I have always been blessed with good advisors and great conversations.
It has been one of the most cherished features of my life. I have
never had a dearth of people that I could turn to, and have a meaningful
dialog with, on almost any subject. The fact that the current state of our
professional success does not hold any importance in the conversations
makes it even better.
Lately our son has joined that group. Something in him, perhaps his attentiveness or his listening ability, makes for a very good sounding-board. I talk about my day and he responds (as any good listener would) with the occasional "aah" and "hmm" that are proof enough that words, contexts and responses are being understood and appreciated. There are no complaints of the digressions that these conversations usually suffer from and in return his heavily vowel-ed phrases (or are those just long words?) get the "exactly" and "that is what I said" in reciprocity.
This bi-directional appreciation for being a listener and a responder seems to be leading to (at this age, all I can do is hope for it to happen) a stronger bond between father and son and we both want to continue working towards improving it.
This dependence on clear and concise communication has also created a problem for us.
It just so happens that our son decided to sleep through the night last week. For a long period he did not make a sound. The 3-4 hourly back and forth that we had become so used to gave way to anxiety and guesswork. Both me and my hardly-slept wife kept checking on our son and the audio device to make sure that both were "working as expected". To our utter disbelief there was nothing amiss either with the toddler or the technology.
That led me to take the situation to my work place: Consider a scenario where we do the unthinkable of treating a client as we would like to be treated. Communication flow was clear, concise and cordial. Everyone that should know what they were supposed to do had that information and had all the resources to meet the set goals by following the laid out guidelines. Now consider a change in our behavior. For reason(s) both justifiable and not so, we decide to cut down on the communication. The client may hear from us and even when they did, clear understanding of the present state and future plans was challenging. The client's reaction, in this case, would not be too different from what we went through last week. There will be anxiety. The trust on even the most basic things will start deteriorating, and they would probably lose sleep over something that "was not even an issue".
It seems pertinent, therefore, in a team that comprises either of stakeholders or implementers or both, that the communication channel does not get blocked. I would go as far as to argue that in times of duress, the communication should be pushed up a notch. Knowing where things are and what everyone is responsible to do almost always leads to success. After all, sleep that lasts all night with an infant in the house, is nothing short of an accomplishment.
Lately our son has joined that group. Something in him, perhaps his attentiveness or his listening ability, makes for a very good sounding-board. I talk about my day and he responds (as any good listener would) with the occasional "aah" and "hmm" that are proof enough that words, contexts and responses are being understood and appreciated. There are no complaints of the digressions that these conversations usually suffer from and in return his heavily vowel-ed phrases (or are those just long words?) get the "exactly" and "that is what I said" in reciprocity.
This bi-directional appreciation for being a listener and a responder seems to be leading to (at this age, all I can do is hope for it to happen) a stronger bond between father and son and we both want to continue working towards improving it.
This dependence on clear and concise communication has also created a problem for us.
It just so happens that our son decided to sleep through the night last week. For a long period he did not make a sound. The 3-4 hourly back and forth that we had become so used to gave way to anxiety and guesswork. Both me and my hardly-slept wife kept checking on our son and the audio device to make sure that both were "working as expected". To our utter disbelief there was nothing amiss either with the toddler or the technology.
It seems pertinent, therefore, in a team that comprises either of stakeholders or implementers or both, that the communication channel does not get blocked. I would go as far as to argue that in times of duress, the communication should be pushed up a notch. Knowing where things are and what everyone is responsible to do almost always leads to success. After all, sleep that lasts all night with an infant in the house, is nothing short of an accomplishment.
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