Analysis of "Strategic Organiztional Communication" (part 3)

Seeing Connections: The Importance of Systems Thinking
by
Charles Lamson

People Express Airlines was an amazing success story that turned into a spectacular failure. It provided low-cost and high-quality air service on the East Coast throughout the early 1980s and grew to be the nation's fifth largest air carrier. It had a reputation as a corporate pioneer, based in part on its emphasis on its people. The airline had a number of innovative human resource policies, such as job rotation, team management, employee stock ownership, and a flat hierarchy, that have since been widely adopted. These innovations kept its employees happy and committed to the organization and enabled the airline to offer excellent low-cost service. The airline grew rapidly and took over Frontier Airlines to help provide the capacity it needed to continue growing.

Despite its enviable position, People Express ran into trouble. Demand for the airline's flights far outstripped the available seats, and the overload resulted in delays and passenger complaints. Service on the flights deteriorated and its customers left in droves. By 1986 the airline had lost over $130 million and was rescued in a buyout by Texas Air Corporation.

At the time many theories were advanced to explain People Express's collapse. Some commentators traced the problems to a human resource policy that was too lenient. Others argued that the takeover of Frontier had been poorly planned and left the company strapped for cash, so that when its debtors called in loans it was unable to pay them.

However, these accounts do not give much insight into how the troubles at People Express developed. It is always easy to identify causes of an organization's problems from the outside, but to really understand the situation, it is important to consider the processes that created and worsened the problems.

People express crashed and burned because of a complex system of factors. The first of the low--fare airlines, People Express introduced an innovative concept - low price, no frills and high-quality air service. It gained a reputation that led to an increasing number of new customers. In its early days People Express's innovative human resource practices and employee stock ownership kept moral high and motivated its employees to work hard to maintain excellent service levels. However, as the number of customers rose, there were not enough staff to handle them, and current employees were overworked. Bringing more employees into the firm was slowed by its progressive human resource practices, which required lengthy training and development of new employees.

At the same time, demand for booking continued to increase, because reports in the media and by word of mouth continued to tout the airline as a great bargain. This drove the price of People Express's stock higher, to more than $20 a share. As a result, many of People Express's employees were wealthy. Though they were fatigued, they were happy and positively motivated.

Nevertheless, the crush of new passengers led to increasing customer complaints about service problems, ticketing delays, overbooked flights and overworked employees. The overloaded staff had few resources with which to address these problems. As problems persisted, customers began turning to other airlines. The resulting decreased revenues led to a fall in the stock price. Once employees realized that their hard work was not going to be rewarded by stock appreciation, their motivation began to shrink. There was a further decline in service quality and still more customers gave their business to other airlines, which further worsened the bottom line. Paradoxically, the very human resource plans that had originally made People Express distinctive eventually brought about lower motivation and declining service.

Increasing the size of its fleet by acquiring Frontier Airlines promised to help address the airline's capacity problems and offered an opportunity to improve service, but implementing the progressive human relations policy in Frontier meant a delay in using the new capacity, because Frontier's employees needed to be trained. Service quality continued to erode, and the new capacity really just added to the problem, because employees were overworked and saw little reward from working still harder. The end result of this complex set of processes was a worsening spiral that led to the ultimate demise of the airline.

People Express did not necessarily have to fail. Studies of People Express and similar airlines showed that it could have turned these negative processes around by either raising ticket prices by 25 percent or maintaining its high level of service, if it had acted soon enough. However, by the time the downward spiral developed momentum, raising ticket prices would have driven the airline's most loyal customers away, and maintaining high levels of service is difficult with a demoralized and overworked staff. These measures should have been enacted well before the spiral worsened.

People Express failed because of a lack of systems thinking. Its managers should have realized that if rising stock prices made workers happy and motivated and falling stock prices might do the opposite, they should have recognized that growing as fast as the company did would stress service quality. Managers should have known that in the face of demand a slight increase in ticket prices would not have been a problem, and might have reduced customer overload somewhat, giving a window of time in which to renew service quality. Employees should have recognized that they were the key to turning the airline around and causing stock prices to rise. Unfortunately, neither the employees nor the managers were able to see these things. Instead they stayed focused on their immediate jobs, assuming that what worked in the past would work in the future. They were not able to recognize the forces that ended up driving People Express out of business.

