COM: 101 – Oral Communication

I just finished another session of Oral Communications class, and am now sitting in my Macroeconomics class, waiting for it to start. I thought I would chime in about something in communications, which I already knew, but was never able to put it in the appropriate context.

Communication and interpersonal relationships are inseparably intertwined. We cannot develop relationships without communicating and we cannot communicate without addressing our mutual relationships.

This is a very important concept for us at Mehlville. As a part of the community, we are directly accountable to our community for what we do. For our community to take an accurate accounting of the quality of our district, they generally need to look at many factors. When our community takes that accounting of us, one of those factors will be based in large part on how well we have communicated with them.

I think that is what some past boards have failed to recognize, and is what this board is doing everything in its power to improve. We understand that we have relationships with various people and factions in our community. The quality of our relationship is based almost completely on the quality of our communication and vice versa.

If we burn bridges with interested stakeholders, we are damaging our school system. It should not matter to us what the intentions are of the stakeholders we are communicating with, other than to try and empathize with them and work to relate to them. If we fight, argue with, and “take on” our stakeholders just because we don’t like them or their message, we are doing nothing but resorting to a defensive stance, which only breeds more negativity and negative feedback. Essentially, what we really need to do, is understand better what it is exactly that the majority, as well as the different interests in this community want out of us, and put it in to practice. Hence, the community engagement process.

As soon as we become defensive, we start building walls between us and our stakeholders, of which we are a part of. We all have a stake in education. As many of you know, Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of our country was dependent entirely on the education of the populace. So for us to get defensive, build walls, and build upon the negativity of the past is nothing more than weak, self-preservationism. People who continue to do this are only exacerbating the issue, preventing the district from moving forward as well as it would otherwise.

If a person cares about this district, yet continues to burn down the bridges we are building, they are not only contributing to their own perceptual demise in the community, they are forcing others to perpetuate the same irreversible negativity in return, and making it more difficult for our school system to be effective in the education of our children, and ultimately, our community.

Who really benefits from this?