Business Communication

Edwards Campus Vice Chancellor David Cook

We’re excited to welcome Dr. David Cook as the new Edwards Campus Vice Chancellor! Dr. Cook joined the Edwards Campus team in April 2013. He came from the KU Medical Center where he served as the associate vice chancellor for community engagement. You can read about Dr. Cook’s prestigious administrative, teaching, and research background at http://edwardscampus.ku.edu/about/pdf/davidcookbio.pdf.

But Dr. Cook is more than just our vice chancellor—he’s also an alum of KU’s PhD program in organizational communication and a former Edwards Campus instructor! We took a few minutes to chat with him about how his background in Org. Com. has influenced his work as a university administrator. Here’s what he had to say:

Why did you decide to study Communication Studies in general and Organizational Communication in particular?

I became interested in Org. Com. because of the quality and passion of the faculty, and I became passionate about the field after taking Dr. Cal Downs’s audits class. I eventually fell in love with international communications and cultural work. I also like that Org. Com. was a very applied field. It relates to real life, and you can solve real problems with it.

How has Org. Com. influenced your work as an administrator?

It’s been paramount in my administrative career. Management and leadership are based on the strength of one’s communication skills, and I use what I learned in my Org. Com. classes on a daily basis.

What does communication mean to you, and how is it important in your life?

To me, effective communication means being thoughtful about how you interact and build relationships with others. The difference between achieving your goals or not is based on how well you communicate with others.

Do you have a favorite memory from the classes you took and taught at the Edwards Campus?

What I remember loving most about Edwards was the mix of students from the Edwards and Lawrence campuses in the classroom. I really enjoyed having colleagues that were working adults. The diversity of sharing different life experiences in the classroom makes for a rich dialogue.

Thanks, Dr. Cook! We look forward to working with you for many years to come!

Making Communication Technology Work for You at Work

Dr. Tracy Russo, the director of the Communication Studies MA program at the Edwards Campus, delivered a talk last month titled “Making Communication Technology Work for You at Work” as part of the KU Edwards Campus’s Professional Edge series. The turnout was fantastic: over 80 people showed up to learn more about the challenges and benefits associated with communication technologies in the workplace.

Tracy Russo, Communication Studies. ©The University of Kansas/Office of University Relations. Credit: Doug Koch.

Professor Russo’s take-away was simple, but it’s one that not all of us think about every day: “The technology isn’t the communication—your message is the communication.” She argued that there is no such thing as an inherently bad or good method of communication, just media that are more or less effective in different contexts.

After reviewing the affordances and social costs of the most common types of communication technology—in-person meetings, phone calls, texting, voice mail, paper, and email—Professor Russo pointed out that workplace cultures can occasionally get “stuck” on various types of communication to their detriment.

For example, if two office mates are emailing each other while they’re sitting in the same room, then they’re probably missing out of the efficiency and relationship-building capabilities of speaking face-to-face. Similarly, if an office tried to communicate entirely by in-person meetings without relying on email or paper, there would be a lack of record-keeping on what was being done and efficiency would be eaten up by a constant stream of meetings.

Professor Russo presenting in the Regnier Hall Auditorium.

Professor Russo encouraged the audience to avoid depending too much on one mode of communication and to always remember the social costs and social benefits of each communication technology. She proposed four essential rules for efficiently communicating with others:

1) “Take the time to focus on the purpose of the communication—not for you, but for the receiver of the message.” What will your recipient get out of the message that could benefit him or her? Thinking in this way will ensure that your messages always have a “hook” for your audience.

2) Consider your audience and personalize the message to their needs, preferences, and limitations. Sending out the same message in the same way to a large group of people guarantees that at least some individuals will get left behind.

3) Choose your medium strategically, keeping in mind the message, what action you want the other party to take, and the other party’s needs and preferences. What can be conveyed effectively in a text message, an email, and a meeting are all very different!

4) Stop and think before you send the message. Give yourself the time to consider its layers and implications. Those few extra seconds each day will lead to much greater effectiveness and stronger relationships in the long run.

