Lost in Translation
The 5 C’s of a Conscious Company Culture: Communication
My husband Víctor is from Venezuela. We have a fun story of how we met: It was 2017 and I decided to improve my Spanish. I enrolled in an online school where the professors were native Spanish speakers, mostly from Venezuela. Víctor was my professor. We got to know each other virtually, while he was still living in Venezuela. Eventually he came to visit me in Texas and the rest, as they say, is history.
I’m still learning Spanish, which sometimes leads to miscommunication between us. More often than not, Víctor has to switch to English to help me understand what he’s communicating to me. We also experience cultural differences, and sometimes things get lost in translation. But while it can cause challenges for us, I enjoy seeing things from Víctor’s perspective because every day I learn new things from him and his unique experience of the world that is so different from mine.
Learning Spanish showed me just how much we take for granted communication. I noticed that I often slur my words in English when I’m talking fast. Other native English speakers can understand, but when I’m speaking with non-native speakers, they usually give me a puzzled look, indicating their lack of comprehension.
The same happens in the workplace, even if we all speak the same language. The level of communication and understanding indicates the cultural health of an organization. Whether it’s a misunderstanding of what a colleague requested of you, or misinterpreting their behavior, communication is one of the 5 C’s of a conscious company culture.
For each of the 5 C’s, there is a question you can use to rate you and your team. For Communication, the question is, “Does your team understand and collaborate with each other?”
Rate your Communication on a scale of 1-10; 1 being not at all, 10 being absolutely. You can also ask team members to offer their own rating of Communication. If you or your team rates your level of Communication below a 10, there is opportunity to invest in expressing more care for your staff.
World-famous coach Tony Robbins once observed, “To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.”
So often in coaching sessions, clients share how much they struggle with this communication challenge. As Robbins noted, they have one way of perceiving the world, and therefore cannot communicate effectively with their manager, peers, or direct reports because they cannot understand their unique perspectives.
This requires us to increase our conscious awareness of our perspective and how it could prevent us from truly understanding and communicating with others. Once a client understands how their perspective or style of communication is distinct from a colleague, they can engage in curiosity and empathy for better communication and collaboration.
To improve your team’s communication, focus on improving (or starting) the following:
Shared Language (a shared lexicon of terms)
Each of the items above links to a resource to help you increase communication for your team. There are some important themes in this list: improving each person’s ability to actually listen to each other on more than a superficial level, truly understanding each other (curiosity and empathy are key here), tools that help us better connect with each other as humans, and creating consistent opportunities to communicate directly.
Joel Trammell, founder of the Manager 360 program, likes to share that he uses the User Manual and DiSC assessment to help him and his team better understand each other. For example, Joel is a brief communicator. He’ll respond to a paragraphs-long email with a one-word reply, which makes some employees feel like he’s angry or doesn’t care.
When Joel created his User Manual to help his team understand his communication and leadership style, it fostered better communication between him and his team members. They realized he’s not irritated with them in his short replies, he’s just concise in his communication. That’s why personality assessments and a User Manual are like a shortcut to learning how to effectively communicate and engage with colleagues.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that a colleague is just a human being. We get so used to impersonal email exchanges, or purely transactional interactions, that we neglect to build relationship with them. I’ve noticed that spending time with colleagues in person in a casual setting increases empathy, builds the team sense of camaraderie, and help us all have more fun together. That’s why team building also helps us better communicate and show care for our teammates.
Each of us comes to the workplace with our own unique way of viewing the world. Sometimes our attempts to communicate with and understand each other’s perspectives gets lost in our own ways of translating what’s going on around us. But when we prioritize communication and truly understanding each other, we help create a healthier, more conscious culture.
Work happy. Live happy. BE happy.
Meredith
The way we work and build teams is rapidly changing. Leaders often feel unprepared to navigate the transition. As a conscious leadership coach, consultant, and communicator, Meredith helps leaders and their teams create new ways of working and relating so they can prepare for the future by consciously co-creating it.
Contact her to develop your conscious leadership and transform your organization into the workplace of the future.
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