Bottoms up! Let’s have a chat

The importance of communication in business is often talked about (or communicated!). But what do we mean by communication..? In this latest blog on bottom up communication I hope to show that unless we define our terms (as my English teacher used to tell me prior to essay writing) we can’t hope to put a successful system in place.

Officially communication means:

“The activity of conveying information by or to or between people or groups; a connection allowing access between persons or places; interactions between at least two agents which share a repertoire of signs and semiotic rules.”

Personally, I’d rather it meant simply:

“A dialogue between two or more people to calibrate their shared understanding on one or more topics.”

If we reframe all communication as a two-way calibration then there is less of a problem with top-down, bottom-up or lateral communication. Even when trying to deliver ‘top-down’ senior managers would, on that basis, need to talk AND listen AND think AND adapt AND respond. Then, when employees were trying to do bottom-up communication guess what? They would need to talk AND listen AND think AND adapt AND respond.

As the meerkat says – simples!

This is the third in my series of blogs on bottom-up communications (here is the previous blog). For the next, I’ll be looking at how a successful system should reflect what’s happening in our society already and use the tools we’re all now very familiar with – social media!

If you’d like to talk to me about bottom-up communications, please get in touch.