SPEAKING LESS AND COMMUNICATING BETTER

Speaking Less and Communicating Better: Internship

SPEAKING LESS AND COMMUNICATING BETTER

I watched the sun rise from the airport window, behind the mountains little streaks of
light rained down on Salt Lake City, Utah. I couldnt help but to miss the city as I pushed my
duffle bag into the overhead compartment on the plane. I just closed my eyes and thought; only a
month left in Salisbury, Md. I couldnt wait to graduate and start my career with Chicago Scoops
as the Area Supervisor for the state of Utah. In a one semester internship, Ive learned more
about working in a successful restaurant than I have in the past five years of working for Cold
Stone Creamery. Im thankful every day for crossing paths with Kyle Welch and Josh Benezera,
my store owners and bosses, theyve invested so much time in me and taught me a ton about
business which I expected. But what I didnt expect to learn from them was how to communicate
more effectively. I thought as a senior in college majoring in communications, that I would teach
them a few things, and Im sure we learned from each other, but I would have to say they taught
me more than I imagined I needed to know. My internship with Chicago Scoops has made me a
more effective communicator, and better prepared to start my career this summer.
The lessons that Chicago Scoops has taught me are incredibly valuable. This essay is a
bridge between field experience and my college education. Through this essay I am able to
explain how Im using the wealth of knowledge Ive learned as a communications major in real
world applications. In a few short months, Ive learned that professional communication is
reliant upon brevity. Ive learned that communication across a large company is, of course,
challenging and needs a lot of structure. Ive been able to understand that even the most complex
aspects of a job can be simple when taught correctly to others, and finally, Ive learned that
having good communication doesnt necessarily mean a lot communication between oneself and
ones work superiors. These lessons were never spelled out in power points, webinars, or
conference calls, but taught to me by experience with learning, failing, and then learning some

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more from my bosses at Chicago Scoops. I already know that these lessons will help
astronomically in my job for Scoops post-college and in life in general.
The first lesson was not an easy one to learn, how to have brevity in my communication
with Kyle and Josh and with those I need to teach. I used to think that if I could explain myself
fully, that I would be communicating as best as I could, by just saying everything I thought, I
could help my bosses to understand what was happening and why, but communication doesnt
need to be so extensive to be effective. By being brief and using my words wisely, I could
communicate better with Kyle and Josh. Its literally speaking in inverted pyramid style. I think
back to my first day in journalism classes and thats always the first thing thats covered. It is
writing the most important information first, the who, what, where, when, why and how, then
moves on to quotes as support and then less important details at the end. I remember Dr. Cox
explaining why we had to this, its because its very rare that the reader is still engaged by that
point in the article (Cox, 2012). I remember all the red scratches on my paper crossing out
needless sentences and rearranging the most important facts on top. Speaking with Kyle is like
that. Hes always busy, and although he loves to catch up with his employees, when theres two
minutes to fix a problem before his next meeting, brevity is essential to the conversation.
I understood this lesson when Kyle and I were working on the charity website that we
created. He asked me to write the website content and I did, but we ended up cutting a lot of the
extra words and long phrases. Simple is better when it comes to explaining, otherwise you run
the risk of confusing people. An example of this was when I wrote the first mission statement for
the site and it read, We promise to stand as a witness for that in need. One scoop at a time, we
can make our communities a greater place to celebrate life, which I thought was good, but in
retrospect it seems a bit wordy. Kyle emailed me back after reading over my long-winded

