How you communicate makes a difference in outcomes. Have you ever heard a manager say, “This isn’t what I asked for”? When this happens, it is usually the manager’s fault for not doing a good job of sending the message. You can learn how to plan, send, and check to ensure your message has been transmitted successfully.

Recall that before we send a message we should carefully encode it and select the channel—this is planning how to send the message. Encode to keep it simple. Your messages shouldn’t just be easy to understand, they should be impossible to misunderstand.

You should plan what to send (set an objective, end result of the message), who to send it to, how (channel), when, and where you will transmit the message. Face-to-face, and the phone, are more personal and often a faster and better way to send a message needing multiple responses than e-mailing or texting.