The Key to Communication at the Executive Level

A Google search (that barometer of the commercial mood) for the phrase ‘executive communication’ yields hits that refer almost entirely to presentation, speech, and media skills training.

It's not surprising that the top search hits would reference executive speaking skills, since the leadership aspect of any executive’s job consists of rallying the workforce on the inside and representing the organization to the world outside.

Nevertheless, this emphasis on speaking skills crowds out a vital part of executive communication. Speaking is only half the communication process, yet few of us are paying any attention to executive comprehension. It’s a field we ignore at our peril. When an executive fails to understand messages from subordinates, the costs can be very high.

Every organization has problems to some degree in getting messages up to the executive level, but we see it most clearly in the case of NASA, whose communication failures have been dissected in the public record. There is widespread agreement that a major contributing cause to the losses of both the Challenger and the Columbia space shuttles was the differing perceptions of NASA’s managers and its engineers of the safety of the shuttle system. In other words, the safety concerns of the engineers didn’t get through to management.

We can fault executives for failing to understand information that’s given to them. It’s certainly true that the mastery of active listening skills should be a requirement for an executive position. But we also need to recognize that to point fingers at the people who don’t comprehend messages is to protect those who fail to make themselves clear. If you send a message, don’t you have at least some responsibility for its reception, even if it’s a message to your boss?

Because executives make the decisions that determine the direction and behavior of organizations, most organizations are ongoing competitions for executive attention. If you want executive attention, then, your best strategy is to offer some kind of benefit for it.

Let’s get back to NASA for a moment, not because NASA is a particularly egregious example but because, as we said, its problems are in the public record and are therefore accessible.

When the shuttle Columbia was in orbit, and before it began its disastrous re-entry, engineers from Boeing were concerned it may have been damaged during its launch. They prepared three reports for top NASA managers on the subject. At least one of these reports was a PowerPoint presentation. Edward Tufte, the dean of visual communication, has analyzed the principal slide from this report in an essay called PowerPoint Does Rocket Science – And Better Techniques for Technical Reports. (The essay is available at www.edwardtufte.com, in the “Ask E. T.” section.)

The slide stated that it was possible for a foam particle of sufficient mass and velocity to penetrate the tiles covering the edge of the wing during launch. It was saying, in other words, that the Columbia could have suffered the kind of damage the engineers were concerned about. But, as Tufte points out, the information is buried in a 125-word arrangement of bullet points, sub-bullet points, sub-sub bullet points, and so on. Not only is the information difficult to separate out of the story being told on the slide, but the slide itself is labeled “review of test data indicates conservatism for tile penetration,” which seems to present an optimistic conclusion.

NASA’s executives decided to go ahead with re-entry, with tragic results. It’s a decision that would doubtless have been made differently if that PowerPoint slide had been titled “test data indicates possible destruction of shuttle on re-entry.” The benefit of the communication (that of preserving the lives of the crew) would have been manifest. It would have received the executive attention it needed.

Communication at the executive level means something a little different today than it meant 30 or even ten years ago. Organizations have become less hierarchical and more collegial. Unfortunately, communication skills haven’t entirely caught up. Anyone who takes any responsibility for meeting an organization’s goals (and these days, that means everybody in the organization) needs to take some responsibility for the comprehension of their messages. This is particularly true when they are supplying information to be used in decisions with organization-wide impact.

It’s time organizations took a broader view of communication skills and held employees to a different standard. Clarity of self-expression will always be fundamentally important, of course, but we also need to train employees to think about what a message should mean to the person receiving it. It’s the best chance they have of improving the signal-to-noise ratio in their messages. And it may be the best chance executives have of being effective.

Lawne Gerhardt is Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Communispond