Every student of management would of course explain the meaning and role of communication through a diagram. Unfortunately, most of them do not know what role it plays in the context of their own lives and living. Unfortunately students simply mug up the lessons from their textbooks and pour it in writing on the answer sheet. But answers lack depth without necessary understanding. You might know the answer to ‘what problems can arise from poor or no communication’. But without a good understanding of it, you might not be interested to use your knowledge for your or any other’s advantage.
Spiritual preceptors explain that human beings have acquired the habit of living only by utilizing their intelligence without proper understanding. Studying anything and reproducing it on the answer sheets successfully is the work of good intelligence. But understanding the concept of what you have studied in the study books and knowing its existence and its concurrent role in your life is the result of understanding.
Take for instance the matter of communication. Every pedagogue in the subject called management is busy imparting lessons about the role of communication in management without telling how it is the integral part of our life’s system.
Just see how things crash by the barriers of communication. Suppose your father has decided to buy a car and he has kept it a secret from you. It’s not because he wants to give you a pleasant surprise, but because he doesn’t consider it as important. Consequently, you hear about it from outside. So, when you return home, you ask about it to your mother and sister. To your surprise, everybody seemed aware of the news except you. But they had remained indifferent without telling you.
How would that situation make you feel? You would find this shocking and emotionally hurtful. Right to the core of your heart, you will not have any intention of sharing a journey in this car after it reaches your home.
Why does this happen? It is because human-beings are just bundles of emotions and they invariably like information that concerns them to be shared with them. Every human being sincerely likes to share and gets shared. Communicating is nothing but sharing. It is sharing of important and pertinent information in a very scientific way.
The next thing that has to be highlighted that an individual is not different from an entity- a cumulative of individual skills makes an organization run. It is the individuals in an organization, who run the show and develop their organizational skills. It is the age of specialization and next comes the topic of better coordination.
Usually we find structure of organization is divided into these four types. Marketing, Finance, Human resource and Production are invariably four departments of every organization or company. Why someone felt the need to divide the organizational structure into four types? It is because we need each task in an organization to be done by a specialist. Therefore, we decided to assign each task of the organization to a group of specialists. A pass-out in MBA with Finance specialization would certainly be fitting for the finance related tasks and an MBA with marketing specialization for the marketing department.
But all these departments of an organization need sharing. But sharing of what? Coordinating is possible only by sharing of information. The proper, scientific sharing of information in an organization is defined as Communication.
You would feel surprised to know that a company named Hill & Middleton had specialized capacity to advise its clients about the ways to handle crisis. It was one of the two biggest public relations companies. It had 65 branch offices in North and South America, Europe and Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.
In the year 1990, syndicated columnist Evans and Novak reported that Hill & Newton was representing the United States Catholics conference in an anti-abortion public campaign. As it was a sensitive and serious issue, none of the other PR firms was ready to undertake the publicity campaign. But to the surprise of all employees working in Hill & Middleton, they were unaware that their own company had decided to accept such a controversial project. In fact, they came to know about it, when press made it public in various newspapers.
After this, the employees in this renowned PR firm got a memo about the company’s decision telling them that no one would be compelling them to work in this project. The information given in the memo was not enough and slow in coming. But the next hitch was it went to only the department heads and many employees never saw it.
Employees in this company wanted to know as to from where this project had come from and regarding the tactics to fulfill the objectives of the project. Numerous inquiries kept coming from outside but no one in the office was in a position to comment. Many employees in the NEW YORK office of Hill and Middleton signed a joint petition to their management voicing their concerns. Yet, management failed to recognize the huge emotionalism surrounding the issue and offered no formal response. Soon it became a hot topic in all the magazines and newspapers of United States that how Hill and Middleton had failed to handle its own internal PR.
Does this not sound familiar to the first instance of communication about the purchase of car in your family? Now you might be convinced that how sentiments are injured when information is not properly communicated and what hazards barriers in communication can create in your personal and professional life.