Nothing is better coordinated than what is shared, according to the new vice-president and government spokesman. In fact, one meaning of the Latin verb communicare is to share. In this case, with 15 ministers.

Political communication generates applications for the management of companies and organizations, as illustrated by José García Abad in El Maquiavelo de León. This expert in the ins and outs of power tells anecdotes and testimonies of ministers who are or were.

It is enlightening that many of them testify under cover of anonymity. Among those who identify themselves, a minister tells how the president "always shares: you for breakfast, you for lunch, you for dinner. He never mixes. A subtle way of projecting closeness and communication, while at the same time dividing his collaborators and deactivating any protagonism outside his own.

Something similar happens in companies with smiling managers and Machiavellian managers in the background. The rhetoric of collective messages to their own is accompanied by an obsessive care in individualizing personal communications that, far from uniting the team in a common project , disperses talents.

Trust traffic

In the end, trust traffic. Many crossed communications with partial data , so that only the main sender has the general plan. Like the original Machiavelli, he would rather be feared than loved. The collaborators receive only segmented information, transmitted through heterogeneous and unsynchronized channels. The person who manages in this way pretends to share information, integrate the team, strengthen trust and reinforce his leadership. The perception of others is information concealment, group dispersion, growing distrust and waning authority.

What is communicated so that everyone feels informed becomes a trigger for rumors, a devastating corporate tumor. Those affected are aware that they receive fragmentary information, they want to know... and end up finding out, in the most extreme cases, from the press or books. Thus, two negative effects: precious time is wasted in a communication of rumors and the internal cohesion of the management core is broken.

The former minister summarizes this behavior of the leader with two phrases: "You may not have all the keys, but trust me" and " project first and foremost". The latter is a prototype message in organizations that sacrifice people for the good of the institution. The result is always negative: ipso facto for the individual, then for the particular business and, sooner rather than later, for the global project .

Another former partner of the president verbalizes what he believes his boss thought: "If these [ministers] are together they will conspire against me, so they better not get together. The best thing is for them to fight. It's one of his techniques to highlight his power." It's what Garcia Abad describes as "a well-organized chaos." He adds that the government's stump of this chaotic direction "does not create his own teams, but he has a special skill to destroy the attempts of his ministers to make their own. The president does not hesitate to appoint them as secretaries of state, undersecretaries and even general directors". In companies, too, formal appointments are used as the equivalent of job defenestrations: one does not know whether he/she is promoted or promoted.

Opacitydisguised as transparency

What has been said so far about Internal Communications or corporate intimacy is a full explanation of what citizens see in their public projection. This lack of communication within a government is the antipode of model of The West Wing of the White House. Paradoxically, the same one that does not communicate inside quotation as an example of the American series.

This reality has its correlate in the management of companies and organizations. This is confirmed by the managers who seek communication advice and by the collaborators who suffer from this opacity disguised as transparency.

Management and communication mistakes can be fixed. That is why the new spokesman of the Government explains that, in this new stage, the leader "has order the ministers to explain what their ministry and the Government as a whole does. A president and 15 spokespersons". Time will reveal the internal effectiveness and public perception of such a good purpose.