Over the last 2 days I have had 2 distinct examples of how terribly wrong things can go with our new way of communicating in text.
In the one example, a few employees of FNB were fired, based on a whatsapp group chat they had, with some racial undertones. The second was that somebody in our group saw a whatsapp sent to somebody else's phone, and some assumptions were made.
I am in no way condoning racialism, but the issue of communication without context, because that leads to assumptions, and we know what that can be. This type of communication is very usefull, and I love it a lot, but in my life it has lead to many problems. When you are, on the contrary face to face in communication, you deal with the whole person. You have the luxury of picking up on emotions and context. You can see what they feel like, what they mean and who they are.
When you are running your own life or a business, communication is the most important aspect of the relationship. And the best thing, it does not cost you a thing, no airtime or wireless provider needed. Think of the difficulty and cost involved in creating misunderstandings? Some companies deal with e-mails to their customers alone, I believe in the efficiency of that and that all is on record, but we miss the bus on this, especially if it is our only way of communications. Everything is automated, and although people use devices, we are not automated.
There are some very successful companies that run their business in the automated world, and I understand the need for this, but again if we loose our face to face time and opportunity with customers, we loose out. Coming from a religious background, we used to have house visits to the home of members by the Minister on a frequent basis. Then congregations became too big to do this, so we moved to cluster meatings and even to a point where the ministers were not even be part of these house-cells. This can not be described as the only reason why congregations are dwindling, there are many factors. As a minister it was hard work and effort to leave your family at night and go to visit members, but after a while of not doing it, I realised that I did not know my people, and I did not know what to preach about, because I did not know what was going on in their lives and what their needs were.
In business, we use consultants and companies to investigate our market, but NO way can this replace Face to Face. In the congregations we later used the feedback from cluster leaders, which in turn was also not the same, they were merely facilitators, and did not give us the core information or feedback needed. Me and my congregation became strangers to each other, I didn't even know their names anymore. For me, this was a loss, because I did not know what was going on in their lives, and they felt that I did not care anymore. This was not the case though, I still cared, sincerely, but I missed one thing, the relationship.
As a further example, I have 2 daughters, and they don't live with me. They live in a different city, and I do not see them often enough. Everytime that they do come and visit, at first, we feel like strangers. It takes us a while to get up to speed about our relationships, school and their lives. I have seen this in practice in my own life, quality time is Face to Face, not via e-mail or Whatsapp.
You can say you care in a message, but when you can look into their eyes, they can feel the love. When they can see the expression on their faces, we build relationships. When we do things together, we grow. My two sons also do not live with me, but luckily we live close to them. This past 10 days they stayed with us, and it was amazing how we built our relationship, even just in short talks or reactions.
I often tell business people, that it should revolve around relationships, not only the bottom line. Successful people make time for Face to Face time with their employees. In sincerety, people need to tell us their story, and through listening you read what is going on in the business. This whole person approach is cardinal to a successful business environment. Too often, our employees are just a number, just a body that fills a cubicle. But in that cubicle, they have pictures of their loved one's, their dog, and they live there for most of their lives. They have emotions, dreams and desires. Do you care enough to find out?
If you do not know your people, how do you think you will react and lead them? Like with the Whatsapp examples I started with, information without context leads to chaos. You need to know, you need to understand first, before you can ask to be understood. This is universally true for any relationship, being there is the answer. It is different seeing your son's score a try in the rugby game, than just hearing about it. If you are present, you smell the grass, you see everything, you feel the wind blow and the sun on your face, and you hear the crown. As with our sences, so with being there for the full-person experience, Mind, Body, Spirit and Power. It is without a doubt the answer we need for a world of Faceless, Number-based relationships.
If we take the annalogy of a ship as your business for a moment. If we take out the word "ship" from relationship, we are left with "relation". In itself it has meaning, but means that there has to be contact. If there is no contact or concern about their wellbeing, you are simply not a good captain. I have heard this so many times that people talk about their jobs, and the happy one's is the one's with a Manager or Owner that cares and creates a place for them to live. This is also true about your other relationships, if you care more or even just the same for them as you do yourself, then not only are they happy, but you receive pleasure from making them happy.
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