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(And Nobody’s Saying Anything About It)
I was working with a team recently, and something was happening beneath the surface that nobody was talking about.
On the surface, everything looked fine. People were polite. Nobody was yelling. There was no overt conflict. But, according to the department manager, the underlying dynamic was toxic. Passive-aggressive behavior. Eye rolls. Silent frustration. People doing things their own way instead of the agreed-upon way. They needed help.
So I dug deeper to assess the communication style of the team and its individual team members. That’s when something quite interesting emerged.
The Four Communication Styles
To get to the root of communication issues, we conducted a half-day workshop. Prior to the workshop each participant takes the HRDQ assessment which identifies four primary communication styles: Considerate, Direct, Spirited, and Systematic.
- Considerate communicators focus on relationships and harmony. They want to be nice and avoid conflict. Their strength is compassion. Their challenge is they avoid addressing problems directly.
- Direct communicators focus on results. They’re straightforward and value efficiency. Their strength is clarity. Their challenge is they can come across as insensitive.
- Spirited communicators bring enthusiasm and energy. Their strength is motivation. Their challenge is they can lack follow-through.
- Systematic communicators focus on process and precision. Their strength is reliability. Their challenge is they can slow down decision-making.
As with most assessments like this, the idea isn’t to identify “good” or “bad” communication styles. Each style has value and applications in specific settings and healthy teams need team members will all four styles.
And that’s where problems can lie. When teams are overloaded with one or two communication styles, dysfunction can emerge. That’s why having diverse communication styles among your team members is so important.
The Power of Diverse Communication Styles for Effective Communication
Each communication style brings different benefits to your team:
- Considerate communicators bring compassion.
- Direct communicators will push back on bad decisions.
- Spirited communicators bring energy.
- Systematic communicators ensure quality.
Together, these styles work together to build team cohesiveness, collaboration, productivity, and effectiveness.
But each style also has their downsides too:
- Considerate communicators don’t like to make waves so aren’t likely to speak up when there is a problem. This builds resentments.
- Direct communicators can come across as harsh and even intimidating.
- Spirited communicators exaggerate and bring drama.
- Systematic communicators can be terse and avoid risks.
Here’s the truth: Effective teams aren’t ones where everyone is polite. Effective teams are ones where people can disagree without being afraid. Where people can speak their minds. Where problems get addressed directly.
That’s the kind of team that actually functions well.
The Leadership Mandate
It’s important for leaders to understand the communication dynamics among their team members both to ensure effective teamwork and to ensure that you’re getting the feedback you need to unearth potential issues and make necessary process improvements.
When your employees fail to speak up, regardless of the reason, your department, the organization and, ultimately, your patients pay the price.
Helping team members to first understand their own style and how to better communicate with people who have different styles is a vital step in fostering collaboration and team effectiveness.
Ensuring diverse communication styles among your team members can help drive:
- Diverse perspectives. If people aren’t saying what they actually think, you’re not getting the full picture.
- Problem-solving. Problems don’t get fixed because they’re not being named.
- Trust. Paradoxically, people sense the underlying tension and distrust grows.
- Accountability. When problems aren’t addressed directly, nobody takes responsibility for solutions.
- Efficiency. Teams waste energy on workarounds and subtle resistance.
The leader’s job is to make it safe for people to speak up. It’s important to normalize healthy conflict. Conflict about ideas and decisions is good. Help your team understand the power of positive conflict so they won’t fear speaking up.
You need those honest inputs. And it starts with understanding communication styles.
Tags: Communication, CommunicationStyles, Leadership, OrganizationalCulture, TeamDynamics
