Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

How communication teams can make an effort to understand … one another

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Yesterday I had the best time, talking with about 30 communication pros at the software firm Splunk, about what people like us can bring to bear in our work relationships, in our communities, in our troubled country. It is always freshly moving to share these ideas with other writers, and thrilling to hope that my being there is helping them remember the highest purposes of their work—as individuals, and as a group.

I’ve had a number of these conversations this summer, and I expect to be having more of them in the foreseeable future, as leaders of communication teams seek to rally their folks—whether for a return to the office, a new post-COVID refresh or a whole rethinking of the communication mission.

Here’s the discussion guide that I provide. If you think your team could benefit from a shared reading, and a discussion like this, I’ll make the time to do it. And if past is prologue, I’ll enjoy every minute. Email Benjamine Knight about honorarium and availability: psacoo@vsotd.com.

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From: David Murray

To: Team Leader

Re. How Can You Use An Effort to Understand to Find a Shared Communication Philosophy?

I wrote my book based on a life surrounded by professional communicators. 

How can your team draw on all that wisdom—and combine it with their own collected wisdom—to create a shared understanding, about what communication is, what it isn’t, how it works and what it might achieve?

You’ll know that much better than I. After reading the book with your team in mind, you should ask me any question you think we ought to discuss, up to and including any points of contention! I do not consider my book gospel—especially in a group of thoughtful communicators in their own right.

So the questions I put down here are meant only to be a loose guide to the sort of communication we mighthave. You and your team should absolutely determine the conversation we will have. The more the questions come from you and your people and the fewer from my own fevered brain, the better the conversation will be.

The most obviously relevant sections to your folks—and the sections from which you might select all or some essays to assign—are sections Two and Three, which focus specifically on leadership communication.

Possible questions:

1. Authenticity and storytelling are sacred concepts in corporate communications these days. You claim corporate communicators have sometimes misused them. Can we talk about that?

2. At one point on the book, you question the concept of “strategic communication,” and you question whether communication can lead to measurable results. What can you possibly mean by that?

3. In an essay on internal communication, you take us back to a 19th century furniture shop, and suggest that we should help our employees understand our business and marketplace, and our leadership, the way those ancient workers knew theirs. Do you think modern employees truly want that kind of understanding, even if we could manage to give it to them?

4. You question the assumption that what audiences of our communication are mostly concerned with is, “What’s in It for Me.” Well, what are they mostly concerned with?

5. At one point in the book, you say that a person (or a company) communicates not, primarily, by words, but by consistent actions and consistent inactions. Another section is titled, “Communication Is Action!” Let’s talk about the relationship between words and deeds, in leadership communication.

6. In the media interviews about the book, you’ve talked about this concept of “imaginative listening.” Your book is called An Effort to Understand. Are you trying to tell us we don’t listen to each other carefully enough? Because we sure feel like we do.

7. In the introduction you ask your readers to join you on a “near-spiritual” movement in communication in our society. What is the highest purpose of communication, and what could happen if we all came to share it? 

Are you working in an industry, or a racket?

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Nelson Algren wrote about a guy who made money up and down Chicago's Division Street by finding lost dogs and collecting rewards. Sounds pretty labor intensive until you understand that he was the one who stole the dogs in the first place.

Is that what your job seems like sometimes? Stealin' dogs and gettin' paid to find 'em?

Well, it shouldn't feel that way all the time. Especially if it's a job like PR or communication, that don't pay too good. Doin' a job like that, you ought to feel like you're doin' some good in the world.

What's the useful social purpose of PR? A couple Fridays ago, Shel Holtz, PR professor Bill Sledzik and I were kicking it all around in Sledzik's office at Kent State University.

As is my annoying habit, I was bemoaning the dearth of philosophical, moral and intellectual thinkers in the communication business these days. When I was a boy, I said, there were giants in this industry: practitioners like the late Chester Burger and Mike Emanuel, writers like Roger D'Aprix and the late Pat Jackson, who helped communicators understand the ideal and the real function of their work in a healthy society.

That's kind of important. Because without an independent sense of your purpose, all you'll ever be is a tool for the goon you're working for this week.

Shel could tell I was just beginning to get cranked up, and he smiled patiently and shifted his weight, as choir members do when being preached to.

Sledzik interrupted me by quoting Jackson on the overarching purpose of our work: "Public relations enables individuals to participate in decisions that affect their lives."

Oh. Right. Well. As long as we're all clear on that, then I guess we don't need any more philosophers.

The problem is we're not all clear on that. And as a matter of fact, the concept hasn't occurred to many of us.

So if that's not what you're doing in this world—and PR is not what I'm doing; I'm just a humble storyteller, which is an old and honorable trade, but only as moral as the storyteller's own heart—what will you tell your maker or your children when they ask what exactly you did for your fellow human beings on this earth?

Cuz I'm afraid stealing dogs and collecting rewards is going to sound a little silly.

People know more than we think; in fact, they know everything

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I have a theory about communication that says, “Everybody already knows everything.”

The theory is called, “The Everybody-Already-Knows-Everything Theory of Communication.”

Born out of observations of interpersonal communication, the theory is only slightly less applicable to employee communication. It goes like this:

Based on the hundreds and thousands of unwitting hints and omissions, odd looks and facial reactions, words and silences, patterns of presence and absence over time, people come to know everything they need to know about their family, their friends, and yes, even their company.

That's right, everything.

To illustrate my theory, I share the instance that brought me to it.

Some years ago, a very close family member—someone I have known since I was small—broke up with a guy she’d been dating for years. I’d always been friendly to the guy—he was boring and self-pitying, but he treated her well and loved her—but I told her I was supportive of the breakup, because I thought she could do much better. “Why didn’t you tell me that six months ago?” she said. “I would have broken up with him then.”

And I thought: You’ve known me all my life. By now you know what it looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like when I am talking to someone who I admire, and also what it looks, sounds and feels like when I’m being polite to someone who bores me, who makes me uncomfortable, who makes me nervous, who makes me sad. I don’t need to tell you what I think of your boyfriend; you already know. The only question is whether you’re going to acknowledge it, and when.

So clear was that to me that I began to apply it to other situations where people have frequent contact with one another over a period of months or years, and my Everybody-Already-Knows-Everything Theory of Communication began to form.

Because of a thousand signals, a friend knows when he’s second-fiddle, a colleague knows a real compliment from a political kudos, a direct report knows you know when he's slacking, a boss knows if you think she's dumb, and eventually, the whole of the employee population knows whether management is in touch or out of touch, sympathetic or downright creepy.

This is why communication is usually not earth-shattering to people
who, after all, had more than an inkling in the first place.

It is why sincere, thoughtful communication—no matter how provocative—is usually a comfort and often a relief from
the constant tension of knowledge without permission to acknowledge.

If you accept this theory—(it goes down easier as the People-Know-More-Than-We-Think Theory of Communication)—the implication is not that communication is unnecessary, or that it is a formality.

It means our essential responsibility as personal and organizational communicators is not to spoon out information slowly to babies with weak digestion systems. Rather, it’s to try desperately to keep up, verbally, with the massive flow of unvarnished truth that our behavior is sending, and that our family, friends and colleagues are receiving every day.