Systems thinking does not come naturally. Several tendencies prevent us from seeing the system. Most of us have been taught to break things into manageable parts, to focus on a single problem and look for its cause. This is useful in some cases, because it enables us to act relatively quickly and in a straightforward manner. However in the case of People Express, there was not a simple single problem, but a chain of interconnected factors that interacted in a complex way. This is the way it is in most organizations. Focusing on one part of the system leads to overlooking other important factors. Another barrier to systems thinking is the narrowing of perspective that comes from working on a particular position in an organization. Over time members tend to see things mostly in terms of their position and department and reduce problems to their perspective. For example, in People Express, the human resource people viewed the problems confronting the organization as human relations problems, while the finance people viewed them as cash-flow issues, and the operations management people viewed them as scheduling and capacity problems. Although each of these diagnoses captured a part of the problem, none grasped the whole system.

*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 9TH ED; CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE*

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R.I.P. Dr. Fidel Castro - Analysis of "Strategic Organizational Communication..." (part 2)

Strategic Communication and Life in Organizations
by
Charles Lamson

One sense in which organizational communication is strategic involves the actions of individual employees. For more than two thousand years, communication scholars have believed that people communicate most effectively if they adapt their communication strategies to the situations they face. To communicate effectively, employees must be able to analyze the situations they encounter in their organizations, determine which communication strategies are available to them in those situations.
select the best of those strategies and enact them effectively. However, selecting appropriate communication strategies is a complicated process. All organizational situations contain guidelines that tell employees how they are supposed to act and communicate and constraints that tell them how they not to act and communicate. Fortunately, organizational situations also provide resources for acting - potential lines of argument, acceptable forms of persuasive appeal and so on - that allow employees to pursue their goals strategically. Strategies or organizing create particular kinds of organizational situations. As a result, the relative importance of guidelines/constraints and resources differs in different situations, employees have the resources available that they will need to meet at least some of their goals and at least some of their organization's objectives simultaneously. In these cases, choosing productive communication strategies is not particularly difficult.

For example, one of the most important guidelines/constraints in bureaucratic organizations is that communication should follow the chain of command. That is, subordinates send messages to their immediate supervisors who relay the information to their immediate supervisors, who relay the information to their immediate supervisors is they deem it appropriate to do so and so on. No one goes over his her supervisor's head however, communicating via the chain of command is slow, cumbersome and vulnerable to many kinds of communication breakdowns. As a result, employees who follow this guideline/constraint are likely to feel that they do not know what is going on in their organization, and may even lack the basic information that they need in order to do their jobs.So they learn to compensate for weaknesses in formal chain-of-command communication by forming informal communication networks - links to other employees that allow them to obtain and send information without following the chain of command. By using this strategy, they are able to find out what is going on in the organization, meet their needs for autonomy and ironically make their organization work better then it otherwise would. And in organizations in which the chain-of-command rule is taken very seriously, they learn to hide or disguise their informal networks.

However, in other situations choosing the appropriate communication strategy is more difficult, perhaps impossible. Organizational situations sometimes paralyze employees at least momentarily. One kind of paralysis occurs when the guidelines and constraints in a situation are clear, but the resources available to meet the are unclear unknown or insufficient. For example, an organizational situation may include the command for psychotherapists to do "good work" hospital administrators to cut costs or elementary schoolteachers to stimulate all the students' interests. These guidelines may tell employee what they are supposed to do, but they tell them little about how they are supposed to accomplish the tasks. As a result, employees may become paralyzed while trying to make sense out of their situations and discover the resources that are available to them. A newly graduated student who had become a stockbroker, once called and asked, "What do I do next?" after being given a desk and a "training session" that included only the`comment "I hope you'll like it here. Just don't screw up like George did." This kind of paralyzing situation seems to be common for new employees and has been shown to be a major source of organizational stress.

A more extreme form of paralysis occurs when action is called for but constraint leaves the employee with no available resources. In the Peanuts cartoon, Linus's purpose is to gain the childlike fun that comes from a friendly snowball fight. However, Lucy's comments leave him with both a command to act (dropping a snowball is an act) and no productive way to achieve his purpose. Throwing the snowball will fail; so will not throwing it. Lucy has taken the fun out of the snowball fight and has robbed Linus of any opportunity for meaningful choice.

