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Inaccurate or deceptive messages are detrimental for an organization.<\/p>\nInaccurate or deceptive messages are detrimental for an organization.<\/p>\n
Business leaders often grumble about these cognitive perversions that kill the essence of harmony and cohesion, where everybody seems to be deceiving one another.\u00a0 Such organizational communication is frequent across organizations, involving a constant barrage of false but compelling stories that propagate disappointment, negatively influence the mindsets of people, and ultimately damage the reputation of a business.<\/p>\n
This kind of deceptive corporate communication<\/a> often passes unnoticed and rather gets reinforced by our routine interactions and conversations. \u00a0Amidst such an ecosystem, proposed ideas and innovation is often greeted with pessimism by the majority of other people.<\/p>\n During good times, corporate communications<\/a> is assuring and exciting\u2014for instance, \u201cwe are simply the best,\u201d \u201cno one can get us down.\u201d\u00a0 But once under pressure, organizational messages turn extremely negative\u2014to the effect of, \u201cthis ship is about to sink\u201d or \u201cnothing can save this.\u201d\u00a0 Most individuals treat these deceptive messages as unquestionable maxims, assume that others trust these, reiterate them across the business, and avoid challenging these rumors.<\/p>\n As we grow, we learn to resist deceptive brain messages, but this resistance comes with consequences.\u00a0 Research reveals that restraining deceptive messages results in higher stress levels and depression in individuals.\u00a0 For organizations, this leads to illogical behaviors grounded in attitudes that nobody support, but cannot cast off.<\/p>\n Deceptive organizational messages<\/a> are of 4 common types:<\/p>\n Narcissistic executives who are overly confident and believe that they are different from the other miscalculate risks, which leads the companies to complacency and failure. \u00a0They are possessed by overconfidence exceptionalism where they underestimate competition, and their people believe that their leader takes chances and always comes out on top. \u00a0This overconfident exceptionalism engulfs the entire company, more so the managers who surpass boundaries, falsify numbers, and become confident until the risks overwhelm them.<\/p>\n This is exactly what happened during the financial crisis of 2008.\u00a0 Some of the deceptive messages voiced during the financial crisis and earlier stated: \u201cWe are smarter\u201d or \u201cwe have learned from past mistakes.\u201d\u00a0 As a result, most of the risk assessments at that time were flawed and not mindful of the looming crisis that hit them hard afterwards.<\/p>\n Deceptive organizational messages concerning value provide a totally inaccurate estimate of the potential value of ongoing initiatives.\u00a0 The miscalculated value of initiatives, resulting from deceptive messages, is demonstrated as perfectionism (or all-or-nothing) thinking\u2014assuming that everything should be absolutely perfect before it is of any value. \u00a0This perfectionism is the reason for teams not proposing an interesting idea, fearing it isn\u2019t good enough, or a research group second-guessing an innovation<\/a> and delaying it until a rival\u2019s offering emerges and takes a sizeable market share.<\/p>\n Deception of value also presents a perspective, quite common in many individuals, called the \u201cfixed mindset\u201d\u2014where people believe that their basic qualities, such as their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. \u00a0They have a certain amount which cannot be enhanced.<\/p>\n Deception of Proficiency makes people believe that they can get anything done even if they lack the basic proficiency to do it.\u00a0 The capability of someone to influence others and get things done, or the confidence in one\u2019s own ability to succeed is termed as self-efficacy. \u00a0People with high self-efficacy believe that they will succeed in complex tasks, even if they do not have the proficiency to do so. \u00a0People with markedly low self-efficacy surrender easily, even though they could actually succeed.<\/p>\n Deception of validity makes people believe that something is true because of the way it feels. \u00a0Misperception of validity is a distorted thinking pattern to split reason from emotion.\u00a0 The messages with the distorted thinking pattern called \u201cEmotional Reasoning\u201d comes into play here where people presume something is true, solely based on a feeling. \u00a0Or, conversely, if it doesn\u2019t feel right, there must be a problem.\u00a0 For instance, people have a tendency to gauge investments based on their emotional feelings from past transactions.\u00a0 They reason that, \u201cwe were hurt by our last deal in XYZ territory, so never again there.\u201d<\/p>\n Dealing with deceptive corporate communication necessitates a robust methodology.\u00a0 Organizations struggling with managing deceptive corporate messages can take advantage of a 2-step approach to dealing with misleading communication:<\/p>\n Interested in learning more about how to manage deceptive corporate communication in your organization? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Deception in Corporate Communication<\/u><\/strong> here<\/a> on the Flevy documents marketplace<\/a>.<\/p>\n You can download this and hundreds of other\u00a0consulting frameworks<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0consulting training guides<\/a>\u00a0from the\u00a0FlevyPro library<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Inaccurate or deceptive messages are detrimental for an organization. Business leaders often grumble about these cognitive perversions that kill the essence of harmony and cohesion, where everybody seems to be deceiving one another.\u00a0 Such organizational communication is frequent across organizations, involving a constant barrage of false but compelling stories that propagate disappointment, negatively influence the… How Do We Combat Deceptive Corporate Communication?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":4048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[323,1346,1348,1347],"class_list":["post-4046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corporate-communications","tag-corporate-communications-2","tag-deceptive-communication","tag-deceptive-messages","tag-organizational-communication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4046"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8739,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions\/8739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nDeception of Risk<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Deception of Value<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Deception of Proficiency <\/strong><\/h3>\n
Deception of Validity<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Approach to Combating Deceptive Communication <\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Are You a Management Consultant?<\/strong><\/h2>\n