated by the sender of the communication gets completely transferred and understood by the receiver of the message. It is vital for the receiver to understand the message and the responsibility of making this happen, rests solely on the sender of the communication. This definition, my dear readers, is more expansive than the mere English meaning of the word. Managers who go merely by the dictionary definition, therefore, often end up being ineffective.

Contrary to popular belief, mere expertise in a language does not ensure that the person would be a good communicator. If this was indeed true, most experts of literature and others with excellent power of expression would have automatically become excellent managers. This is not so. Language is just one cog in the many skills required for being a good communicator. Yes, the absence of any knowledge of a language, which is normally understood by the team, will definitely handicap the manager but then we are not considering such far-fetched situations, here. We will also be restricting ourselves to communication skills required between two human beings and not with an animal (all dog lovers like me would agree that communicating with your Alsatian is a different cup of tea and probably merits a separate article.)

Let me share with you some startling statistics, first. Leaving aside non-verbal communication for a moment (we will deal with it later), two human beings normally communicate with each other either by writing, reading or speaking. Based on this assumption, all our scholastic courses and syllabi were designed to teach us these skills during our formative years. A survey was done to assess the percentage contribution of each of these parameters, in the total communication gamut.

It was found that while "writing" accounted for only 9%, "reading" for another 16% and "speaking" for about 30%, a hitherto unconsidered factor called "listening" accounted for the balance 45%. Do you now know why all of us are bad communicators to begin with? They just don't teach us to "listen", in our schools or colleges. If most of us did not properly learn even the skills that were taught, how on earth can we be expected to be proficient in something which wasn't? This, then, is the beginning of the tragedy!!

Listening is very different from hearing. While the latter is the physical process of sound waves impinging on our eardrums in order to send messages to the brain, the former includes understanding of this message in the sense that it was meant to. A good test of whether you have just heard a message or "listened" to it is to try and remember if you can recall its content about 48 hours after you have indeed "listened" or else…. I am reminded of Gandhiji's famous words "It is not those who cannot see who are blind, it is those who would not see, inspite of having eyes who are". Let us identify factors which would make a manager "communication-savy" and hence efficient.

Understand that verbal communication is prone to a lot of corruption.

Amongst all modes of communication, the verbal mode is the most prone to be misunderstood by the receiver and hence all of us must guard ourselves against this. Remember, this includes telephone conversations as well, where we have the additional disadvantage of not being able to see the expressions on the face of the other person. In an organization or a situation where there are more than one tiers through which the verbal message has to flow until it reaches the person/s for whom it is meant, things become even worse. Experiments have shown that the corruption that can be introduced in a message when it flows down even three tiers (persons) could be as high as 40%. Imagine forty percent of the message getting mutilated or completely missed by the time it reaches the target person!! Alas, it is equally true that we cannot live without verbal communication.

So be extra careful while communicating verbally.

What cannot be cured has to be endured and tackled. A manager should remember that it is in his interest that the receiver gets the message with the least amount of corruption. Two practices that will ensure this largely are (a) Repeat the message; & (b) Motivate the receiver of the communication to ask questions. We must however remember that surveys have again proved that any repetition of more than two times is ineffective, so managers should not aspire to become parrots. Moreover, in many situations, the team members do not ask question on their own and then it becomes the managers' responsibility to pose them himself and answer them too, like in a one-act play. Someone has rightly said that managers also need to be consummate actors.

If the message is vital, commit it to paper.

Why flirt with disaster if it is a matter of importance?? It is recommended that written messages be resorted to when the contents are crucial. Use a fax machine or e-mail the missive. But don't think there are no dangers lurking round the corner in this supposedly more reliable mode of written communication.

Being effective in the written communication mode is an art.

Fortunately you can learn it if you have the diligence to do so. I have read many letters, which have left me more confused on the concerned issue , than I was before reading that letter. A good written communication must let the reader know, in the first few lines, what it is all about (and not in the fifth paragraph). Written managerial communication (I believe it even applies to love letters) should be as brief as possible, rarely exceeding a page and should end with specifically stating what is expected of the receiver. Is the receiver required to just file it or is he supposed to do something. A communication that does not have all these characteristics, is bound to be ineffective. That leads us to the "mother of all communications"…. the non-verbal mode.

Non-verbal communication needs to be interpreted intelligently.

This method rarely has to be taught. All of us have it in us. Remember how an infant cries for a feed, even without being able to speak and how it is able to recognize the touch of its parents. We seem to know a lot of this mode right from the cradle. A manager who is not an expert in recognizing the non verbal signals from his team, is only hastening his own progress towards his professional "grave". An important point to remember here is that whenever there is a contradiction between the verbal and the non-verbal signals emanating from a person, it is proved beyond doubt now, that it is the non-verbal signal which is taken to be authentic, by the receiver of this communication. So, next time don’t think you can hide your sense of utter disappointment from someone who has outscored you (even in a friendly badminton game) and whom you are verbally congratulating. Your body signals may be conveying exactly the opposite of what your words are trying to do, and the dumbest of them will understand this.

So dear readers, if communication is so important not only to managers but in every sphere of our life, what has prevented us from teaching the basics of "good listening" and the "art of reading body signals", to our children in school. Wouldn't that be an effective compliment to the other three skills (reading, writing & speaking) that we already teach?? Why don’t we force our educators to bring about this change in the syllabus to ensure that we produce "better taught" communicators? Instead of spending time and money on teaching these skills to grown-ups when their receptivity has already dimmed, let us really catch them young and ensure that they are at least exposed to these vital skills which will be useful to them throughout their adult lives. Otherwise we are destined to have an increasing number of poor managers and worse, inadequate human beings in our midst.

Don’t throw technical jargon at your customer.

"Mr. Prakash Shesh, the author, has done his MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad after his Masters in Physics from I.I.T. New Delhi. You may send your feedback to him by choosing an option at the top right corner of this page."