Leadership and Communication Issues at Work

Interviewing HR Manager

When interviewing the HR manager Ahmed Al-Salim, who works at a well-known bank in Kuwait, I addressed three specific questions to him regarding communication breakdowns. Because communication is really key to a strong HR department, I wanted to see how well he responded to breakdowns in communication among the topic areas of internal politics, decisions making and leadership. Specifically, I asked: How do communication breakdowns in these areas influence the manager's ability to function effectively in the job.

Regarding breakdowns in communication pertaining to internal politics, he responded: Internal politics is inevitable at any workplace, regardless of the culture. People will try to jockey for position, will try to curry favor, will be upset about some policy, or will want a co-worker or boss to be either rewarded or censored for various reasons. When two individuals cannot find a common ground or fail to see the other's point-of-view, this can lead to a breakdown in communication -- and what the HR manager is affected is in his ability to keep everyone moving on the same page towards the same goal. With internal politics, there is a tendency for different aims to appear organically and for movements to come up. What I like to do is to identify these movements and identify the seeds of them -- why they are happening, why certain workers feel things should go one way or the other -- and then I try to see why others are not moving that way. There is a need to locate the basis for the disruption, for the diversion so as to overcome the obstacle of communication breakdown. It is like running out of gas on the road. You get out and walk back to the last petrol station and fill up a can and take it back to the can: the fuel in this case is information -- and you take that back to the scene of the breakdown and call a meeting and share the information and show everyone where these different movements are coming from and why they are going in different directions. It can be very useful for everyone because it gives them context and they are able to step outside themselves for a minute and see more of their surroundings and more of themselves and more of the direction of the overall company and how aims and strategies should be aligning. If there is still a breakdown I repeat back to the person or group what they are saying to show that I understand and then I ask them why they feel that way and we walk back to gather more data, because maybe there is something that I missed. The important thing is that we are all together now communicating whereas before there was a breakdown. By listening and posing questions it provides space to clear the air and get things moving again. This is essentially what Daim et al. (2012) assert when they identify "trust" as a necessary quality for communications to be regenerated. Establishing transparency and identifying needs is a good way to help build trust and rebuild communications.

As for decision-making, communication breakdowns occur here because there is an inability -- for whatever reason, whether it is lack of confidence, lack of information, lack of direction, lack of initiative -- to make a decision. Communication stops and work grinds to a halt on this particular issue. So for an HR manager, the best way to handle this is to contact the decision-maker and find out what is going on. This can be done by asking whether any more information is needed for this particular issue -- whether more time is required, whether there is anything that anyone else can give that can help this decision be made. If the decision-maker cannot say what is needed then it becomes an issue of identifying what is missing, what this individual needs to get moving -- and that can be found by asking questions about what the decision-maker is looking for, listening, repeating back to the person what he or she is saying and asking them to go on and explain more. Sometimes all it takes is for the individual to talk it out him or herself. This allows them the opportunity to hear themselves say what they are thinking and they can better understand the situation in this way so as to make a decision. The goal here is to get people communicating about their needs and wants and helping them to identify what it is they are after so that the work can continue.

Breakdowns in communication among leadership are some of the hardest to confront because here the leader is just not open for discussion, so just getting them to open up is a feat in and of itself. In this type of situation, where the source is unwilling to talk about what is going or why communications have stopped, then one has to work without using the source. The HR manager can gather data from others about the state of affairs and use this to detect the underlying causes of what is happening. This is in line with the research conducted by Lockwood (2015), which states that the underlying reasons for communication breakdowns are ultimately what have to be identified before communications can be resolved. So in the case of a breakdown in communications among leadership, it is necessary to interview several different stakeholders in order to make an assessment of the situation and then address the appropriate persons via the right channels so as to get the right kind of leadership in place once again.

In conclusion, Al-Salim had very good insights on how to overcome communication breakdowns in these three areas -- whether internal politics, decision-making, or leadership -- and backed up his methods with research pertaining to good communications.

References

Daim, T. (2012). Exploring the communication breakdown in global virtual teams.

International Journal of Project Management, 30(2): 199-212.

Lockwood, J. (2015). Virtual team management. What is causing communication

breakdown? Language and Intercultural Communication, 15(1): 125-140.