 Do you have any tips of your own related to communication and technology in the workplace? Share them with us in the comments!

COMS 930: Linking–Organizations and Their Communicative Connections

Are you a current student looking for a summer course? An alum seeking professional development? A prospective student interested in getting your feet wet in something besides a swimming pool?

You might want to consider enrolling in program director Dr. Tracy Russo’s summer class COMS 930: Linking–Organizations and Their Communicative Connections. Here is Professor Russo’s course description:

Photo by David F. McKinney, KU University Relations. Copyright 2007 The University of Kansas/Office of University Relations.

This organizational communication class focuses on organizations as the level of analysis.  We’ll consider questions about the communication of organizations and how organizational interact.  In particular, we will examine the role of technology in connecting (and disconnecting) organizations.

Among the topics we’ll address are how technology influences organizational form, how organizations organize into networks, how innovations diffuse through organizations, and how organizations’ attempts to establish identities have ripple effects through groups and types of organizations.  We’ll also look at how organizations are influenced by and influence corporate social responsibility and organizational/social ethics.

To help frame these questions, we’ll draw particularly on ideas from systems theory, institutional theory, and organizational rhetoric.

This class will meet face-to-face once a week in the months of June and July, with some meetings scheduled for Mondays and some on Wednesdays from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. This class will also include a substantial amount of mediated interaction equivalent to a class period. Students will write two short papers and create a final project in the form of a case study, a literature review, a research proposal, or another project.

Current students can enroll online as usual. Alumni and prospective students can contact us directly at laowens [at] ku [dot] edu for information about taking the class as a non-degree-seeking student.

We look forward to seeing you on campus this summer!

Brainstorming, Critical Collaboration, and Introversion: New Models for (Not) Working Together

As professionals and scholars, we spend a lot of time thinking about communication, but we don’t often think about instances when we shouldn’t communicate. However, a recent spate of media coverage debunking brainstorming and championing introversion might challenge our assumptions about collaboration’s usefulness.

Susan Cain’s new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking focuses on the benefits of introversion, particularly as it relates to creativity, leadership, and happiness. In a recent interview with NPR’s Audie Cornish, Cain suggests that even though introverts make up as much as half of the population, are at an unfair disadvantage into our extrovert-oriented culture:

“Introverts are much less often groomed for leadership positions, even though there’s really fascinating research [. . .] finding that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes when their employees are more proactive. They’re more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extroverted leader might, almost unwittingly, be more dominant and be putting their own stamp on things, and so those good ideas never come to the fore. [. . .]

“None of this is to say that it would be a good thing to get rid of teamwork and get rid of group work altogether. It’s more just to say that we’re at a point in our culture, and in our workplace culture, where we’ve gotten too lopsided. We tend to believe that all creativity and all productivity comes from the group, when in fact, there really is a benefit to solitude and to being able to go off and focus and put your head down.”

A recent article in The New Yorker suggests that even though collaboration is on the rise, traditional brainstorming (generating ideas in a group setting in the absence of negative feedback) is not effective. As Jonah Lehrer puts it in “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.” Even as collaboration is on the rise in many fields of research, Lehrer suggests that its uses are limited: working alone is often more creative than brainstorming, but random, cross-disciplinary, and—most importantly—critical and debate-oriented interactions can be far more productive to creativity than other forms of work.

Obviously, communication cultures are not “one size fits all”: different modes of collaboration and communication can serve different personalities, needs, and goals at different times. In an ideal world, how would you choose to collaborate (or not collaborate) with others? Have you ever found critical debate, isolation, or conventional brainstorming to be the key to a project’s success?

Nancy Duarte: How You Communicate Can Help You Change the World

We’ve all struggled with making plain old business presentations into something that can inspire real change, but Nancy Duarte offers one invaluable trick in her March 2011 TED talk: tell a story.

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

Duarte, author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and the CEO of Duarte Design, describes how stories–transformative timelines with  a beginning, a middle, and an end–can make ideas come to life for an audience. She asserts that the world’s best, most effective speeches follow an oscillating pattern that moves repeatedly between “what is” and “what could be.” To illustrate this pattern, she maps out Steve Jobs’s first iPhone launch speech from 2007 and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to show how real presentations consistently compare the present to the possible future.

