Listening to Build a Vision

Listen to David as he highlights the positive and negative sequence of events associated with proper communication or lac there of. Effective communication leads to collaboration and the execution of a common goal, while ineffective communication can create a hostile work environment. To ensure the success of a family business it is essential to communicate effectively.

David Bentall (4) What is communication? It’s two things, a sender and a receiver. It’s a speaker and a listener. And I think what many family enterprises struggle with is they have lots of ideas they want to communicate. Families have a lack of empathetic listening skills. Then they have a difficult time really communicating. If they have a difficult time communicating, then they have a difficult time understanding each other. A lack of understanding leads to a lack of collaboration. A lack of collaboration leads to divergent paths. Divergent paths lead to frustration. When people become frustrated with each other they become angry. Then they become hostile and pretty soon you have enmity, and in this case, the family business was torn apart. A lack of empathy leads to a lack of communication, leads to a lack of collaboration, etc., but to build back the other way, if family members, in terms of communication, can learn to empathetically listen with one another, then they can learn to really hear each other, then to understand each other, and then to collaborate and then to compromise together, and to build a common vision. If I was to have one word for families, it would be don’t think about communication skills, think about learning how to listen to one another because if we listen deeply, empathetically, then we can build something.