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phrases and said, I think the tendency for everyone when doing a start-up is to over think items.
Always best to keep it short and sweet, and at that moment things started to click. After a month
or so of floundering with my ideas for the website content, I finally understood what Kyle was
trying to get me to do. After that conversation, I came up with all new content and it was a
success. The new mission statement became, Well help you through today to arrive at a better
tomorrow, which is one line, and simple.
There are so many reasons that brevity is important for effective communication. Some
of the reasons are because of time constraints, to not confuse people, to not bore people and just
generally to maintain focus on a particular objective. I put myself in Kyles shoes as I listened to
some of my own employees over explaining things, I quickly realized that not only had I stopped
listening, but the conversation had gone off on a tangent about something else very miniscule. So
the need for brevity in professional communication became very evident to me through this.
Keep things simple; say what you need, not more or less.
The next lesson in communication that I learned was that communication in a
large company needs structure. Communication is a difficult task as the company grows; this is
why Kyle is always so busy. He is responsible for communicating company standards to more
than 23 stores with the help of Josh and other supervisors. This is where the lesson of relying on
your people came into play (from my work logs), but still communication needs structure in
order to be effective. Just as a paper needs an outline or an article follows the inverted pyramid
style, communication needs structure. One of the first things that I was given for this internship
was a detailed agenda for each week, with learning objectives to complete, and sometimes
homework. In addition to my own learning agenda, the company has webinar sessions each week
to discuss new promotions, operations, opportunities for improvement and other topics. At the

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end of the call, Josh typically gives us something to do to practice what weve learned. After a
webinar about Valentines Day, the local stores were encouraged to go out into the community
and give away a few cakes to prominent businesses. This type of homework after weekly
webinars was typical and it gave the communication an element of action. It sounds easy, but its
still hard to be able to get people going and actively learning company objectives.
I tried my hand at creating a structured method of communication for my internship, I
created a general manager lesson plan and tried to get my successor at the store to follow it and
complete homework to actively learn. Most of the time the homework didnt get done and after a
while, so many little tasks piled up to be a huge pain to complete. It didnt work for me because
although I had set deadlines for tasks to be completed, the weeks lacked routine and so the day to
day tasks overshadowed the learning objectives I had set forth. This lack of structure is a huge
reason why I made the General Manager Weekly Duties sheet. I created a weekly list of what
things needed to be done and by when. This helped to create a routine amongst the restaurant
chaos and spread out tasks over seven days. At the store level, structure and routine is a must and
so communication must follow suit. If one has weekly webinars and no follow up on homework,
nothing will get done, so company supervisors must structure their communication in order to
initiate action.
Communication is an amazing thing. Journalists are able to learn how to write in college
and then go on to be mini experts as Dr. Cox would say, in many other subjects. When a
reporter goes out into the field and gets a story about something theres a rule in how you present
that knowledge in an article. Its no secret that journalists write at a fifth grade reading level, and
Dr. Cox would teach us, If you dont understand what youre saying, your audience wont
either, (Cox, 2014). So journalists also become educators in a way, because they cant explain a

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subject in its entirety, but they can explain a topic about a subject in a way that everyone can
understand. Thats a college lesson that I came to practice during this internship, because
although Im not a business major, nor even a minor, if I can understand the basics, I can teach
them to others.
There are so many business terms that I still dont understand, but every time I talk to
Kyle or Josh, I feel like a reporter again taking notes and stopping them to explain things. Kyle
has created so many tools to help stores achieve goals in sales, food cost and labor budgets, but I
often find that lots of people still dont understand how to use them. This is a huge opportunity
for me to communicate company standards because if I can understand how to use the tools in
order to achieve goals than I definitely can teach others to do the same. My journalism education
is to thank for this because journalists place themselves in situations they might know only a
little about and then ask the right questions in order to be able to write articles to present the
story to the public.
After this semester, when I take my role as Utah Supervisor, I will be responsible for
sharing knowledge to all the people in the stores I oversee. This internship has been my briefing
in order to ask all the questions necessary to put together a clear understanding of what exactly
we should be doing to have a successful business. Im sure at times my excessive questions and
clarifications were annoying, but if I dont understand it, I cant teach it. Thankfully my bosses
have been very patient with me and my lack of formal education in business, but I believe it will
all be worth the long phone calls and emails. You have to get the facts right. This is the amazing
thing about communication, I could have gone back to school to be even more qualified for my
new positon, but if I can communicate properly, I can learn everything that I need and more and
then teach it back. Ive trained so many employees over the years of working at my store, but

