Successful Communications

There is no doubt that communications is the most influencing aspect in our lives. Via good communications, we achieve peace , we have good families and we achieve success at work. On the contrary, few words in bad communications lead to war, unstable families and failing business.

The question is, how do we define good communications? In another way, what makes communications good?

I have worked on a formula that I tested during one of my project on all employees, contractors, clients and even family . Results have been excellent until now.

The formula is to have all communications filtered through these four criteria before it's said or written:

1. PreciseHaving all communications being filtered to be precise, we have stopped all generalizing and made everyone focused on the real topics. Everyone stopped saying regular comments like "My work is bad", "The project is failing", "I don't like working with that department", etc. Because it might be one thing that is not good about the work, or one task of the project that is not rectified, or a specific person has a specific characteristic that is not good rather than the whole department. Having understood this, we started pointing fingers at the problems directly, or even specific success criteria in other places to be copied to ours.

2. ShortYou will notice that all the four criteria of successful communications are indirectly making communications shorter where they all stop needless talks. However, this criteria is aiming directly to the point where all communications should be short. This criteria has saved a lot of our time at a period of time that we needed every second. For example, rather than sending an e-mail of one page and take the time to think about it and type it, it was sent in few lines. This also reduces the time required to read it by all recipients. Rather than having an hour meeting just because we agreed for an hour, we reduced it to the time really required for the meetings. Rather than giving lots of examples in here, I'll just cut it short and assume you got the idea ;) Having implemented this condition, it allowed us to have enough time to focus on our main tasks.

3. QuickYes, the communication might be short but slow. For example, talking a little faster, typing a little faster, having quick phone calls rather than spending the time typing e-mails, taking all related documents for a discussion and being ready rather than extending discussions without valid information or having quick studied decisions; have all increased the time we can have to perform our tasks and avoided needless talks.

4. PositiveAnd this was the most important of all above. Having positive communications allowed people to come with solutions rather than problems, stop nagging almost about everything: weather, life, work, car, etc., and also allowed people to assist each other. For example, if I had a person complaining about another person, I explain to him this is negative communications which will either push me to share you my negative feelings about the same person, or at least will affect my feelings negatively against the situation or people. After explaining the impact of negative communications, I ask the same person to repeat the statement positively. WOW! Try asking someone talking negatively to repeat the same positively in five different ways, and you will be amazed of the feelings, solutions, enhancements, assistance and other good results that everyone can gain. For example, people used to see problems and rather than reporting seeing a problem done by others, they say we found a problem, resolved it and have reported the same to avoid happening again.

I'm endless with the example that I have experienced in a period of six months with my team where everyone was influencing all the surroundings, until we got about 200 precise, short, quick and positive communicators. This is the number that I, at least, was aware of. I remember while reporting a problem, I asked a supplier to resolve it saying "There is an issue.." and his response was "Issue is a negative word". I responded "You are right, there is a challenge ... ".

I urge everyone to do a test for one day not to say or accept communications other than being filtered through these criteria, and let me know your feedback.