We can probably all agree that communication is a fundamental aspect of organizational practice and performance. At the same time, it is important not to view this simply as an act of message-passing from those who are formally in charge, and supposedly “in the know”, to other participants.
However well-crafted, information-rich, and skilfully presented such messages might be, these communicate nothing. Instead, they serve as an invitation for those on the receiving end to communicate amongst themselves. And this is something that they do informally, in small-group and one-to-one interactions; seeking to make sense of what they’ve heard and deciding how, if at all, they’re going to respond. Communication takes place only in real-world; U ‘n I interactions - with all of the informality, messiness and ‘hidden agendas’, etc. that these entail. And this applies equally well, of course, to those in formal management roles as it does to everyone else.
For managers, then, the conversations are the work.
In their formal roles, the communications task for managers (aided in some aspects, perhaps, by “internal comms” specialists) is three-fold:
- First, to tune-in to those themes around which people are informally coalescing and which are organizing their everyday interactions.
- Secondly, to tap into key elements of the informal conversational networks, through which people are making sense of what’s going on and deciding how to act; seeking, where necessary, to influence the patterning and content of those interactions (including, where relevant, their own!) in organizationally beneficial ways.
- Thirdly, as they go about their day-to-day activities, to pay attention to their own words and actions; recognizing that everything that they say and do - as well as everything that they don’t say and don’t do - ‘sends messages’ to people about what’s important, how they should act, and so on. Here again, though, it’s those who observe their words and actions, not the managers themselves, who decide what these mean; doing so in the course of their conversations with others.
Finally, as I mentioned in an earlier post, conversation does not simply occur about organization; it is performative. That is to say, organization is enacted in the ongoing process of people’s in-the-moment conversational interactions. Or, to put it another way, we talk organization into existence.
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