Are Your Leaders Struggling with These Communication Breakdowns? [Podcast]

Are Your Leaders Struggling with These Communication Breakdowns? [Podcast]

Hi there! I’m Jackie Mueckenheim, Senior Trainer & Consultant at ERC. I have been working with professionals for many years on how to improve their communication, leadership and management development performance. I love helping them build and strengthen these skills.

Most leaders within an organization don’t even realize they are struggling with communicating to their team. When I look at leaders and I see them struggling, it doesn’t seem to matter which industry they are in, they all struggle with the same things:

Behavior most leaders struggle with

What it all boils down to is time; it all takes time. All of the things listed above take effort and focus, and it’s not that leaders don’t value it, because they do. They have good, positive attitudes and want to do what’s best for themselves and their organization, and their teams. But when push comes to shove, everybody is expected to do more with less and less, all the time.

Employees feel that stress themselves, but they sometimes don’t stop and think about the stress that their senior leaders or their middle managers have. They are also pressed for time. I think what it comes down to is their people side of their role gets put on the back burner to the task side of their role. It’s really just a lack of time.

Common challenges leaders face today

Leaders today face issues surrounding multi-generational work forces, respect, inclusivity and diversity, understanding, and communicating. Also, I think sometimes leaders today struggle with the idea that those focus areas are about the soft skills of their job versus the hard skills, like budgeting, forecasting and strategic planning.

But let’s face it, if the people side of their jobs and leadership don’t show up, well then there won’t be a company to build a strategic plan around, and you won’t have an organization that requires a budget.

They go hand in hand and that’s why when I am talking about training and development and really enhancing your leadership style, I don’t really differentiate between soft skills and hard skills. I think you have to have both to be a successful leader.

Common reasons communication breaks down in the work place

You need true and meaningful communication. You can’t allow it to break down or become ineffective to get in the way of being successful, because that takes focus and energy. Whether it’s between peers, colleagues, coworkers, management teams and their individual contributors, or within senior management teams, everyone needs time.

A breakdown in communication happens when we don’t know people, when we don’t understand them and when we all have different ways we speak and act.

But I think intrinsically, they happen and that’s because we don’t know people well enough. Let’s face it, if you don’t have a good working relationship with someone and you have a communication breakdown, you are more able to quickly repair it because you know one another.

You can quickly identify the issues that are getting in the way…It is not about judgment, or attacks or labels…It is just about simply saying “hey, we disagree on this or we haven’t been communicating about this, so let’s sit down and figure this out.”

It’s when we don’t have relationships with people and have to spend the time focusing on how we communicate, not with just what we say, but how we say it, and who we are talking with in the moment. If we can focus on that, then we can have far more successful organizations.

When I am training at a workshop with leadership groups, I am often asked to tell them what the difference is between talking to other people and talking with other people.

  • Talking to is one direction, it is not rapport or relationship building, it’s just telling.
  • Talking with people means even if you don’t agree with what they are saying, or there is a disciplinary or performance issue, you deserve to be heard and I deserve to be listened to. In the end, you build better relationships and better rapport. And the long term result is you will have fewer breakdowns in communication because you actually know one another.  

As a leader, you know once you see a breakdown in communication, you can’t let it continue to happen. A leadership expectation is that you have to build bridges and not divides. I think one of the most important things you can do when communication breaks down is to assess your own feelings about it, assess your own approach and your own roll on how it broke down.

Communication rarely breaks down because only one person was involved. It is a cooperative process, rather than trying to assume what the other person is thinking or coming from, or what their perspective is.

The biggest don’ts when it comes to respecting others’ differences in the workplace

Recognizing differences and being able to laugh with other people about it. Whether the difference is related to culture, or ethnicity or religion or gender or generation or age.

Let’s face it, one of the things that can help us build relationships with other people is laughter- so we laugh. But one of the things that happens however, is sometimes we take it too far. They take it beyond laughing and we will tell jokes about it or highlight the differences all the time, and over time it can feel personal and not respectful.

Well, you have to be really careful because what will happen is there comes a day where you will tell a joke that really isn’t funny to the person that is different then you and all of a sudden you’re not laughing together and you have set up a wall.

Don’t joke too much about it, recognize it, talk about it, value and respect it. Be comfortable with it and embrace it, but be sure everyone keeps respect and sincerity as part of it, because the difference can yes, bring you together, but that difference can also divide you if you are not careful.  Bottom line is to be aware of it and respect it.

ERC offers leadership development programs for all experience levels.

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