Chapter 2 Communicating Strategically

Chapter 2 Communicating Strategically

Needed Strategy

Every form of communication should have a strategy. Between families, with significant others, at work, in sports, or simply with friends. The process for communicating includes determining the objectives for a particular communication, deciding what resources are available for achieving those objectives and diagnosing the organizations/persons reputation.

Explanation of Strategy and examples

Determining the objectives is just the simple explanation of what you want to communicate. In your life with your family you may want to communicate what is for dinner that night, in sports you may want to communicate what time practice is, and where I worked this summer (Longhorn Swim Camp) we might need to communicate the airport schedule. These are examples of what you want to communicate now here are the objectives (for swim camp), communicate child’s age, destination, flight number, flight time, and what counselor is going to shuttle the child to the airport.

Deciding what resources are available makes a big difference in communicating. Resources include money, time and human resources. Families may have to communicate differently depending on what their schedules are like, if they have cell phones, or computer access. For a sports team, depending on the number of athletes depends how to communicate information to them. Mass e-mails are a way if everyone has computer access, mass text messages are another way, and word of mouth from the captains is another resource of communication. In my work example, to communicate the airport schedule we would receive an e-mail; and after the e-mail we would receive a mass text telling us to check our e-mail so no one can be missed in the communication process.

The last link to the communication process is, diagnosing the organizations reputation. For a family situation, if the family is well put together, and if you are absent from dinner this could cause bad reputation on your part for not receiving the messages. For the sport team, if the athletic advisor wants to relay a message through the coach to the athletes and fails to do so then the reputation of the team will go down depending on how well the coach communicates the information. And for my example of the camp I worked our reputation means a heck of a lot considering the children’s families have paid a lot of money to send their child to the best swim camp in the world, and if the children do not arrive home safely or in a timely manner the reputation of the camp will go down!

Resource information link to the chapter

In the links that I found pertaining to communicating strategically they pointed out ideas that were not as explained in the book. One of the major things I learned from the sources is that an executive needs to communicate. But they need to decide what is most important to communicate and what does not need to be communicated to the employees. This is a big concern, because if the wrong information gets out to the employees it can cause a lack of effort on the job site or even people getting in trouble for spreading rumors. At swim camp one of our head counselors let it slip that the counselor were going to get a half day off, and because he let this information slip soon the rumors spread and every counselor knew and started slacking because they knew their day was almost over which made our productivity dwindle.

The other article I uncovered about communicating strategically was about conflict in communication, and misunderstanding. If there are both or either of these issues in the communication process the effectiveness of the company can be tarnished. An example from my work experience of misunderstanding were information is given is when one of the counselors must not have heard the fact that if you are a male, you are not allowed to go into a female campers room unless you have a female counselor with you. Because this certain counselor misunderstood this information it caused conflict between all of the counselors and this caused a lot of talking behind the counselors back and ended in a big blow up until our boss stepped in. The communication process was not activated in the right manor which made the conflict become even worse.

Strategic communication is an important part of every aspect of our lives and must be understood to be effective.



http://www.cba.uni.edu/buscomm/buscomcourse/ReadingsSummer07/CommunicatingStrategically.pdf


http://www.imetacomm.com/otherpubs/pdf_doc_downloads/strat_commg_uncertainty_v4.pdf