After nine months of being the president of my fraternity, the most frustrating part of the job deals with communication. My frustrations with communication come from lack of communication and useless communication. When someone calls me to ask if it is a snow day, I become annoyed with my lost time. I DO believe that it is possible to over communicate, but I also believe you can never have too much information (these beliefs may be contradictory). While I do not wish to know nor expect to know what every brother is doing at all times (and some give me these updates), I do like to at least have a nuts and bolts version on what he is doing.
The study in Exhibit1-2 breaks down the major tasks of managers and the amount of time spent on each task. The average and successful managers spend about 28-29% of their time communicating, but have a much different time allotment spent on networking. An average manager networks for about a fifth of their time when a successful manager spends about half of his time networking. The difference that I feel the networking has on their effectiveness is that by spending time networking, the successful manager has learned better communication skills. The better communication skills that the successful manager has allows him to spend just a little bit less time on communication, but be much more productive with his message. The effective managers however spend nearly the complete opposite amount of time on communication/networking than the average manager, and more time communicating and a little less time networking than the successful manager. I think this is like the book Good to Great. To move from a successful manager to an effective manager the person has to make some changes. They have now most likely mastered the skills of communication and from his networking knows which people to keep in his inner-circle. By knowing which people to keep in the circle, the effective manager has eliminated time spent on people who cannot help him; therefore, he no longer needs to network with them. Because of this, the person will need less time to network because they are better at knowing who/how/when to network. I feel that they spend more time communicating because they have developed the skills to know how to best communicate with each employee. If you have to communicate similar messages but in a different manner, it will take more time, but the results will be much, much better.
Depending on how a person’s communication skills/tactics are (poor, average, good, great) shapes how I personally communicate with them. I have to communicate with some people in person, some through other people (roommates), some via phone, some through texts or email, and others by combinations of the above tactics, and some by all of the above until they respond. For example, if a person is extremely long winded, and a five minute conversation will take half an hour, I will communicate via email asking them to respond in bullet points. The reason I started doing this was the conversations with these types of people were exhausting-they would first tell me what they were going to say, then say what they wanted to say, repeat, get off track, re-cap, and then get off track some more. Every time I had a conversation that went like this I would become agitated as I felt the conversation/communication became devalued by the waste of time. However, if I feel that a person has great communication skills I may not contact them until they contact me because they are effective and handling and reporting tasks, or I may just give them a quick call and see the progress they have made and ask if they needed any help.
The effectiveness of a manager depends on his ability to communicate and have people communicate with him.
