In my introductory post, 12 Vital signs of Organizational Health, I listed the 12 signs.  Here is sign #8:

A healthy organization excels at communication — of all kinds — internally, and externally.

So, you know your “why,” thus you are grounded; you’ve developed your strategy, you’ve got your leader, your leadership team, the talent you need, everybody is on the same page…  Now what?

Communicate, communicate well, communicate fully, communicate thoughtfully, and communicate constantly.

In reality, you can’t quite separate each of these neatly from the others.  To build teams, to successfully attain genuine alignment, genuine buy-in, you’ve got to communicate – to everyone, in every “direction.”

Never assume that everybody, or really, anybody, knows anything.  Tell them, tell them again, and again — and again.  And, tell them until they say, “I’ve got it!.” And, then, make sure they do in fact “have it.”  As Verne Harnish put it in his excellent and practical book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits:

I have written often on this.  Communication takes place in meetings, conversations, e-mails, expanded documents – memos, reports…

There are many great suggestions about how to do this well.  Read my blog post “Can You Help Me Soften the Tone in my E-mails – Without Sacrificing Efficiency?”.  Remember the brilliance of the principles in both Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, and Words that Work by Frank Luntz.

In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers commend six principles for successfully communicating messages that will stick:

Principle 1	Simplicity
Principle 2	Unexpectedness
Principle 3	Concreteness
Principle 4	Credibility
Principle 5	Emotions
Principle 6	Stories

(By the way, remembering Aristotle and the ancient rhetoricians is always useful:  of the six principles, ethos, pathos, and mythos are clearly evident, and logos is never far behind).

In Words that Work, Luntz proposes 10 Rules for Successful Communicators.  (Yes, there is some overlap in these two lists).

The Ten Rules of Successful Communication:

Rule 1	Simplicity:  Use Small Words
Rule 2	Brevity:  Use Short Sentences
Rule 3	Credibility is as Important as Philosophy
Rule 4	Consistency Matters
Rule 5	Novelty:  Offer Something New
Rule 6	Sound and Texture Matter (alliteration)
Rule 7	Speak Aspirationally
Rule 8	Rule Eight – Visualize
Rule 9	Ask a Question
Rule 10	Prepare Context and Explain Relevance

So, how are you doing with the communication task?  Have you made sure that you have a crystal clear, “on the-same-page” message?  Then, say it loudly and clearly and often.

The real lesson is this – don’t forget to communicate.  With your team, up, down, and across the organization.  And do the same as you venture “out.”  Communicate equally well, equally thoroughly, with clients, with customers, with suppliers, with collaborators…  Communicate — with everyone.

In his latest essay for The New Yorker, SLOW IDEAS: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t?, the always insightful Atul Gawande wrote about the attempts to spread an inexpensive “easy” treatment for diarrheal disease.  Here’s the key excerpt:

Diarrheal disease remained the world’s biggest killer of children under the age of five.
In 1980, however, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization called brac decided to try to get oral rehydration therapy adopted nationwide. The campaign required reaching a mostly illiterate population. The most recent public-health campaign—to teach family planning—had been deeply unpopular. The messages the campaign needed to spread were complicated.
Nonetheless, the campaign proved remarkably successful. A gem of a book published in Bangladesh, “A Simple Solution,” tells the story. The organization didn’t launch a mass-media campaign—only twenty per cent of the population had a radio, after all. It attacked the problem in a way that is routinely dismissed as impractical and inefficient: by going door to door, person by person, and just talking.
The workers were only semi-literate, but they helped distill their sales script into seven easy-to-remember messages…

(Read the whole essay.  It is about the way innovation spreads, and communication methods are front and center — and truly critical).

Ed Savage, Manager of MID Training & Development at L-3 in Greenville, TX,  and a regular participant in the First Friday Book Synopsis, introduced me to the “Rule of Seventeen.”  This rule states that one must repeat a message 17 times to get it through, fully accepted, and then acted upon by a listener.  When I heard it, it immediately made sense.  Take a look at this graphic, provided by Ed:

It is a big, big mistake to think that folks understand everything they need to understand by some magic form of osmosis.  Tell them what they need to know.  Then, tell them again.  And again.  And again.  And…

Any organization that experiences a “What we have here is a failure to communicate” culture is definitely an unhealthy organization.  And an organization that excels at communication throughout the entire organization, in every way, using every available method, has a better chance at a pretty good health check-up – don’t you think?

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You can purchase my synopses of Made to Stick, and Words that Work, each with multi-page comprehensive handout + audio, at our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.