Communicating in the workplace is rarely a simple matter of giving and receiving information. The status of the communicators’ professional relationship to one another makes a difference (employer/employee, team member/team member, inside or outside a reporting structure, for examples) as does the urgency of the communication, the tone of its expression, the personal relationship of the communicators with one another and contexts and histories too numerous to mention. 

Messages sent are not always aligned with messages received. It’s a wonder that communication is ever entirely successful. Nevertheless, we can strive for better alignment even when we cannot expect to be perfectly attuned.

Consider:

Initiator: “I would like to see your draft before you submit it.”

Recipient: He thinks I am not a competent writer.

Initiator: “I really need your report by Friday.”

Recipient: He thinks I don’t reliably meet deadlines.

Initiator: “Have Bob and Sarah participated in planning the event?”

Recipient: “He thinks I try to do things myself without involving my team.”

In other words, the initiator thought she was dropping a pebble. The recipient felt the initiator was dropping a boulder. How are they to close the gap between the meaning that was intended and the meaning that was received? 

One common strategy to check for communication alignment is the frequent use of “right?” or “OK? “by the communication initiator. Though well intentioned, this method of checking for communication alignment is fundamentally rhetorical. Typically, with these words, the initiator is signaling a desire to move on. They convey little interest in slowing down to be sure the message is received as intended. This is particularly true if the initiator leaves little time between “right?”  or “OK?” and the next sentence.

Is there a better way for initiators to encourage an opportunity to discover whether the message sent is the message received? To send that signal, it would be helpful for the initiator to regularly use additional sentences that invite open exchange rather than expressions that close it off.

For example: 

The initiator could say: “I would like to see your draft before you submit it. Will that create any problems for you?”

The recipient might reply: “Is this a timing issue? Do you need more time to review my draft?”

The initiator might then say: “No, the deadline date is OK. I want to check that the draft includes certain phrases I like to use and does not include others that make me cringe. I like your writing style, but there are some “red flag” words that I want to avoid and some words that will help me with certain readers. Rather than give you a list, I’ll just need time to check for them.”

By suggesting a possible reason for the request and inviting the initiator to provide a fuller explanation, the recipient was able to set aside initial concerns and have a better sense of why the initiator made the request.

Similarly, for the other examples, the initiator could say: “I really need your report by Friday. I won’t be available over the weekend, and Monday is too close to my deadline. Will that timeline work for you?” A short rationale for the request should take darker speculation about implied criticism off the table.

In the third exchange the initiator of the exchange might say something like: “Have Bob and Sarah participated in planning the event? I want to be sure to acknowledge their work when I see them.”

Again, darker implications of the request are taken out of play. Of course, this approach assumes that the initiator really is intending to drop a pebble rather than a boulder. There will, no doubt, be situations in which the boulder is the intended communication. But that’s another story for another time.