Question

1.Think of an occasion when you faced a miscommunication problem. What do you think caused the problem? How do you think it should have been handled better?

2.Report examples of “mixed signals” you have received (or sent). How can you reduce the potential for misunderstanding and misperception as you communicate with others?

3. What makes you want to say to someone, “You’re not listening!”?

Answer 1

1. Communication is an essential part of daily interaction and work activities. Without effective communication, the message to be passed to the other members will not be clearly understood. Such issues can cause high tension, lack of clarity in sharing information and delay in action that needs to be taken. Miscommunication is a problem that can be avoided if the teams and personnel are willing to put adequate efforts. I can think back to an occasion where I reacted differently from how I should have. The incident occurred when my manager asked me to prepare a report and share it to consultants. The consultants had created a format for tracking project status. The fields of tracking were – Concept stage, functional stage, technical stage, build stage and deployed stage. This is a typical SDLC mechanism. They mistook all projects as software projects while we had few projects where the end output were whitepapers. When my manager asked me to fill the details, I checked with consultant on what they actually wanted. I understood and prepared the report accordingly. They had explained to me since whitepaper projects are basically study projects only concept stage would be present, since there is no deployment or development attached to it. We also mentioned it clearly in the status column. But someone in their team overlooked it and did the analysis considering all projects. Ideally the study projects should have been left out of deployment projects but it did not happen. the reports were shared to higher leadership but before the issue could escalate the problem was identified and solved.

The major cause of the problem was communication barriers. The person who prepared the report format did not communicate effectively in regards to what was actually required. Then we could not understand the format and there was miscommunication in regards to the filled report. There was again miscommunication between us and the consultants where we could not effectively communicate that study projects were also part of the list. All this could have been easily avoided if the entire team was present in one single room or call to discuss what was needed and how the data can be analyzed.

2. There are cases of mixed messages which can come out in communication. A mixed message (or double message) can be caused a person saying something and doing something different. It can also occur that a person who was doing something for a long time is doing something entirely new without any prior notice. I can relate to this incident. One of the leaders at my organization was used to analyzing report in a certain manner and we had used the same format multiple time. But one time he changed his approach and wanted it in entirely different format. He send a mail saying few things needed to be changed but when we presented the new report he was not happy with it. But he send a mail saying the new report to be published. We were confused as to what happened since he had rejected it earlier. So in order to clarify this we had a detailed discussion on this with him. He shared his concerns and recommendations. All we had to get the message was have a discussion with him to clarify the issue. In case of mixed signals it is always better to have a discussion with the stakeholder and clarify the messages.

3. There can be cases when the person in front may not be able to understand the topics or issues in entirety. It can also happen that in spite of discussing the same points multiple times the same doubt could be repeated. In such case I may be prompted to say that other person is not listening. I might say it but it will not project him as a bad listener since it would discourage him completely.