Minimizing Back-and-Forth Communication for Better Career Growth
Action-result industries are filled with people wired for action, working in a business model driven by a schedule balanced with quality and budget. A good share of projects over budget is due to people taking action without focusing on the result they wish for versus the result they get by having to go back to go forward, which affects the budget and time.
Does it bother you when you have to go back and forth for information to either schedule an appointment with multiple parties or arrive at a decision on a project agreeable to all parties to move forward?
How can you take ownership to improve the amount of back-and-forth communication in your world?
Three ways are to:
- offer choices,
- offer solutions, and
- provide all the necessary backup information to allow for an informed decision.
Offer Choices and Solutions to Streamline Communication in the Workplace
Let’s Start with Offering Choices
When trying to coordinate a meeting between two or more parties, offer at least two options—three is better. Make sure the options are not just the same day unless the meeting must happen right away, and try not to make the choices too specific: “Does Wednesday the 1st before noon, Friday the 3rd after 1:00 p.m., or Monday the 6th anytime work for you to do a meeting?” This type of choice delivery in your communication allows a response of, “Friday 2:00 p.m. or anytime Monday works for me.” You can then send a confirmation easily, and scheduling will be complete.
When unsure of a meeting location, offer at least two choices: “Do you prefer to meet at your office or the Downtown Café?” The response will typically be one of your options or lead them to be specific as to the location they want to meet. They can also answer in one word, as dominant personalities often do.
Tight schedules among the parties fill up quickly, which makes presenting choices even more important; otherwise, you could go back and forth quite a few times to find a respective opening because the one open slot has quickly gone.
Offering Solutions Prevents Back-and-Forth Communication
If you offer a solution to a proposed design change, schedule conflict, budget overage, etc., you give the other party a platform to either agree with or comment on, and the parties can arrive at the solution or answer without asking back-and-forth questions. They can focus on the items that will get to mutual buy-in versus going through all the questions for a proposed solution.
Solutions also help the people you communicate with who are under very tight schedules and may not readily know the answer. We often assume it is because they are not qualified, whereas it could be many underlying reasons, including political, on their end. What matters is getting the answers you need to do your job effectively.
Provide Comprehensive Backup Information for Informed Decision-Making
Always Provide Sufficient Backup Information
Why? Remember in school when your teacher wanted to see the worksheet showing how you arrived at the answer? You might have thought it was to make sure you didn’t cheat. More often than not, the worksheet was to see your thought process and make sure that how you derived the answer would line up with the next lesson where you had to add another component.
Obtaining solutions in business works much the same way. A proposed solution might work for the current problem, but the way you target the solution could open a whole new set of problems or costs moving forward. Providing backup not only includes credibility but also provides a pathway through how the answer was derived, where a step or piece can be easily tweaked versus the whole proposed solution scrapped, putting you back at square one.
Learn from a Table Tennis Doubles Marathon to Improve Your Communication
According to the Guinness World Records the longest table tennis doubles marathon is 101 hours, 1 minute, and 11 seconds, by Lance, Phil, and Mark Warren, and Bill Weir (all USA) in Sacramento, California, from April 9 to 13, 1979. General business decisions can seem to go back and forth for that long, although the result is not a prize but a distressed project and severed relationships.
You can make the difference!
Offer choices, offer solutions, and provide backup information. You will win respect—and the esteem that comes with success—if you save the back and forth for Ping-Pong, not email or communication.
To learn more about effective communication, download or hardcopy-order John Maxwell’s book Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently.
Solutions for You,
Suzanne Breistol
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