Kim Gaskill reflects on nurse handoff briefings at Chandler Regional Hospital, where the same facts land differently depending on who hears them. She argues communicators bear responsibility for ensuring their intent actually gets received, not just transmitted, and draws a parallel to how businesses need to simplify and clarify their messaging.
Good morning from Chandler Regional Hospital. I'm Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. Yap, still here, but hopefully moving to a rehab facility today. The, uh, handoff between the nurses today when they were— every morning they give a briefing of information handing off their patients. Give a little summary and synopsis of the information that they need to pass on so that the following shift knows what happened the prior day and can continue the treatment as needed for the patients. It's a pretty good system. Make sure that there is that one-on-one contact, that it's personal. But it got me to thinking, each person communicates differently. Each person could take the same information, the same facts, the same statistics about my last 12 hours and communicate them in a little different way to mean something different, even though it's the same information. And I thought, it's really important that when we communicate information, that the message, the intent of the message, is not just put out by the person with the information, but it's also received with the proper intention from the person that you're communicating with. You have that responsibility as a communicator to make sure that that information that you intend to be received and perceived by the next person is in fact what you wanted. If they walk away and they interpreted what you said incorrectly from what your intention was, part of that is on you. If you did not make sure that they got what you were saying, that they understood in the way you wanted them to understand. It's the same with branding in your business. I've been working on simplifying my branding, my message. What am I saying to people? What is it I do? What, what is the value I provide? It's not been clear because I've been doing too many things. So I've been simplifying and clarifying my message in my business, which I'm gonna have to change up a bit, but that's okay. And, uh, I wonder if you're doing the same. Is the message you're putting out about you and about those you serve being interpreted correctly on the other side? Are they hearing the message you want them to hear, or are they hearing the message they want to hear? And only taking the pieces of information that they think are useful and making up the rest themselves. Make it clear, make it simple, make it concise, and make it the intent of what you want it to be perceived. See you again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