Organizational situations sometimes parallel the Peanuts situation. Supervisors may find that they have only one position to allocate and two departments that desperately need help, have equally strong claims on the position, and will be justifiably angry if they do not receive it. Subordinates may be told to do one thing by one superior and the opposite by another. They may know that one supervisor has a higher rank than the other and that in their organization they are always expected to follow the orders given by the higher ranking person. However, they may also know that the lower-ranking supervisor might retaliate against them in ways that will never be detected by anyone else if they violate his or her order. Here the subordinate has no realistic options because no available resources are available. Between the two extremes of simple situations and paralyzing ones are those that employees normally face at work: situations that provide a range of options that can serve both the employees' purposes and those of their organizations, situations in which employees can act and communicate strategically.

Finally, strategic choices create, reproduce and in some cases change their guidelines/constraints and resources. For example,bureaucratic strategies of organizing continue to exist only because employees act like bureaucrats. The organizational strategy of making decisions by applying established, written policies and regulations on established policies and regulations and have come to believe that decisions should be made in this way. In doing so, they chose to follow a rule that limits their actions to those prescribed by the organizational situation. And in doing so they use that rule as a resource for managing  

*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 6TH ED. BY CHARLES CONRAD AND SCOTT POOLE; PGS. 18-20*

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Analysis of "Strategic Organizational Communication..." (part 1)

Case Study
by 
Charles Lamson

How to Handle the Scarlet E-mail

In some ways, the interpersonal relationships that we form at work are like the interpersonal relationships that we form throughout our lives.But in other ways they are different. Natural relationships seem to be voluntary - we encounter people, discover that we are attracted to one another and begin to develop a relationship. We learn about them, develop expectations about how they will act, and begin to trust them when those expectations are fulfilled. If they violate our expectations, we interpret their behavior as a negative comment on them or as a negative comment on our relationship. If the relationship continues, we develop psychological contracts about how we will act toward and communicate with one another, and we make sure that those contracts are understood by both parties. The nature of our relationships is influenced by our relational histories and our anticipated future and our expectation that our relationship should be mutually fulfilling. We continue then because they fulfill what leadership expert Frederic Jablin has called "psychological-individual" functions.

Being members of the same organization complicates our relationships in many ways. Some organizational relationships are imposed on us, at least initially. We enter into them because they fulfill "formal organizational" functions. Some of those are with people we would have voluntarily formed relationships with; others are not. The differences in power and status that accompany different organizational roles also complicate relationships - buying lunch for someone in the next cubicle does not mean the same thing as buying lunch for the vice president of sales. We communicate differently with people of different power or status and we expect to be treated differently by them. Friends usually provide comfort and support to one another. But supervisors are required to evaluate their subordinates' work (and in organizations, subordinates also evaluate their supervisors), and those evaluations may involve uncomfortable assessments of one another's competence, performance and personality. Working relationships are also complicated by a "fishbowl effect," they are public in a way that natural relationships are not.

The work situation also complicates normal aspects of relationships. All friends have to balance autonomy and connectedness. If friends work together, they may be forced to spend too much time together or to work too closely. Friends also tend to be more open and honest with one another because of their higher levels of trust. But organizational roles often require people to keep information secret, even from their closest friends. For a number of reasons, the blended relationships that people form at work simply are more complicated than natural relationships. As they develop some become close relationships because the parties help one another solve work related problems and find areas of similarity and attraction. Co-workers become trusted confidants and their communication becomes more personal and less cautious. Eventually, some co-workers become important in one another's personal life.

The complications are easiest to see in romantic relationships at work. Although most experts on office etiquette flatly advise that if you care about your career, you should keep romance out of it, about 40 percent of workers admit to dating a colleague. With 50-60 hour workweeks, people simply do not have the time or opportunity to look elsewhere for romantic partners. Perhaps more importantly, people can gather accurate information about a potential mate by working with him or her - much more than they can learn at a singles' bar or a classified. In recent years a few organizations have had recent policies forbidding dating between supervisors and their subordinates, often married male supervisors and single female subordinates. Most seem to be based on "true love" rather than on job or advancement related motives. Research indicates that romances do not harm organizational performance, unless they generate a high level of gossip that interferes with task performance. Perceptions of favoritism are more like for employees involved in a romantic relationship with their supervisors. Gossip and discomfort among co-workers are extremely likely. If the relationship is terminated, it becomes difficult to see one's ex every day.

