What Does It Take to Communicate Effectively?

Communicate Effectively with Suppliers, Stakeholders, and Customers

Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic

We like to think we are effective in our communications. We do not set out to cause disruption or misunderstanding. How much of our frustration comes from our lack of communication? This idea seems pretty obvious, at first, but how well do we communicate with our suppliers, stakeholders, and customers? How do we communicate effectively? The following story illustrates what can go wrong.

While working with suppliers in the advanced purchasing processes, my team and I became frustrated with a condition we could not understand. Our suppliers manufacturing engineers expressed their understanding of our requests for quotes but came back with high cost and delivered poor quality in our initial product introductions. What was causing this? The harder we worked it seemed the worse it got. The breakdown was a result of our assumptions. We need to communicate effectively with our suppliers.

When we took a step back to understand some of the potential root causes, we came to a simple cause. Our prints were notoriously difficult to understand. A simple question uncovered the real reason for the lack of performance. I sent a team out to test our engineering partners. I asked them to validate the interpretation of our prints in a conversational setting. What we discovered set us on an educational effort that paid incredible dividends.

‘The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’
George Bernard Shaw

Our assumption that everyone understood what we were asking was our failure, not our suppliers. What we discovered was we did not have effective communication. By slowing down and checking the presence of communication, we uncovered a gold mine in quality improvements and cost alignment that would have taken months or years to resolve.

Effective Communication

Does everyone understand the relationship between communication and performance? Why would we emphasis the communication with our suppliers, stakeholders, and customers, if we hadn’t discovered the presence of assumptions underlying the failure to achieve success.

Taiichi Ohno told us that we must slow down to speed up. I hear this phrase repeated mindlessly and watch as we skim the surface in our haste to win while we lose our competitive advantage and our profitability to be first. Slowing down in our communications is just the beginning. The pace of change is also a great place to explore Ohno’s suggestion. Whose pace of change matters? The leaders or the slowest person in the team? I like to state it in this way – if you don’t think you have time to do it right the first time, what makes you think you have time to do it over?