Failures to communicate happen everywhere — even when the stakes areincredibly high. They happen in the military. They happen in airplanecockpits. And they happen in emergency operating rooms. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that just fifteen years ago, hospitals across the United States had a serious communication problem.

The University of Toronto, a teaching hospital, hosted a study in which their surgeries were studied over a period of months. Every communication during surgery was carefully recorded and analyzed. The findings were troubling. About 30 percent of communications were deemed failures. Of those, nearly 37 percent jeopardized patient safety.

The reason, in retrospect, seems obvious. At the time, operating rooms were run according to a strict command-and-control hierarchy. Nurses, usually the first to spot a mistake, were discouraged from challenging or contradicting physicians. Junior doctors, still learning, were worried about seeming insubordinate (or worse, incompetent) in front of their teachers. Senior doctors made things worse by reacting badly when challenged. In other words, the rigid hierarchy in the hospital was creating an environment where trust and open communication were suppressed — and it was literally killing people.

This story highlights the critical role that trust and openness play in effective communication. But what happens when you can’t communicate with people in person? As your business grows, chances are good that putting in “face time” with employees and suppliers will become a challenge.

Unfortunately, a growing body of evidence suggests that it’s much more difficult to build and communicate trust when we can’t look one another in the eye. When we email, text, chat — even when we speak by phone — the potential creating conflict and confusion grows.

One of the key reasons for this is a concept called social distance — that’s the degree of emotional connection we feel with another person. It turns out that social distance correlates pretty strongly with physical distance. In other words, we feel closest to the people we physically interact with.

When we don’t feel close to someone — a customer or an employee we haven’t interacted with regularly — we’re less likely to correctly interpret the messages they send by email or phone. We’re more likely to overreact or assign blame when things go poorly. Over time, this can create a climate in which miscommunications breed and relationships are damaged.

So how do we communicate trust when no one can see our face?

There are four key aspects to trust that need to be addressed in our communication: integrity, intent, capability and results.

• Integrity is our ability to be congruent (i.e., have the same basic character and values) no matter who we are speaking to.
• Intent is another word for our agenda. If people believe we don’t have their best interests at heart, trust will be damaged.
• Capability means that people trust our competence. We can be the nicest person in the world (clear integrity and intent) but others must still believe we can do the job and meet their need.
• Results are a proven track record of success. Our communication should demonstrate an ability to move our customers, suppliers, and employees toward a positive outcome every time. Whether we’re communicating in person or by email, all four cores of trust must be present to build a strong business. If any one of them is broken, communication will suffer. To instantly elevate your communication skills, consider how you’re doing along these four cores of trust.

Integrity

Are you unintentionally undermining your integrity? Have you ever sent an email or text to the wrong person (and instantly regretted the content?) That’s an unintentional integrity hit. Do you routinely CC a vendor’s manager, even when things are going well? Your reasons for doing so may be innocent, but consider how that can make your supplier feel.

Intent

Read this sentence to yourself: “I never said he stole the money.” Now, change the word you emphasize in your head. (I never said he stole the money. I never said he stole the money. I never said he stole the money.) Do you see how the meaning changes each time?

When we write an email, it can be incredibly easy for the recipient to misinterpret our intent.

Even scarier, it turns out that the mood we’re in when we read a message has a huge impact on which interpretation we choose (a phenomenon called egocentricity bias.) When we communicate by email or text, it’s important to be explicit about what we mean to say. Consider including sentences like “The reason I’m asking is…” or “I’m CC’ing your supervisor because…” When we aren’t clear about our intent, we force others to guess what it is.

Capability

The way we communicate says something about our competence. It may not be fair, but our customers feel more confident communicating with someone who “spellchecks” their emails and uses proper grammar. Do your emails convey confidence in your capabilities?

Results

Email can be wildly inefficient for getting things done. If you want to build trust and teamwork across your businesses, consider whether your email chains are leading to results—or causing everyone to spin their wheels. Clean, tight communication will be action-oriented. When planning a task or addressing an issue, good communication should be clear about who does what by when.

As you consider these four aspects of trust, reflect on which one your business struggles with the most. Understand that if you’re relying heavily on email, text, chat, and phone calls to communicate, social distance will make each of these aspects of trust more difficult (but certainly not impossible!) to achieve. It’s critical to address each aspect with intention and focus.

The reward for doing so is a growing business built on a foundation of trust—with your team, and your customers!

Don’t miss Sara Gallagher’s sessions on building trust, April 27 & 28 at The Car Wash Show 2018.