A Happy Median

      Communication, a word that has many different faces.  Communication also wears many different masks.  Communication can be accomplished in many different spoken languages, through body language, through sign languages, and through many different written forms. When you have all of these barriers in communication, you would think that we would do everything that we could to simplify how we communicate with other.  This isn’t the case.  If you were to communicate with someone that speaks the same language as you, but the person has a different ethical background then you can have a difficult time getting your message across.  Sometimes you could speak the same language, have the same ethical background, but have different job status, and find it difficult to communicate properly with one another.  In his article “Ten Commandments of Intercultural Communication” author Martin Hahn writes about several ways to effectively communicate. In this discussion I would like to take one of my recent situations and apply some of his methods to the situation to see if I could have communicated my situation better.

      A few days ago a co-worker and I got into an argument about our policies and procedures.  My co-worker wrote a standard operating procedure on how to perform a process.  Allow me to give you a little bit of a background before continuing.  I am in the military, my co-worker is a civilian. In the military I have job security until my contract runs out. My co-worker does not, his job security is performance based. In the military we have a mentality to just get the job done.  In the civilian world they are paid by the hour so they have to ensure that they are gainfully employed the whole time.  Now that you understand where my co-worker and I are coming from, let’s get back to the situation.  When my co-worker wrote his standard operating procedures, it was more of an overview of what needed to happen.  To which I felt that too much of the process was left up to interpretation. To give you an example of what I am talking about, if part of the process involved a peanut butter and jelly sandwich he wrote in the process: make peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Now I have simplified this with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it is way more complex than that.  My argument with my co-worker was that if we were to do this we should write in each step of making the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I understand how to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and my co-worker understands how to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but the people that will do the job in his place or my place needs to know how to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich or the mission is a failure.  My co-worker and I went round and round about this over and over again.  Now had I read the article “Ten Commandment of Intercultural Communication” I would have come across some tools to use when communicating with my co-worker, here are a few epiphanies that I came to after reading the article.

                By bridging our differences, I could have successfully achieved intercultural communication (M. Hahn, 2005).  Some of the commandments that author Hahn pointed out made perfect sense. 

                The first commandment was to be aware of differing social values (M. Hahn, 2005).  My co-worker has to value his importance to the organization.   In order to retain his job he has to ensure that the organization needs his services.  So when he make a standard operating procedure that is vague then anyone who reads it knows that he is the one that they have to turn to in order to get answer increasing the organizations need for him. Had I realized this then I could have communicated that I understand that this is what he was attempting to do, and that I think that we can find a happy median where people are able to accomplish their mission without having to revert back to him for everything just majority of the more difficult complex issues. 

                The third commandment was to be aware of decision making customs: not all people like to make decisions quickly and efficiently, and the fourth commandment said to beware of the concepts of time (M. Hahn, 2005).  Now when I came to my co-worker and argued with him about making the changes to his standard operating procedures he waved my off, and said that he would get to it later.  In the military we like to get to things right away, especially when we know that it is wrong.  We like to fix it and then get back to business as usual.  Well in the military we have that luxury because we are on salary.  If there is an issue on the civilian side that does not require immediate attention then dragging it out benefits them.  Not realizing this I attempted to push my co-worker to take the task on immediately.  Had I thought about this commandment I would have approached the situation differently.  I would have offered to take the task on myself and when he had time to assist in the revision of the standard operating procedure.

                These are just a few of the commandments that I could have used when communicating with my co-worker.  The examples that I gave in this discussion show how I could have altered my communication with my co-worker to more effectively relay the message that I was attempting to get across.  The message is that we can find a happy median between what will help him in the security of his position, and still being able to provide enough information to accomplish the task at hand with minimum aide from him.

 

Respectfully,

W. D. Stubblefield

 

Reference Page:

Hahn, Martin 2005  Ten Commandments of Intercultural Communication retrieved from website http://ezinearticles.com/?Ten-Commandments-of-Intercultural-Communication&id=120247