As I tweeted yesterday, “We see and often judge others by their behavior while we know nothing about the motivation behind that behavior”.

When you go about your business without communicating with the people around you, whether it’s your boss, co-workers or family, what are some of the assumptions they might make about you?

• you don’t care
• you are selfish and thoughtless
• you are not dependable
• maybe even that you are incompetent

These assumptions are often wrong and will give you a bad rap. But if you aren’t saying anything to the contrary or providing information  about the thoughts and motivation behind your actions, people will think what they will and you may not like what that is.

I once had a situation where the director of another department would email me requests for specific information. She always cc’d my boss. It irritated the hell out of me and made me feel like I was in kindergarten. Further, I couldn’t understand why she did it because I always followed through with whatever she needed in a timely way. I decided instead of being pissy and letting it bug me I should ask her about it. I went to her office and said, “In the interest of better working relationships, can we talk for a minute?” I explained how I felt about her cc’ing my boss on all her requests to me and asked her why she did that since I thought I had been very responsive to her. She said she had no problem whatsoever with my compliance. The only reason she was cc’ing my boss was because when she had starting giving me tasks, he got pissed that she hadn’t gone through him since I was his employee. Made perfect sense and had nothing to do with me. Annoyance gone. We were good. And if I hadn’t asked?

Communication promotes understanding and better working relationships. That’s the bottom line.

Lack of communication leads to assumptions, misunderstandings and erroneous conclusions about your character and intentions. Do you really want that?

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