Page 75 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

Leadership, Appreciation, and Productivity
Lecture 22

Work is central to most of our lives, and the relationship between
managers and employees is the bedrock of success for all organizations.
Let’s examine how the quality of this relationship can be improved by
increasing the quality of the communication between them.

ike other types of cultural knowledge about how things and people
work, the way our contemporary managers and employees relate is
Lprofoundly shaped by schema. The traditional Western assumptions
about organizations and the roles of managers and employees were developed
over a hundred years ago: An organization is a machine built of thousands
of interlocking parts arranged in a hierarchy of authority. Employees are

cogs in the ef¿cient operation of this machine and are subject to control by
managers above them in the hierarchy.
In this traditional model, managers were completely in charge of controlling
the work, devising the best way to do it, and training workers to follow their
rules. Communication was intended to serve two simple purposes in this
model—to deliver orders downward and to deliver production information
upward. And managers were committed to discouraging two other types
of communication: bypassing (employees going around a local supervisor
to talk to the manager above) and horizontal talk (employees talking with
each other about how to do the work). These communication moments were
considered to be either dangerous or inef¿ cient.

We now know that to be effective, managers have to be leaders as well
as controllers of the plan. They have to step outside of the traditional
unconscious schema of managing and consciously invite employees to join
them as partners in managing the process. Successful managers learn to lead
employees so that employees can manage themselves. This not only requires
managers to reenvision their role, but it also requires a conscious shift in the
way they talk to their employees.

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