You are the VP of Marketing and have a call with Eugene the VP of Engineering in 10 minutes on an important collaboration. Your teams are ironing out the final details on the latest product release and you urgently need a spec sheet from engineering for your product marketing campaign.

However, you are dreading the “walking on eggshells” tension created on the last call due to unintentionally pissing off Eugene by pressing him for a decision on the spec sheet details.

On the last call you found out the hard way he was not actually ignoring your request but finishing his normal analysis process and would have arrived at this decision shortly. Just not via same urgency as you expect from your marketing team. Instead of arriving at a decision on the last call, it became “us versus them” resulting in Eugene needing to take more time, delaying the product even further.

If you had only known this is Eugene’s normal process in the first place, you may have understood the reason for the delay. Perhaps there would be no need for another call and the project would continue its progression.

Conflict and Miscommunication Happen Every Day in Business
Situations like this happen every day in organizations worldwide. Consider all the individual business conversations you have every day at work. Clients, colleagues, your boss, your direct reports, someone in a different department, everyone.

Now think about the most recent project, meeting or other business situation where someone (you or the other party) reacted like Eugene due to an unintended miscommunication and work (or progress towards a sale, etc) was delayed. You’ve had those conversations recently. So have I. We all have.

When you aggregate these day-to-day conversations across your team, department then organization – miscommunication adds up to a staggering amount of lost hours in productivity. In fact, according to conflictatwork.com, the estimated cost to businesses due to stress (one of many negative results from unresolved work conflict) is $1.7 billion¹.

What if there was a way to know ahead of time how to best present data to your boss, direct reports, or Eugene in the engineering department?

Now there is. Instead of navigating a daily gauntlet of communication land mines, Enterprise CUEcard^TM, presents “just in time” communication tips via a .vcf file. One glance at your Corporate Address Book allows you to “study up” on communication tips -and what to avoid- when in calls and meetings with your colleagues, organization-wide.

Back to your looming conversation with Eugene the VP of Engineering now 5 minutes away. As part of your call prep you have two options:

• Continue communicating the same way and risk repeating history (at cost), or
• Download Eugene’s CUEcard^TM as a .vcf file and find out how Eugene prefers to be communicated with.

The clock is ticking. Which will you choose?

Comment below or via @talentanalytics on twitter.

¹ WarrenShepel [online], Health & Wellness Research Database (2005). See conflictatwork.com for more statistics.

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Mike Kennedy is a Technical Evangelist at Talent Analytics, Corp. He can be reached via mike@talentanalytics.com .