There are a number of commonsense steps that people can take to manage the complications created by office romances. First, all employees should learn their organization's view of workplace relationships. Seventy percent of organizations have no official policies, so it is sometimes difficult to obtain this information. But even in that case, once a relationship becomes serious, a frank conversation with your supervisors is warranted. Second, decide when and how to go public. Advisers differ on this issue. Some say that it is best to come clean about the relationship as soon as it gets serious. Others say that keeping it private is the best strategy. According to this perspective, your goal should be to minimize heresay and innuendo, and especially to make sure your relationship does not interfere with your work. In some situations, those goals can best be achieved by keeping quiet; in others the open approach is less disruptive. Third, have an exit plan. Discuss what the two of you will do if the relationship ends. Then if you break up follow the plan. Finally, be discreet. Maintain a professional relationship at work. Richard Phillips a career counselor in Palo Alto, California, reminds employees that "what you consider to be lovey-dovey between the two of you may make your co-workers retch. You're forcing them into a situation they don't want to be in." Do not hold hands in the hallway, play footsie at meetings, or anything else that is perfectly appropriate in romantic relationships but completely inappropriate in professional relationships. And make sure your partner knows that your "aloof" behavior at work is not an indication they you are cold or uncaring toward him or her.

Washington Post columnist Marc Fischer once wrote a column that vividly described how awkward office romances can be to coworkers. One of his co-workers accidentally sent him an e-mail that was meant for her romantic partner, probably by clicking the wrong line of her address directory. The massage started out in a friendly tone, but very quickly became erotic. To make things worse, Marc knew the woman and her husband (who was not the recipient of the message); in fact, he had been invited to their home for dinner. What should he do? respond in a businesslike tone ("Your message of 9-to-6 on Sunday was misdirected to me. Cheers.")? Notify the husband of what was going on? Keep quiet? Find some excuse for canceling the dinner date? He asked his friends for help. Most of the women told him to stay out of it; most of the men wanted him to find out all the sordid details and then let them in on it. He decided to do nothing.

Then another message arrived, one that was more intimate than the first. He went to dinner, sat between husband and wife, and very nevous throughout the evening. He squirmed during a private after-dinner conversation when the husband told him about his dreams for future years with his wife. He went home rattled and vowed to not have anything more to do with either of them. Then he went to a stationary store and bought notecard and envelopes - the appropriate medium for private messages.

*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT 6TH ED. BY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE*

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Preface to Analysis of "Strategic Organizational Communication"

Introduction

I am done with my analysis of Business Communication Today. It was starting to bore the shit out of me, and as a writer, that is a bad sign. So after I skimmed through the rest of the book just to make sure I was not missing anything blogworthy, I decided to conclude this analysis. I think I gleaned the most important and useful stuff from the book. So I hope you, the reader enjoyed or found the content useful in some way or another.

So now that I am done analyzing Business Communication Today, I am going to begin an analysis of another of my favorite college textbooks. The name of the book is Strategic Organizational Communication in a Global Economy - 6th ed. It was written by Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole.

Preface

The goal of this upcoming series of articles, and of this book I will be analyzing, is to provide a unified description of the incredibly diverse array of ideas that make up this rapidly expanding field. This book places organizations and organizational communication within a broader social, economic and cultural context. It has a relaxed and engaging writing style. Strategic Organizational Communication in a Global Economy focuses on the two-level concept of strategic choice making. This book contends that people make choices about the overall strategies that they will use to operate the societies and organizations that they will live within. Ironically, people tend to normalize and naturalize these choices transforming them from a conscious selection among a number of available options into assumptions, taken-for-granted facts of life. These overall choices in turn create the specific situations that people encounter every day - the challenges they face, the resources they have available to manage those challenges and the guidelines and constraints that limit the options that are available to them. People adapt strategically to the situations that they create, but in adapting, they tend to reproduce those situations. The result s a complicated cycle of acting, creating situations and adapting to them.

