Re:Communication as a Critical Business Skill
by Nihilartikel on Monday February 20, 2023 @10:39PM
(#34876183)
I really agree - doubly so after going independent and dealing with more non-technical counterparties.
Since my youth, I've always had a visceral, perhaps a bit maladaptive, need to be understood and have been able to parlay that into a sort of communicational hyper vigilance. The end result is that I compulsively over communicate and go out of my way to meet the receiving parties more than half way. If I can, I consider their background and reference frames and preemptively build a semantic bridge to them. Working with international teams, it's important to suppress urges for idiomatic expressions or general folkseyness, which is hard since I _LOVE_ to indulge in mixed metaphors and intentional malapropism.
The end result of emails with those constraints tends to be a wall of text, but the upside is that it tends to get copied around as a contextual 'checkpoint' of the problem under discussion.
In the end, effective communication is empathy.. And empathy can often be difficult work.
Since my youth, I've always had a visceral, perhaps a bit maladaptive, need to be understood and have been able to parlay that into a sort of communicational hyper vigilance. The end result is that I compulsively over communicate and go out of my way to meet the receiving parties more than half way. If I can, I consider their background and reference frames and preemptively build a semantic bridge to them. Working with international teams, it's important to suppress urges for idiomatic expressions or general folkseyness, which is hard since I _LOVE_ to indulge in mixed metaphors and intentional malapropism.
The end result of emails with those constraints tends to be a wall of text, but the upside is that it tends to get copied around as a contextual 'checkpoint' of the problem under discussion.
In the end, effective communication is empathy.. And empathy can often be difficult work.