Communication Impossible: Preventing Incomplete Conversations

Did you ever see the TV show “Restaurant Impossible”? An hour of interesting communication that saves a restaurant and sometimes saves a family too. But my favorite moment is at the very end, when the show is over, and some guy – while they are turning off the final credits – says “That’s done!” He has a great voice, and now I’ve started saying it too, using the same tone he does. I finish the dishes? “That’s done!” Finish writing a blog? “That’s done!”

It is particularly interesting because I just finished a communication assessment for a client (“That’s done!”), and saw that the top workplace issues in their organization are created by what we call “incomplete conversations”. Those happen when:

• Somebody does something really good and nobody says, “Thank you!”
• Or somebody doesn’t keep their promise to get you that information you need when they said they’d have it – and you don’t contact them and say, “Hey, where’s that price schedule you said you’d have on my desk this morning?”
• Or you change an appointment on your calendar and forget to notify some of the people you were supposed to meet.

The first incomplete conversation is likely to cause a little bit of hurt feelings, when the person wonders if you even noticed the good thing they did. But if you leave out that “Thank you!” on a regular basis, it can turn into a grudge, or worse.

The second one eats away at an organization’s integrity and undermines accountability. If you don’t follow up when people don’t keep their word, they will learn that you don’t really care about what you say you want. If you wonder why you don’t get what you want, read that last sentence again because it’s true. You lose your credibility, and nobody takes you seriously. So when you ask people in another department for something you need right now, well, guess what? You have trained them out of being accountable.

The third one is when you make a change and don’t really consider who will be affected by it. You can’t be surprised when they’re sort of mad at you. Maybe even more than sort of mad – they might gossip about you, say mean things to you, or just not invite you to something you should attend. Payback is a bear, but we bring it on ourselves.

So this organization is going to learn about where the incomplete conversations are. We already know they have something like all 3 of these situations, but I’m betting we will find more of them. When we find out where and when they happen, we can see how to put in the completion. That would reduce some of those negative feelings in a hurry and maybe even boost their accountability scores too: it’s not impossible.