Understanding this action-situation-adaption cycle requires people to realize these things:

• Organizations are embedded in societies and cannot be understood outside of a society's beliefs, values, structures, practices, tensions and ways of managing those tensions. For example, U.S. society is defined in part by a tension between community and individuality. This tension arises from many of the challenges faced by contemporary U.S. organizations - challenges as diverse as the attitudes of generations X and Y, the blending of traditional and cultural strategies of motivation and control, the implementation of feminist and other so-called alternative forms of organizing, and the need to understand non-Western forms of leadership.
• Each overall strategy of organizing includes a characteristic organizational design, a system of motivation and control, a particular form of leadership and a particular relationship to communication technologies. However, each strategy of organizing is a choice. For example, bureaucracies are bureaucracies because people in them choose to act like bureaucrats. Each strategy also includes opportunities to resist the organization's strategy of organizing.
• Members of organizations can manage organizational situations strategically. They can exploit fissures and contradictions in social and organizational power relationships. Even in the turbulent world created by the new global economy, members of organizations can manage organizational situations in ways that achieve their personal goals and the goals of other members of their organizations.

*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 6TH ED. BY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE*

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Business Communication Today: An Analysis (part 12)

GAINING AN ADVANTAGE WITH VISUALS

Well-designed visuals can bring business messages to life and help communicators connect with their readers. Visuals enhance the communication power of textual messages. They can convey some message points more effectively and more efficiently than words. Pictures are also an effective way to communicate with the diverse audiences that are common in today's business environment. In the numbers-oriented world of work, people rely heavily on trend lines, distribution curves and percentages. An upward curve means good news in any language. Visuals attract and hold people's attention, helping your audience understand and remember your message. Busy readers often jump to visuals to try to get the gist of a message and attractive visuals can draw readers deeper into your reports and presentations.

Identifying Points to Illustrate

When deciding which points to present visually, think of the five Cs:

• Clear. The human mind is extremely adept at processing visual information, whether it is simple as the shape of a stop sign or as complicated as the floor plan for a new factory. 
• Complete. Visuals, particularly tables, often serve to provide the supporting details for your main idea or recommendation. The process of summarizing, concluding or recommending often requires you to narrow down your material or exclude details; a table or other visuals can provide these details without getting in the way of your main message.

• Concise. You have probably heard the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words." If a particular section of your message seems to require extensive description or explanation, see whether there is a way to convey this information visually.
• Connected. A key purpose of many business messages is showing connections of some sort - similarities or differences, correlations, cause-and-effect relationships, and so on.
• Compelling. Your readers live in a highly visual world. Will one or more illustrations make your message more interesting or more likely to read? You never want to insert visuals simply for decorative purposes, of course, but even if a particular point can be expressed equally well via text and visuals consider adding the visual in order to make your report or presentation more compelling.

Maintaining a Balance Between Illustrations and Words

Strong visuals enhance the descriptive and persuasive power of writing, but it is important not to overdo them. Cramming too many visuals into a report can distract your readers in two ways. First if you are constantly referring to tables, drawings and other visual elements, the effort to switch back and forth from words to visuals can make it difficult for readers to maintain focus on the thread of your message. Second, the space occupied by visuals can disrupt the flow of text on the page or screen, which also creates additional work for the reader.

*SOURCE: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION TODAY 8TH ED; COURTLAND L. BOVEE, JOHN V. THILL; PGS. 332-334*

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Business Communication Today: An Analysis (part 11)

Writing Business Messages: Composing Your Message

Composition is easiest if you have already figured out what to say and in what order. Although you may need to pause now and then to find the right word, you may also discover as you go along that you can improve your outline. Feel free to rearrange, delete and add ideas as long as you do not lose sight of your purpose.

Choosing Strong Words

Effective messages depend on carefully chosen words, whether you select them during your first draft or edit them in later. First, pay close attention to correctness. The rules of grammar and usage are constantly changing to reflect changes n the way people speak. Even editors and grammarians occasionally have questions about correct usage and they sometimes disagree about the answers. For example, the word data is the plural form of datum, yet some experts now prefer to treat data as a singular noun when it is used in non-scientific material to refer to a body of information. You be the judge: Which of the following sentences sound better?

• Our marketshare data is consistent from region to region.
• Our marketshare data are consistent from region to region.

