If we’re serious enough about capturing our best return to invest the energy into building a leadership culture that starts from the top and cascades throughout our organization, we’ll have a solid start toward achieving quantifiable results in addressing our profitability killers. And when we do, we can expect that to impact every other individual issue that’s been eating away at the profitability of our organization! The next profitability killer that deserves our focus is poor communication. More specifically, how much poor communication really costs.

In the second lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, I share stats from Salesforce.com and SIS International Research to emphasize how significant these costs are. Instead of citing those yet again here, consider how an article I found on the Society for Human Resource Management’s website opened in making their case for what they called “A Business Rationale for the Communications Competency.” “David Grossman reported in ‘The Cost of Poor Communications’ that a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of $62.4 million per year because of inadequate communication to and between employees.” Even after working close to twenty years for a large manufacturing company, I have a hard time wrapping my head around companies that size and losses that big. Thankfully, that opening paragraph closed with an example that hit a bit closer to home: “Debra Hamilton asserted, in her article ‘Top Ten Email Blunders that Cost Companies Money,’ that miscommunication cost even smaller companies of 100 employees an average of $420,000 per year.”

Another article from BusinessWire.com in early ‘22 referenced a study done by Grammarly and Harris Pole digging into the “far-reaching impacts of poor workplace communication on U.S. businesses and employees” estimated “up to a $1.2 trillion annual loss among businesses due to ineffective communication.” As I think back to the conversation I had on a Friday evening several years ago when my friend told me he “didn’t have time for all that touchy-feely stuff; he was responsible for growing the business,” I can’t imagine he had any perspective whatsoever for losses his team was experiencing from communication alone…

Don’t misunderstand me here; I don’t believe he (or any responsible executive) would ever intentionally squander that kind of profit. But if poor communication is genuinely responsible for losses this significant and this widespread, it seems to confirm George Bernard Shaw’s suggestion that “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

To truly grasp the significance of this profitability killer, we need to accept that communication requires more than just saying a few words at a volume that can be heard. We need to ensure our message is received and understood to have any hope of capturing even a little bit of what’s often lost. With that in mind, let’s consider why it’s more complex than just saying something once, especially if we need our team members to take action and get results!

For more on this, you're welcome to reach out to us directly at admin@dove-development.net to get a 45 Day Trial Access to our COMPLETE Leading At The Next Level program or you can check out Wes's recently released book, What's KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) that was a #1 Best Seller on Amazon!