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Communication in all its forms should be among any leader’s top priorities. Jack Kennedy worked overtime during the Cuban Missile Crisis to make sure people understood their orders because, as he put it. “There’s always some guy who doesn’t get the word.” Only one?
One sure way not to get the word is when leaders fail to understand that people can take things literally - far too literally. Some employees, consumers, voters, and followers can handle abstraction, subtlety, irony, and indirectness, but many others cannot. The best leaders don’t just assume people understand correctly - or at all - what they say and mean.
Instead, they are explicit and direct in communicating objectives, strategy, change, and direction. They avoid abstraction. They ask good, clarifying questions. They probe. They repeat. And they certainly don’t make assumptions that people hear, understand, and internalize their messages let alone act on them.
Effective leaders also limit the use of historical, cultural, or sports references, analogies, and metaphors that can elude younger generations. Yes, we are all responsible for knowing history that predates us but, regrettably, that generally doesn’t seem to be the case. A college student once said to me that she didn’t know anything about the Vietnam War because she wasn’t alive when it happened. God help us.
Just because you are good at abstraction, irony, or pithy references doesn’t mean others will get it. I recall the story of a boss in his late 50s who once made reference to Johnny Carson’s fortune-telling Carnac character when his team asked a question about the organization’s future. Carnac? Few people knew who Carson was, let alone the Carnac gag. I was told one person later reported that the boss was talking about CarMax and that she had no idea why.
Just ask Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of The Pet Shop Boys about people taking things literally. Of course, interpreting artists' intentions is always a tricky business, let along interpreting their interpreters. Most fans understood, however, that The Pet Shop Boys' 1986 hit “West End Girls” spoke about poverty and the difficulties of life across many London communities in the 1970s and ‘80s. The meaning of other songs could be more elusive to some people. Their 1987 tune “It’s a Sin” was reportedly praised by the Salvation Army for taking sin seriously. The song was instead a reflection by Tennant on his Catholic school education where he was taught, he felt, that most everything was a sin.
So too with the 1986 number “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money).” The duo was criticizing selfishness and the excesses of capitalism. Some people believed, however, that the song was celebrating greed and materialism and danced to it feverishly. And, similarly, the 1987 entry “Shopping" became an ode to consumerism for some people. Actually, Tennant and Lowe were speaking to how businesses were privatizing so many key government services and, in general, shopping everyone as purchasing targets. People took - or chose to take - the song at face value.
It's been reported that Tennant and Lowe sometimes bristled at being thought of largely as ironists. That's understandable since being branded in this manner gets in the way of deeply meaningful songs that are not meant to be ironic. These guys are terrific artists. They are free to use as much or as little irony and subtlety as they wish. That’s part of the art form.
From the perspective of communications effectiveness in organizations, however, it is essential to speak and write in ways that are explicit and direct. Otherwise, you’ll leave people Shopping for meaning and wasting Opportunities, and that would be a Sin.
Image courtesy of NPR.