The Importance of Effective Business Communication

For almost a decade I was part of a CEO group named Vistage.  In addition to the great relationships that I established with the CEO’s in my group, and in the USA, we had amazing speakers come in each month to meet with us on a variety of topics.  I recall one speaker who spoke of something that doesn’t get the attention that it needs in business… effective communication.  Many times leaders believe their employees are clear on what is asked of them, but that is not always the case.  From first hand experience, I have had my team members tell me after the fact that what I wanted was not communicated effectively, and therefore contributed to the reasoning as to the end result. But by Changing Your Lens, regarding how you communicate with your employees, you can actually become a more effective leader as well.

Back to the Vistage speaker, He began by separating the groups into 3 sections and instructed us to make a straight line.  In a very short time, each group was lined up in a perfectly straight line. Next he asked us to “create the number 4”.  There was no additional instruction, only those four words.  Immediately one of the members in my group said, “let’s just draw the number 4 on a sheet of paper”.  Although this sounded easy, one of the other members said “which kind of 4”? Over the next several minutes we went through options of drawing a traditional 4 (with the triangle), the other frequently used style of making a 4, a roman numeral 4, and even using our bodies to create the number 4.  It was clear nobody in the room had received what he had just communicated to us. Keep this example in mind the next time you ask something of your team member and be sure you effectively communicate what you want done.

An important part of effective communication is understanding the words are the least important component compared to your body language and tone in which you are speaking. The most cited study of the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages in communication is one by professor Albert Mehrabian commonly known as the 7-38-55 Rule.  This states that your words compromise a mere 7%, whereas your tone represents 38% and your body language represents a staggering 55%. 

Now this study has its critics, but it cannot be argued that today “what you say in business, certainly is not as important as how you say it.”