Three Steps to Improving Understanding
Loriana Sekarski
November, 2019
When communicating with volunteers or staff, there are three aspects to making sure that what you’re communicating about actually gets accomplished. How you communicate the request can impact any of these three aspects:
- They understand what you said (explaining)
- They are motivated to take action (influencing)
- They follow through and take action (holding people accountable)
We will examine all three of these things in this next series of articles.
First up: explaining. While explaining and getting them to understand what we are saying may seem simple, it’s often not simple in reality. Using jargon, acronyms, or clichés can impact how well someone understands what you’re saying. Another issue may be your assumptions of what the staff member or volunteer should know without stopping to check what they actually know.
These three steps can help improve understanding when communicating with staff or volunteers.
- Choose the right words
Pastors often approach things from a theological standpoint and use that type of wording and the acronyms that go with it. They think they’re being clear, and it might be perfectly clear to another pastor. But it’s not clear to that volunteer who doesn’t have theological training, so the message may not get through.
The key is using simple words that mean the same thing to all people in everyday language. If putting something in writing, it’s important to be conversational by thinking about how we would actually speak about the topic. Here’s a great link to eliminate words that tend to be more formal and less conversational. For example, I can “use” words or I can “utilize” words—“use” is a lot simpler, so that’s the better choice.
Often I find that words that are common to one level of leadership are not commonplace to other levels in the organization. For example, words like processes, concepts, and constructs are frequently used by upper leadership but may not be as commonly used among all levels of employees. To effectively communicate with all levels of staff and volunteers, be sure to avoid jargon or buzzwords that may not have the same meaning for your employees. Find a different word or create a metaphor to be sure your message comes through clearly.
Metaphors can be extremely helpful when sharing new concepts and trying to get people to understand the change. When communicating something to an individual or a group, think about a situation that they are familiar with and use that illustration to explain your point. Dr. Tony Evans is brilliant at selecting and powerfully communicating metaphors. You might peek at this blog to see how I explained a rather complex management tool through football. I personally like sports metaphors (as do most of my clients), but you need to know your audience and if it will make sense to them.
- Take time to consider people’s backgrounds
When explaining any concept to someone, it’s helpful to know where they’re coming from. People have different knowledge, perspectives, experiences, levels of intelligence, and ways that they process information. No two people are alike in this way! Our brains operate differently, so what may be intuitive to one person could be completely baffling to another. We see this in marriages sometimes where two people simply think differently and may struggle to communicate because of it. It’s no different in an organization.
Be aware of the different assumptions and contexts that different groups will experience when they hear the message, as that impacts interpretation as well. For example, a church announced service and said families were welcome. As I heard it, I thought back to how I would have received that message when I was single. I would not have felt welcomed and may have concluded the church was more a place for families than all people. I know that wasn’t their intention, but a group of people with families wrote the message and didn’t think about how those without would take it.
So how do we break through all of this? One way is to test important messages. Share them with people who think differently than you do and then ask them to rephrase what they think they heard. I suggest using different test groups for this to get a wide range of feedback, especially for important messages you’re sharing with a group. Before you share a message, always think through who might be in the audience and how they might interpret that message differently.
"A church culture of “playing nice” can triple this tendency and lead to an environment where issues are rarely discussed openly."
- Check for understanding
There’s a difference between a conversation and a lecture. Conversations are two-way, but a lecture is only one person talking. I recently heard a leader proclaim, “I spent an hour explaining it!” It made me wonder if they asked any questions of the receiving person or allowed them to ask questions.
Understanding a complex topic can take time, and people need the opportunity to ask questions. Sometimes information needs to be shared on an individual basis or in smaller groups because some people won’t speak up in a group if they don’t understand something. Share less information with them up front and then talk about it more. Let them dig into the ideas and start applying them in the discussion. That way, you can listen to whether there is true understanding.
When I taught undergraduate and would write an exam, I would sometimes get 10 different responses to the same question. I thought the question was crystal clear when I wrote it, but in reality, it wasn’t. Sometimes the students didn’t understand the question at all. Once I saw the answers and talked with them, it was obvious how muddled my question was. It can be the same with our speaking, and that’s why it’s important to test it and check for understanding.
The bottom line is if you make it easy for people to understand it, then you can move on to influencing their motivation to get them to take action. We’ll take a look at influencing in the next article.
Loriana Sekarski is the founder and president of BONSAI, a consulting company that transforms leaders (and businesses) into the best version of themselves. As a leadership coach, Loriana teaches leaders how to hone soft skills, spur workplace engagement, and achieve untapped levels of potential. Outside of BONSAI, Loriana serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University’s graduate student program. Additionally, she’s fine-tuning her passion project, TakeFlight, a program that addresses domestic abuse within the Christian community.
