If you’ve known me for 5 minutes, you’ll know I like to talk! It’s how I learn, process information, and communicate most clearly. But I know that sometimes it’s important to distill information into text or video or a recording of some kind. People need to be able to refer to what you’ve said, read it again, absorb it, and internalize it. That’s why we document so much stuff as an organization: vision, strategy, policies, testimonials.

In our modern world, we can become so overwhelmed with information, some of it is useful, some is inspiring and some is just funny! It is coming at us from all sources – WhatsApp, social media, team chats, emails! It can be hard to stay on top of it and filter it for the information we need to retain. A lot can just wash over us; chats between colleagues or social media scrolling. So how do we catch and absorb the information that is important to us? How do we as leadership ensure that our team internalizes the key communication that we’re sharing?

Effective communication is:

– Clear
– Comprehensive
– Concise
– Continuous (well, repeated regularly, but I wanted another C 😉)

How often do you talk about/write about/share the vision or the strategy of your organization with your team? We create it, share the document, put it on the website, and assume everyone has internalized it into their everyday program implementation. To be effective, we need to regularly remind people of the important stuff, and share ways that it has been incorporated into our daily life, and what it means to us. Otherwise whatever you’ve learnt just becomes interesting information that washes over you and changes nothing.

I’ll talk about the other C’s in the next blog post. In the meantime, please share stories with us of how something you communicated made a difference or went horribly wrong!