One of my primary suggestions for everyone, and not just managers, is to listen first and to listen carefully for what is really being said. Doing so significantly improves communication for a number of reasons; first, most "communication" is everyone talking and no one listening. Needless to say this is inefficient and ineffective. It's even common to see arguments where people are violently agreeing but aren't listening well enough to realize it.
Starting off with everyone listening carefully goes a long way toward insuring that people are at least discussing the issues of disagreement. This keeps the discussion on topic and makes it possible to then determine how to resolve those issues of disagreement. It also shows respect to those you are discussing an issue with, that you first ask them to lay out what they think should be done and why. When you show that respect it generally forces the others to then truly listen to your points.
Now this sounds easy, keeping your mouth shut at first and paying attention prior to talking. But it's not that simple because most people tend to talk in terms of proposed solutions rather than key concerns. And many times when they list "key concerns", it's not their primary concerns but rather the concerns that they think will convince people to agree with their proposed solution.
A good example was the lead-up to the Iraq war. If you listened to the Bush Administration members when they talked at length, it became clear that their key concern was a desire to somehow inject Democracy into a major Arabic country. I don't know if speaking to this key concern would have led to a different approach – but the odds would have been better.
So truly listening oftentimes requires asking questions as needed to dive into each person's reasoning. This does not need to be even a 5 minute deep inquiry – most times a question or two gets to the root of the issue.
The other benefit to this approach is if everyone is trying to understand the key concerns of everyone, many times a group will quickly come to agreement on the best solution. Not always, but many times. And that leads not only to better solutions on average, but buy-in from everyone which improves morale & productivity.
As always, particularly when a manager, you need to lead by example. And if you think you do this, I'll give you the test I give my managers. When you've finished listening to everyone else (as the manager you should go last so you don't influence because of your title), can you first lay out everyone's core concerns and their main arguments to back it up?
If you can, then you didn't need to read the above article J.
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