V Viswanathan
Effective communication is an essential ingredient for achieving success. Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management said, “The most important thing in communication is to hear, what isn’t being said.” Costly lapses can occur when a communication is misinterpreted.
An industry that I worked for, produced as one of its main products a chemical in powdery form. This chemical, in its wet form was produced in one section, and dried in another section by injecting steam in a mammoth, cylindrical drum that rotated with deafening noise. The wet and dry process areas were exactly opposite each other, with just a road separating the two.
We had a process manager who was always bubbly and displayed a high degree of energy and enthusiasm. He was a man of action, both literally and figuratively. Once, he stood at the ground floor of the wet section monitoring the production. The entire process was happening very smoothly without any hitch and this gave joy to the manager. Across the road and diametrically opposite him, he spotted a plant operator walking around in the drying section. The manager wanted to know if the colossaldrum in the drying section was also running trouble-free.
It was pre-mobile era and to be understood over the din, the manager had to only gesture and find out if the drum in the drying section was operating fine.He made a few circles in the air (to denote the drum), showed a thumbs up sign (to represent if it was fine) and nodded his head animatedly as if he were in a hurry. The operator mistook the manager’s gesture. He thought there was some major problem in the wet section and that’s why the manager had asked him to stop the drier immediately. He rushed inside and stopped the massive drier machine and the factory came to a grinding halt. The manager became wet with sweat and knew that he’d be grilled and dried in the production meeting for a costly miscommunication arising out of his hyper excitement and he knew there was absolutely no need for him to quiz the operator in the drying section.
In the same industry, a senior engineer instructed one of the trainees in the electrical department to note down some parameters in an electrical panel that supplied power to a set of very critical machineries. This work can be done in two ways – either without cutting power supply or after stopping power supply to the equipments. The latter option called for very elaborate procedure. The senior engineer wanted the trainee to do this work without causing any disturbance to the system. But he did not mention clearly that no equipment should be stopped for taking the readings.
The trainee who went to the panel room, not being clearly told of the method, switched off power supply to the vital equipments one by one. This led to a severe disruption of production and took the operation engineers by complete shock and awe. They rushed to the panel room, spotted the trainee and asked him what went wrong. He serenely switched off one more equipment in their presence and replied, “I’m checking some important parameters in the panel” at which they got infuriated and jumped from earth to sky. The faux pas became the talk of the factory and of course, a major learning point, in the art of communication, which is in essence a two way street.
