Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Business ESP

You can’t communicate with employees through ESP no matter how hard you try. And I’m not kidding. Sometimes we act like everyone should just be able to figure out what we’re thinking, and it happens all the time. If Ideas and requests aren’t properly communicated they’re not going to be understood.

I had an employee who was rolling into work late, sometimes an hour late or more. I would stew about it. It would frustrate me and I just didn’t know why it was happening. Turns out, after I decided to lay down the law about it, that he actually didn’t know when work formally started because no one had ever told him. Thinking back on it, I know I didn’t say anything about a specific clock-in time and no one else had mentioned it either. Wow. I made a big mistake by thinking that an employee could somehow get inside my brain and know what I was thinking. And this doesn’t just happen with employees. It happens with business partners, suppliers, customers, and just about everyone else I encounter during a business day.

Of course communication is the missing piece here. Things have to be spelled out. It’s not because people are dumb or inept or anything like that. It’s because everybody is different and they all have different perspectives and ideas. It’s immensely helpful to sit down with someone, no matter who they are, and simply communicate. Maybe you’re better about this than I am, but I find that there is a constant need for more complete and basically better communication.

This goes the other way too. Sometimes people aren’t communicating their ideas to me. Maybe they don’t want to say something critical to their boss or maybe I’m simply not listening as I should be. It’s vital as a business owner, I think, to ask people what they’re thinking. I mean really ask, and be specific. Bad communication is a big roadblock to successful business and it takes constant attention to always maintain proper communication.

Posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm and is filed under eReplacement Parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.