Using Functional and Content Words Correctly

Words can be divided into two main categories. Functional words express relationships and have only one unchanging meaning in any given context. They include conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Content words are multidimensional and therefore subject to various interpretations. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. These words carry the meaning of a sentence. In your sentences, content words are the building blocks and functional words are the mortar that holds them together. In the following sentence all the content words are underlined:

• Some objective observers of the cookie market, give Nabisco the edge in quality, but Frito-Lay is lauded for superior distribution./

Finding Words That Communicate

By practicing your writing, learning from experienced writers and editors or reading extensively, you will find it easier to choose words that communicate exactly what you what to say when you compose your business messages think carefully to find the most powerful words for each situation.

• Choose powerful words. Choose words that express your thoughts, specifically and dramatically.
• Choose familiar words.  You will communicate best with words that are familiar to both you and your readers.
• Avoid cliches. Although familiar words are generally the best choice, beware of terms and phrases so common that they have lost some of their power to communicate.
• Use jargon carefully.  Handle professional or technical terms with care

*SOURCE: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION TODAY 8TH ED; BOVEE AND THLL; PGS. 130-134*

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Business Communication Today: An Analysis (part10)

Controlling Your Style and Tone

Style is the way you use words to achieve a certain tone or overall impression. You can vary your style (your sentence structure and vocabulary) to sound forceful or objective, personal or formal, colorful or dry. The right choice depends on the nature of your message and your relationship with the reader. Although style can be refined using the revision phase, you will save time and a lot of rewriting if you use a style that allows you to achieve the desired tone from the start.

Using a Conversational Tone

The tone of your business messages can range from informal to conversational to formal. If you are in a large organization and you are communicating with your superiors or the customers, your tone would tend to be more formal and respectful. However, that formal tone might sound distant and cold if used with colleagues.

You can achieve a conversational tone in your messages by following these guidelines:

• Avoid obsolete and pompous language. Business language used to be much more formal than it is today, and some out-of-date phrases remain. You can avoid using such language if you ask yourself, "Would I say this if I were talking to someone face to face?" Similarly, avoid using big words, trite expressions and overly complicated sentences to impress others. Such pompous language sounds self-important.

• Avoid preaching and bragging. Few things are more irritating than people who think they know everything and that others know nothing. If you do need to remind your audience of something obvious try to work the information in casually, perhaps in the middle of a paragraph where it will sound like a secondary comment rather than a major revelation. Also, avoid bragging about your accomplishments or those of your organization.
• Be careful with intimacy. Most business messages should avoid intimacy, such as sharing personal details or adopting a casual and unprofessional tone. However, when you do have a close relationship with your audience, such as among the members of a close-knit team, a more intimate tone is sometimes appropriate and even expected.
• Be careful with humor. Humor can be an effective tool to inject interest into dry subjects or take the sting out of negative news. However, use it with great care. The humor must be connected to the point you are trying to make. Business messages are not a forum for sharing jokes. Never use humor in formal messages or when you are communicating across cultural boundaries. Humor can easily backfire and divert attention from your message. 

Using Plain English

Plain English is a way of presenting information in a simple unadorned style so that your audience can easily grasp your meaning without struggling through specialized, technical or convoluted language, because it is close to the way people normally speak. Plain English is easily understood by anyone with an 8th or 9th grade education. The Plain English Campaign (a nonprofit group in England campaigning for clear language) defines plain English as language "that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it." You can see how this definition shows respect for your audience.

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Business Communication Today; An Analysis (PART 9)

Building Strong Relationshps with Your Audience
by
Charles Lamson

Focusing on your audience's needs is vital to effective communication, but you also have your own priorities as a communicator. Sometimes these needs are obvious and direct, such as when you are appealing for a budget increase for your department. At other times, the need may be more subtle. For example, you might want to demonstrate your understanding of the marketplace or your company's concern for the natural environment. To help you address your own needs while building positive relationships with your audience, you must establishing your credibility.

