Overcoming Communication Breakdowns: HR Manager Interview
This paper presents findings from an interview with Ahmed Al-Salim, an HR manager at a prominent bank in Kuwait, focused on how communication breakdowns affect HR functioning. The interview explores three key areas: internal politics, decision-making, and leadership. Al-Salim describes practical strategies for identifying the root causes of communication failures, rebuilding trust, and restoring dialogue among staff and leaders. His responses are grounded in scholarly research by Daim et al. (2012) and Lockwood (2015), connecting real-world HR practice to academic frameworks on communication in organizational settings.
- Introduction: Interview context and three question areas
- Communication Breakdowns in Internal Politics: Strategies for resolving politically driven communication failures
- Communication Breakdowns in Decision-Making: How HR supports stalled decision-makers through dialogue
- Communication Breakdowns in Leadership: Gathering stakeholder data when leaders are unresponsive
- Conclusion: Summary of Al-Salim's practical communication insights
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses a clear primary source — a structured interview — and ties the subject's responses directly to peer-reviewed research, giving practical insights an academic foundation.
- Each of the three topic areas is addressed in its own dedicated section, creating a logical, parallel structure that makes comparisons easy to follow.
- The interviewee's extended analogy (running out of gas on the road) is preserved verbatim, providing a vivid, memorable illustration of the information-gathering process during a breakdown.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the technique of triangulating practitioner knowledge with scholarly sources. Rather than simply reporting what the interviewee said, the writer anchors Al-Salim's responses to Daim et al. (2012) on trust and communication regeneration and Lockwood (2015) on identifying underlying causes, showing how real HR practice aligns with established research findings.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief introduction explaining the interview context and the three question areas. It then devotes one substantial paragraph to each topic — internal politics, decision-making, and leadership — each containing both the interviewee's strategy and a supporting citation. A short conclusion synthesizes Al-Salim's overall effectiveness, followed by a references list in APA format.
Introduction
When interviewing HR manager Ahmed Al-Salim, who works at a well-known bank in Kuwait, I addressed three specific questions regarding communication breakdowns. Because communication is key to a strong HR department, I wanted to see how he responded to breakdowns in the topic areas of internal politics, decision-making, and leadership — specifically, how communication breakdowns in these areas influence a manager's ability to function effectively in the role.
Communication Breakdowns in Internal Politics
Regarding breakdowns in communication pertaining to internal politics, Al-Salim responded that internal politics is inevitable at any workplace, regardless of the culture. People will try to jockey for position, curry favor, express displeasure about a policy, or push for a co-worker or supervisor to be rewarded or censured for various reasons. When two individuals cannot find 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 most affected by is his ability to keep everyone moving toward the same goal.
With internal politics, there is a tendency for competing aims to emerge organically and for factions to form. Al-Salim explained his approach: "What I like to do is 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 the 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 car: 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."
He noted that this process can be very useful for everyone because it gives context, allowing people to step outside themselves for a moment and see more of their surroundings, more of themselves, and more of the direction of the overall company — and how individual aims and strategies should be aligning. "If there is still a breakdown," he continued, "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 approach is consistent with what organizational communication researchers emphasize. Daim et al. (2012) identify "trust" as a necessary quality for communications to be regenerated. Establishing transparency and identifying needs is a good way to build trust and rebuild communications.
Communication Breakdowns in Decision-Making
As for decision-making, Al-Salim explained that communication breakdowns occur here because of an inability — for whatever reason, whether it is lack of confidence, lack of information, lack of direction, or lack of initiative — to make a decision. Communication stops and work grinds to a halt on the issue in question. 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, whether more time is required, or whether anyone else can provide something that would help the decision be made.
If the decision-maker cannot articulate what is needed, it becomes a matter of identifying what is missing. That can be uncovered by asking questions about what the decision-maker is looking for, listening carefully, repeating back what he or she is saying, and asking them to elaborate. "Sometimes all it takes is for the individual to talk it out him or herself," Al-Salim said. "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 is to get people communicating about their needs and wants, and to help them identify what they are after so that the work can continue.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Al-Salim offered very good insights on how to overcome communication breakdowns in these three areas — whether internal politics, decision-making, or leadership — and supported his methods with research pertaining to effective communication. His practical strategies, grounded in active listening, trust-building, and stakeholder engagement, reflect a thoughtful and evidence-informed approach to HR management in complex organizational environments.
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.
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