Is it poor performance or poor communication

26th July, 2010 - Posted by stellacollins - No Comments

Hello

With all the discussion of BP’s chief executive leaving one of the news programmes this morning posed the question as to whether he had been a good CEO or not.

And the follow up was a short discussion about him potentially being a very good CEO for the time immediately before the disaster but not the person to be facing the media at a time of crisis.  The view seemed to be that he was good at his job but wasn’t particularly good at communicating what he’d done.

This is an issue for lots of people who are good at their jobs – they’ve potentially been highly trained and are highly skilled in lots of areas but have never had the time to learn about good communication skills.  This is not their fault – we are not born with all the communication skills we need in order to navigate our complicated, messy and intricate life paths.  Some people learn more naturally – perhaps they are gifted in the same way that excellent musicians, scientists, horseriders are naturally gifted – and some may have had better role models or teachers of communication skills.  But even geniuses are better at what they do because of the hours and hours of long, deliberate practice that they put in.

So if you’ve not focused on communication skills up until now then there’s no reason to expect that you ‘should’ be good at them – you may be of course – but it’s not a function of growing up.  We can all do with extra help now and then.