I’m going to discuss my personal battle with being misunderstood through text, instant messages, and email at my work. Just today I was involved in an IM conversation about a problem at one of our test sites with a certain problem vehicle. The person was going on and on about the details of the problem the test site coordinator was having and at one point I messaged back “I know all about it I just got off the phone with Jon (site lead).” To have that responded to with “Excuse me for wasting your time…”. The sole intent was for that person not to have to waste their time giving me details that I already knew. So after a phone call we were back to the relationship we had prior to the IM conversation taking place. Had we been talking face to face I could have started nodding my head with a smile to show “yes I already know the bad news you don’t need to give me all these details” and exhibited low-context understanding as the receiver.
In that instance I believe I was being interpreted as egocentric in cutting that person off. I also find myself doing the same thing in emails and coming off as egocentric due to providing excessive information and opinions. I do this out of fear of being misunderstood both in content and intent.
The culture I work in has me in the middle of a low-context and high-context culture which makes it difficult for me to communicate in emails consistently. I’m routinely the go between from engineering to manufacturing and back. Engineering likes to be inundated with information, facts, and data. They also inundate me with instructions and questions. On the other hand when I have to communicate these instructions or resolutions to problems to manufacturing they want the simplest description and process. So I find myself frequently have to decode something very complicated and encoding it very simply to send back out for execution. You would think that would make me a master communicator but the second half of that communication hasn’t been mastered yet and normally takes me a couple tries to get it through to them affectively. Typically manufacturing wants to know two things. Is it fixed? And did you correct it so that it won’t happen again? They don’t want to know anymore details than that.
Ross McMurray OLEAD 410 Lesson 4
References
Pennsylvania State University. (2015). OLEAD 410 Lesson 04: Leadership in a Global Context. Retrieved at: httop://cms.psu.edu
Moran, R.T., Abramson, N.R., Moran, S.V. (2014). Managing cultural differences. (9th ed.) New York, NY: Routledge.