Poor Communicators

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

Careers, Business/management, Work, Advice, Harvard, Help, Mentor, Workplace, Business, Management, Challenges, Entrepreneurship, Hbr, Office, Business/careers, Business/entrepreneurship

4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2018

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is miscommunication a constant problem at your workplace? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Holly Weeks, a lecturer at Harvard University. They talk through what to do when your coworker won’t stop talking, your boss overcommunicates with everyone on a project, or a leader keeps changing what you're supposed to do.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.6	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.7	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.2	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.5	The truth is that we don't have to let the tension, conflicts, and misunderstandings get us down.
0:22.1	We can do something about them.
0:25.7	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:27.7	We take your questions about workplace dilemmas, and with the help of experts and insights
0:33.0	from academic research, we help you move forward.
0:42.7	Today we're talking about poor communicators with Holly Weeks.
0:45.8	She lectures on communication issues at the Harvard Kennedy School.
0:47.3	Holly, thanks for being in the show.
0:48.7	Glad to be here.
0:55.0	So you wrote a book called Failure to Communicate about managing difficult conversations at work. What drove you to write it?
0:56.0	I think the reason I wrote the book is that I needed it.
0:59.0	I suffer everything everyone else does, blanking out, losing my temper, whatever can go wrong.
1:03.0	I've already done it.
1:05.0	When people talk to you about poor communicators in their organizations, what are some of the most common problems you hear about?
1:15.3	Interestingly, I find that people have a hard time saying what the problem is.
1:17.6	For example, he just doesn't listen.
1:20.3	It's usually not that.
1:25.1	And so there's a lot of breakdown between trying to address or fix the problem and even just articulating what it is.
	...

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