Duarte's Pattern of Presentations. Image from http://www.thespeakerpoint.com/.

Duarte’s talk offers great insight into what makes presentations successful. What tricks do you use to make your presentations work? How do you bring your ideas to life so that you can change the world?

Bold Aspirations, Changing for Excellence, and Effectively Communicating Change

The University of Kansas has been going through some big changes recently. The University just released Bold Aspirations, a strategic plan meant to improve KU’s research, teaching, and contributions to the community. As one Bold Aspirations brochure states,

As our state’s flagship university, KU’s mission is to lift students and society. Our aspirations are bold: to be recognized as a top-tier public international research university.

KU has also invited a consulting group to campus to evaluate and streamline KU’s administrative systems. This Changing for Excellence initiative is one way for the university to prepare for future financial challenges by ensuring that we make the most out of our resources.

Obviously, KU is dedicated to refining the university’s mission, improving its reputation and culture, and strengthening its business practices to make sure that KU remains “A Great Place to Be You.”

But KU has also been dedicated to transparency, as well. If you clicked on any of the links above, you’ll see that these initiatives have inspired websites, videos, forums, brochures, reports, university-wide emails, and press releases—a plethora of different media designed to reach a diverse audience of stakeholders, including employees, students, and the public at large.

When an organization is faced with changes that are this pervasive and multifaceted, its leaders have to think carefully about how they communicate these changes to stakeholders.

©The University of Kansas/Office of University Relations. Credit: Megan McAtee , KU University Relations

When you encounter change in your organization, what kind of communications mean the most to you? What do you need to know so that you can continue to work, thrive, and remain flexible in a changing environment, and how can this information be most effectively presented?

Civility in the Workplace

Civility, or rather incivility, has become a hot topic.  From published pundits to folks in the grocery store check-out line, there’s a lot of complaining about the ways people talk to and about one another, especially at work.  Many observers are alarmed that incivility may seem increasingly normal, especially given its continuing presence in the media, in sitcoms to CSPAN.

In the most recent edition of Spectra, a publication of the National Communication Association, Janie Harden Fritz notes that incivility is costly to organizations, both in terms of people and productivity.  She writes

If left unchecked, incivility harms workplace relationships, costing managerial time and effort spent in damage control.  Incivility takes attention away from work, compromising the trust needed for successful cooperative activity. .. Communication marked by incivility – rudeness, impoliteness, failure to treat others with at least minimal respect – distracts us from tasks, increases stress, and infects the organizational climate, creating a toxic matrix of distrust and cynicism that transforms enthusiasm into reluctant resignation and daily routines into drudgery.

At the heart of civility is consideration of audience and of thinking strategically about what we want to accomplish, choosing appropriate approaches.  Incivility and civility highlight the power of messages to harm and to heal.

Copyright KU Office of University Relations. Credit: Doug Koch.

Fritz argues that electronic communication, with its accessibility and speed, provides more opportunities for incivility, particularly in its blurring of public and private discourse.  Given the complexity of our organizational lives and the human reality that we do have bad days sometimes, our workplaces probably never will be free of thoughtless or deliberate incivility.  But efforts to practice professional civility create a backdrop of respect and goodwill that may sustain us through both the mundane and difficult times.

JD Schramm on Consistency in Communication

This week, we stumbled across “A Model of Consistency,” a blog post from JD Schramm. Shramm, a member of the Harvard Business Review‘s blog network, writes about a former professor who sent his students and friends monthly newsletters year in, year out, to the tune of 467 issues before he retired. It’s a fun read, and Schramm offers a valuable question:

What does consistent communication mean for you?

As we kick off our new blog here at Com. Studies, we naturally have consistency in communication on our minds. In the world of online, written communications, what types of consistency are important to you? What do you look for when you decide to follow a blog?

Aristotle once said that

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

What habits can we, and all online communicators, cultivate to produce excellent content and bring our readers back for more?