Establishing Your Credibility

Your audience's response to every message you send depends heavily on their perception of your credibility, a measure of your believability based on how reliable you are and how much trust you evoke in others. With colleagues and long-term customers you have already established some degree of credibility based on past communication efforts and these people automatically lean toward accepting each new message from you because you have not let them down in the past. However, With audiences who do not know you, you need to establish credibility before they will listen fully to your message. Whether you are working to build credibility with a new audience, to main credibility with an existing audience, or even restore credibility after a mistake, consider emphasizing the following characteristics:

• Honesty. Honesty is the cornerstone of credibility. No matter how famous, important, charming or attractive you are, if you do not tell the truth, most people will eventually lose faith in you. On the other hand demonstrating honesty and integrity will earn you the respect of your colleagues and the trust of everyone you communicate with, even if they do not always agree with or welcome the messages you have to deliver.
• Objectivity. Audiences appreciate the ability to distance yourself from emotional situations and to look at all sides of an issue. They want to believe that you have their interests in mind, not just your own.
• Awareness of audience needs. Let your audience know that you understand what is important to them. If you have done a thorough audience analysis, you will know what your audience cares about and their specific issues and concerns in a particular situation.

• Credentials, knowledge and expertise. Every audience wants to be assured that the messages they receive come from people who know what they are talking about - that is why doctors hang their medical school diplomas on their office walls and why public speakers often arrange to be introduced with brief summaries of their experience and qualifications. When you need to establish credibility with a new audience, put yourself in their shoes and try to identify the credentials that would be most important to them. Express these qualifications clearly and objectively, without overshadowing the message. Sometimes it is as simple as using the right technical terms or mentioning your role in a successful project.
• Endorsements. If your audience does not know anything about you, you might be able to get assistance from someone else they do know and trust. Once the audience learns that someone they trust in turn respects you, they will be more receptive to your messages.
• Performance. Who impresses you more, the person who always says, "If you ever need me, all you have to do is call," or the one who actually shows up when you need to move or when you need a ride to the airport? It is easy to say you can do something, but following through can be much harder. That is why demonstrating impressive communication skills is not enough; people need to know they can count on you to get the job done.
• Communication style. If you support your points with evidence that can be confirmed through observation, research, experimentation or measurement; audience members will recognize that you have the facts and they will respect you. On the other hand, trying to spice up your messages with terms such as incredible, extraordinary, sensational and revolutionary strains your credibility, unless you can support these terms with some sort of proof.

You also risk losing credibility if you seem to be currying favor with insincere compliments. Try to support compliments with specific points that show you are aware of a person's contributions and not spouting off a generic thanks:

INSTEAD OF THIS My deepest heartfelt thanks for the excellent job you did. Its hard these days to find workers like you. You are just fantastic! I can’t stress enough how happy you have made us with your outstanding performance.

USE THIS Thanks for the great job you did filling in for Sean at the convention on such short notice. Despite the difficult circumstances, you managed to attract several new orders with your demonstration of the new line of coffeemakers. Your dedication and sales ability are truly appreciated.

Finally, keep in mind that credibility can take days, months or even years to establish - and it can be wiped out in an instant. An occasional let-down or mistake is usually forgiven, but major lapses in honesty or integrity can destroy your reputation. On the other hand, when you do establish credibility, communication becomes much easier, because you no longer have to spend time and energy convincing people that you are a trustworthy source of information and ideas.

*SOURCE: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION TODAY 8TH ED; COURTLAND L. BOVEE AND WILLIAM J. THILL*

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INSTEAD OF THIS

My deepest heartfelt thanks for the excellent job you did. Its hard these days to find workers like you. You are just fantastic! I can’t stress enough how happy you have made us with your outstanding performance.

USE THIS

Thanks for the great job you did filling in for Sean at the convention on such short notice. Despite the difficult circumstances, you managed to attract several new orders with your demonstration of the new line of coffeemakers. Your dedication and sales ability are truly appreciated.

Business Communication Today: An Analysis (part 8)

Writing Business Messages

Adapting to Your Audience

by: Charles Lamson

Whether consciously or not, audiences greet most incoming messages with a question: "What's in this for me?" If your intended audience thinks a message does not apply to them or does not offer them anything useful or interesting they will be far less inclined to pay attention to it. By adapting your communication to the needs and expectations of your audience, you will be providing a more compelling answer to this question and improve the chances of your message being successful.

However, adapting your message is not always a simple task. Some situations will require you to balance conflicting or competing needs. Other situations may tempt you to adapt your personal style, but do so carefully. Although adjusting your style is a positive move, do not go so far that you come across as someone you are not. You will  not be comfortable with this approach, and your audience will probably see through it.

