M’s the word: Communication is NOT a two-way street…
It’s an obstacle course
By on Mar 18, 2012I might have told you already, but as a child I was privileged to have parents who believed in foreign travel. We were the only children in our village who spent two weeks of every year on a beach in Spain. I can hear you all saying that you did this, too, but remember I did it when there were no Easyjet or Ryan Air flights. My dad drove almost non-stop from York to Dover, then from Calais to the Costa Brava. Not just in his hurry to get there, you understand, but so that he spent as little time and money in the hated France.
Things went a little pear-shaped one year, when the wheel came off the caravan at 60 miles per hour, in the middle of France, and we had to stop for an evening while he found a welder who could fix it to get us home. There was a nightclub in the town, though probably a dance club is more accurate, and the three of us (my brothers and I) could not resist. My French was passable. I could order trois bieres without much effort.
My middle brother took a sip and then sauntered off towards the dance floor, where an attractive girl was making lazy circles around her handbag. He is still a good dancer, but back in those days he was also fit, so he met with a ready response. When the music stopped, he walked her over to the wallflower area, where my youngest brother was nursing his biere, and I was earnestly trying to engage another wallflower in conversation.
Middle brother was by now ‘talking’ to the girl he had ‘pulled’. Only without French, he was talking like Jonny Halliday: perfect English, with a French accent. The girl smiled, but she had no idea how to respond. With my brother, at that time, the answer was pretty simple but thankfully she chose not to understand.
Well, we are now working with several French specialists. We have begun a project with one in particular, and things were looking good, until a recent telephone discussion with one of our agency staff. The wheels came off, figuratively, in the middle of a long sentence, which would have been difficult for a Geordie to understand, let alone a Frenchman. And he did get annoyed. In fact, I thought he would disconnect. Until my newest member of staff, who happens to be Spanish, interrupted with her Barcelona accent and asked the agent to re-phrase her question in something that non-English speakers could understand. At which the professor chuckled, and the meeting moved on.
I am working in an international company, which really means an American/English environment. Anyone who joins the group, even though we work in Germany, is expected to be able to speak English. And the better the overall English spoken in the group, the easier it is to forget that most of our customers do NOT work in an English speaking world.
So I said a silent ‘Thank you’ to my new recruit, and congratulated her on her interjection and wrote a short note to myself and to the agency. Try to remember that communication is not just a two-way street. It is an obstacle course that can only be negotiated with skill and attention. Focus on the message and try to read it from the perspective of the recipient. You will be amazed how many times you misfire. How many times your witty riposte sailed overhead, but your correspondent was too polite or too embarrassed to let you know.
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