Managers attentive to team realities are more successful

Hosts Kael Moro, partner attorney at Vanzin & Penteado, and Bruno Nassar, CEO of Lexnautas, interviewed analyst and researcher Vinícius Sgarbe for the videocast Conexão Empreendedorismo (Entrepreneurship Connection). Below are excerpts of the conversation converted into an article.

What communication is

Communication is a relatively new science (in terms of the constitution of an academic research field), but it is present in all areas of life. We believe its definition can vary depending on the role the definer occupies. For medicine, there will be one bias; for law, another; and so on.

However, we agree that communication takes place in the present moment, between human beings. It happens through words, gestures and elements of a very broad set of expressions. From our point of view, communication is not the property of communication scholars but of all of us.

Furthermore, we stress that communication, although a recently created science (we wrote about journalism in the 17th century and about public opinion in the 20th), is the fruit of other fields refined over centuries, such as philosophy and political science. In any case, we consider that more important than an epistemology of communication is listening to the experiences of communication’s users. From the book, cinema, television and radio, all of the mass-distribution conception, to the interlocutor of artificial intelligence, users are the “owners” of communication.

We believe it is a fundamental science for understanding social interactions, which includes the limitations of those interactions. Knowledge and improvement of this science are essential for improving the results of human relationships that become a “good life.”

Self-knowledge for the entrepreneur

We understand that a significant part of business activity is susceptible to automated behaviors. In other words, what is communicated in that condition escapes the individual’s rational and emotional intelligences.

However much we insist — and sometimes with convincing arguments, brilliant in rhetoric — that we are acting freely, very often it is nothing more than a loop of unassimilated experiences. That is the case of the entrepreneur who, at the end of the day, concludes: “exactly what I did not want to happen happened again.”

It is in this context that self-knowledge comes onstage: by knowing ourselves, we shed light on the dark areas of our lives. That is invariably leaving autopilot and, with a little more work, taking the reins of the business and of success.

Autonomous entrepreneurs (from the standpoint of freedom of life) are recognized by peers and able to manage teams. When we worry about things that cannot be solved (because they are fantasy or irrelevant problems, for example), we reduce teams’ happiness and performance. When we have an analytical eye, rather than an embellished leadership performance, we become able to say: “all my plans become successes.”