A good relationship is vital to conveying your messages effectively, whether you are sending messages across the office via-email, or to the other side of the planet in an online meeting. Like every relationship, successful communication meets the needs of both partners - you and your audience. To adapt your message to your audience, try to be sensitive to your audience's needs, Build a strong relationship with your audience and control your style to maintain a professional tone.

Being Sensitive to Your Audience's Needs

Even in simple messages intended merely to share information, it is possible to use all the right words and still not be sensitive to your audience and their needs. You can improve your audience receptivity by adopting the "you" attitude, maintaining good standards of etiquette, emphasizing the positive and using bias-free language.

Using the "You" Attitude

You are already becoming familiar with the audience-centered approach - trying to see a subject through your audience's eyes. Now you want to project this approach in your messages by adopting a "you" attitude - that is, by speaking and writing in terms of your audience's wishes, interests, hopes and preferences.

Instead of This To help us process this order we must ask for another copy of the requisition. We are pleased to announce our new flight schedule from Atlanta to New York, which is any hour on the hour. We offer MP3 players with 10, 15 or 20 gigabytes of storage capacity.

Do This So that your order can be filled promptly, please send another copy of the requisition. Now you can take a plane from Atlanta to New York any hour on the hour. Select your MP3 player from three models with 10, 15 or 20 gigabytes of storage capacity.

Be aware that on some occasions, it is better to avoid using “you," particularly if doing so will sound overly authoritative or accusing.

Instead of This You should never use that type of paper in the copy machine. You must correct all five copies by noon.

Use this That type of paper doesn’t work well in the copy machine. All five copies must be corrected by noon.

Maintaining Standards of Etiquette

INSTEAD OF THIS Once again, you’ve managed to bring down the website through your incompetent programming. You’ve been sitting on our order for two weeks and we need it now!

USE THIS Let's go over what went wrong with the last site update so that we can find out how to improve the process. Our production schedule depends on timely delivery of parts and supplies, but we have not yet received the order you promised to deliver two weeks ago. Please respond today with a delivery commitment.

Emphasizing the Positive

INSTEAD OF THIS We apologize for inconveniencing you during our remodeling. I’ve been working on this proposal for six months, and I hope the time wasn’t wasted.

USE THIS The renovations now under way will help us serve you better. This proposal identifies $4 million in potential savings companywide without reducing staff.

INSTEAD OF USING THIS Cheap merchandise Used cars Failing Elderly Fake	USE THIS Economy merchandise Resale cars Underperforming Senior citizens Imitation faux

*SOURCE: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION TODAY 8TH ED; BY COURTLAnD  L. BOVEE AND JOHN V. THILL; PGS. 118-122)*

END

Instead of This

To help us process this order we must ask for another copy of the requisition.

We are pleased to announce our new flight schedule from Atlanta to New York, which is any hour on the hour.

We offer MP3 players with 10, 15 or 20 gigabytes of storage capacity.

Do This

So that your order can be filled promptly, please send another copy of the requisition.

Now you can take a plane from Atlanta to New York any hour on the hour.

Select your MP3 player from three models with 10, 15 or 20 gigabytes of storage capacity.

Instead of This

You should never use that type of paper in the copy machine.

You must correct all five copies by noon.

Use this

That type of paper doesn’t work well in the copy machine.

All five copies must be corrected by noon.

INSTEAD OF THIS

Once again, you’ve managed to bring down the website through your incompetent programming.

You’ve been sitting on our order for two weeks and we need it now!

USE THIS

Let's go over what went wrong with the last site update so that we can find out how to improve the process.

Our production schedule depends on timely delivery of parts and supplies, but we have not yet received the order you promised to deliver two weeks ago. Please respond today with a delivery commitment.

INSTEAD OF THIS

We apologize for inconveniencing you during our remodeling.

I’ve been working on this proposal for six months, and I hope the time wasn’t wasted.

USE THIS

The renovations now under way will help us serve you better.

This proposal identifies $4 million in potential savings companywide without reducing staff.

INSTEAD OF USING THIS

Cheap merchandise

Used cars

Failing

Elderly

Fake

USE THIS

Economy merchandise

Resale cars

Underperforming

Senior citizens

Imitation faux