Communication and strategic management

The aim of this article is to answer the question: the link between management and communication is vague

This sentence is a remark that I often receive in the context of my coaching. The first objective is to unite the actors.

Yet this is the whole issue of strategic management … knowing how to communicate, pass the message!

Silent cinema: clear message!

Silent cinema offers a neutral communication where the message is delivered to its simple expression without being cluttered with language. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, two talented actors, inscribed in the history of silent cinema, are the great witnesses.

The message in silent cinema is carried by mime and silence. The latter is self-explanatory.

With language, communication becomes more complex, opening up an immense field of interpretation and discussion. Interpretation depends much more on emotional factors than on the facts conveyed by the message.

This is why graphic facilitation is back in force with an image + a word. The image deactivates the emotional affect, thus reinforcing the chance of the message to be understood in its context without any other interpretation than that intended by the drawing.

The challenges of strategic management

When you start coaching, management training, conflict management, very often the leitmotif is that you have to improve communication. And it is often it is facilitating interactions between teams that will prove necessary to free the unspoken.

A catch-all word, communication is the object of all evils. The bosses say they communicate, and the collaborators say about their bosses: they can’t hear us. A dialogue of the deaf is established between the base and the top …

And yet communication represents 80% of the efforts of strategic management. So what is going on behind this association of evils: are they just words?

The challenges of strategic management are:

1- in listening

2- in the art of questioning,

3- in the capacity to thwart one’s own cognitive biases to establish the bases of a common dialogue.

1- Listen: “A man has two ears and one tongue, to listen twice as much as he speaks.” Zeno of Citium

Communication and the art of really listening

On this point, the manager must first (re) learn to listen to himself. The principles of active listening, repeated in this video are:

  1. Have an open mind
  2. Focus on the other’s words
  3. Be there to listen and not to answer
  4. Recognize your perceptual filters
  5. Reformulate the major sentences of the interlocutor
  6. Ask the interlocutor what he understood
  7. Dare to ask adequate questions

2- Questioning

The questions are open, sometimes ingenuous, often powerful. The manager, through his questions, will invite the members of the team to find the resources she needs to solve her problem.

The objective is not to induce the solution but to bring the team to undertake, to experiment.

3-Transforming

Acting in conscience These are 3 steps to understand for a systematic implementation of your emotional intelligence: Listen, Identify, Transform. These 3 steps are based on our ability to establish our model of actions, then the model of forces in which the collective can register.

Listening is a deep breath. It is an opportunity given to others to express themselves, spontaneously under a benevolent gaze.

The main objective of this listening is to understand the issues, the actors and the brakes encountered by the team, or the team-mates.

This listening in place, the questioning allows to divert the idea, the project and to implement an effective delegation.

It is developing one’s ability to support everyone in transforming their ideas, putting them into action for the common good.

The In Imago model invites you to enter into a breath in which each one by the quality of his listening, and a right word accompanies the implementation and the transformation of the idea.

Communiquer : SHU HA RI DO game
Become aware of each other; speaking with intention and listening with attention are the basics of emotional management. They are keys for effective strategic management

Communication is breathing

Communication is breathing. On inspiration, we welcome and we feel. At the expiration, we develop the idea and pass it on.

It is a mechanism to be put in place, in which everyone wins in the addition of their efforts and contributes to the implementation of a project that makes sense.

The diagram above traces a proposal to support personal achievement; Do to the establishment of a ritual to co-construct and go to the Japanese Cha Do and take the path of tea …

To find out more about the model, discover our approach to organic management.

Knowing how to listen starts with yourself

Learning to breathe: from listening to transformation

Zen leadership is an opportunity to foster natural and effective communication. Breathe to: Identify your emotions, focus, get in motion. These 3 podcasts are a proposal to breathe with and find a quality of listening.

Listen

Inside, outside

Transforming

Once the quality of your listening has been restored, intuition emerges and the setting in motion of ideas in a free flow of energy. To bring out your leadership, 3 axes are proposed to you. Explore!

Axis 1- Develop the CIDs, in a metaphor of the Hero’s Journey

The axis that I suggest you explore is to Develop the CIDs -Courage, Intuition, Challenge and common sense in each of the stakeholders.

It is first and foremost a personal test. Have the courage to set in motion, follow your intuition, and meet the Challenge that of the gaze of others … then it collides and transforms with the advent of the team and is deployed in an organization. The challenge will be to keep these CIDs alert, to promote the emergence of ideas and maintain an atmosphere of positive cooperation, without hindering cognitive biases.

An example of lack of self-listening: procrastination. The hero’s journey stops if the CIDs- Courage, Intuition, Challenge, common sense does not take place. CIDs fall asleep, get bored … Discover the story of the frog that didn’t know it was cooked.

Communiquer un enjeu du management strategique

Once you have learned to listen in setting your intentions in motion, the others gradually start moving. In this listening, cooperation can be set up and transformed.

Axis 2- THE ART of dialectics

The Art of dialectics is also a way of asserting itself. It is still one of the main ways of communicating. Art innate but also used by the strategic management within the framework of seminar of development of the leadership.

The debate of ideas uses dialectical stratagems to provoke emotions in their opponents

The dialectic, the dialect, is the wording that everyone uses to communicate their ideas, what they are, etc …

It is a natural narrative approach, that of rhetorical discourse. But it is also: communicating becomes the art of imposing oneself, or even of manipulating.

Discover the art of dialectics and the art of always being right with SCHOPENHAUER: 38 stratagems to impose your ideas and win the debate. SCHOPENHAUER identifies the debate as a fight between vanity, ego, and wisdom in the article opposite

Axis 3-Develop your relational image

Developing your relational image consists of understanding the mechanisms of the secondary Imago and identifying how we identify ourselves in our relationships with the group..

Our communication within a group will depend on this relational image.

Manage your interactions: discovery trail

Communication and strategic management: manage your interactions

An exciting debate: what do my peers think?

To explore other avenues, I asked the question in a peer group. Some of these comments contributed to the development of this article. You will find the comments collected in the digital game coaching forum – Empower Team theme

The lively discussion that followed shows the importance of this theme in managerial practices. The answers are unanimous. The strategic management to communicate must take into account the affect, the emotion of each one so that the message is understood. …

This debate is also current in the research to find the best equation between the company of the future and meet his personal aspirations … the objective of which is to answer the question: Strategic management, which company for tomorrow?