4 Examples from Corporate Life to Prove How Your Communication Impacts the Behaviours of your team members

Despite it’s importance, Communication Skills are often given the least priority in corporate world. Here are 4 communication examples from corporate life where it’s clearly seen how a Manager’s communication can impact the behaviours of the team members.

What you reward will increase. What you ignore will (with time) decrease. This is a fundamental rule of human behaviour.

Let’s look at it from our daily corporate life perspective.

1) Ben keeps complaining that his team doesn’t update their meeting records on the system. Every meeting, same rant.

Result?

The team continues to not submit the meeting records on time.

1a) Ben wants his team to update their meeting records on the system every Friday.

He sees that Ann has made attempts to enter the records, though not completely.

Ben appreciates Ann, individually and publicly.

Result?

Team starts attempting.

2) During every weekly review meeting, Aster gets ridiculed by her manager for her lack of good presentation making skills.

Result?

Aster keeps making bad presentations.

2a) During every weekly review meeting, Aster gets complimented for her data analytics and root cause analysis.

Result?

She starts learning how to make her analysis more presentable to her team.

3) The HR Business Partners keeps monitoring the attrition target and shares exit analysis and reasons of exits regularly with his functional manager.

Result?

Functional Manager doesn’t know how to stop exits and Attrition keeps happening.

3a) The HR Business Partners shares retention strategies with his functional manager and agrees on a retention target.

Result?

Functional Managers know how to retain and starts seeing less exits.

4) Katie is managing a portfolio of 5 products. She has superseded achievement in 3 products but couldn’t meet targets for 2. Her manager is not happy with her performance.

Result?

She didn’t like being ignored for her gallant efforts, and quits the next month.

4a) Katie is managing a portfolio of 5 products. She has superseded achievement in 3 products but couldn’t meet targets for 2. Her manager awards her for over-achievement publicly. Gives feedback on managing other 2 privately.

Result?

She continues to work loyally.

These communication examples from corporate life show us clearly that ignoring behaviours and actions that you like and negatively responding to ones that you don’t like is a poor way of #communication.

Behavioural scientists call this as 3 R theory: Reinforced Responses Recur.

Each Individual has their own strengths and weaknesses. Actions you notice more will increase and the ones you ignore will start decreasing.

Corporate Managers make the mistake of ignoring good behaviours (which starts decreasing) and keep reinforcing bad behaviour (which keeps increasing).

I work with teams to build #positivecommunication at workplace. Reach out if you want to learn more about this.