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over this internship, I was able to incorporate my education and my job in order to learn how to
train others properly. No matter how intimidating food cost, marketing, and labor budgets are, I
can make them simple by teaching those around me what the big picture goals are using all the
knowledge Ive gathered thus far.
Once I had asked the bulk of my questions about company standards, goals and
objectives, I was able to learn that excessive communication does not mean that one has good
communication with ones superiors. Just like emailing professors to tell them how a paper is
coming along is not effective, excessive communication is just extra. Professors want to see the
finished paper, not the process usually. This lesson correlates with what I learned about brevity,
but its just simply not over communicating. My previous store owner liked to talk a lot, she
would call the store multiple times a day and was invested in each one of the crew members
lives. She was a great manager, and I loved talking with her. With Kyle and Josh, communication
is something very different than what it was with my previous store owner and manager. What
they do is invest time up front with their supervisors and managers so that they know how to
handle things on their own. When I first embarked on this internship, I thought that if I emailed
Kyle and Josh lots of updates on how things were going that they would think I was
communicating with them and thus doing a good job. In reflection, I realize that lots of updates
and emails show that one is doing things, but how valuable those things are is questionable. For
example, if I had an issue with something pertaining to the charity website, I would email them
about what was happening, why and what I was doing to fix it. I guess that was good to show
that I genuinely cared about what I was doing, but it was sort of unnecessary. I learned that it is
better is to communicate about things that I didnt understand as opposed to bombarding them
with emails that were just explaining day to day occurrences. In other words, it would have been

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much better to not email them a whole story and proposal to fix whatever issue I had and instead
just email them with the finished product and if they had questions I could answer them at that
time.
Over communicating is annoying and I realize that now. To people like Kyle and Josh
who get so many emails a day, over communicating makes their day harder because theyre
probably trying to sift through nonsense in order to figure out what needs immediate attention.
This is not to say that they dont care about daily updates, but at some point they do have lives
outside of work. In my feature writing course, I learned from Dr. Cox that every detail in a story
should have a specific purpose, and if it doesnt, it should be cut from the piece, (Cox, 2014).
This relates to this internship because if there was not a direct purpose for sending an email, it
shouldnt be sent. After learning this lesson, Ive been communicating where it counts. I havent
been sending them updates every time that the marketing coordinator and I change the color of
the website, but instead emailing them when I have to clarify something or have a genuine issue
that needs attention. It feels good to not micromanage myself too. Over communicating was a
way that I over analyzed my work and whether or not I was doing okay. I feel much better
leaving out all the small details and getting to what really matters; the finished products of my
internship.
All these lessons have polished my communication skills to be better. At no point did
Kyle ever say, Hey Victoria, you should email us less, speak with more brevity, have more
structure, and you need to learn objectives well in order to teach them, not ever. The way that I
learned these lessons was from picking up on how Kyle and Josh speak to each other and to me. I
watched carefully during store acquisitions and listened intently during webinars to see how they
interacted with the rest of the company. Through these observations, I was able to see what was

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ineffective about my own methods of communication and how I could use the Scoops methods in
order to be better. Im thrilled with my transformation into a simpler, more effective
communicator and I think that these lessons were crucial to achieving my promotion in the
company.
In the next few weeks, I will graduate from college, and I wont ever stop learning, but I
will be doing my fair share of teaching. Effective communication is key to being a good trainer
or teacher and I feel that Ive struggled enough in understanding things myself that Ive learned
what works about communication and what doesnt. Ive said this earlier, but communication is
an amazing thing. By communicating well with others, one can achieve great things. Kyle
always says that A great leader can produce other leaders, and I think the true mark or a good
leader is proper communication skills. Im sure at times Kyle and Josh havent wanted to spend
the time explaining things to me as I struggled to understand, but they always did because they
knew how important it was to me. I hope that I can always match their dedication to their work
and refine my methods of speaking with them. Theyve taught me the ways to speak less and
communicate more effectively. The secret is that communication is not about holding fast to
textbook lessons, but watching and observing the world around you and what works and doesnt.
My college education has taught me how to adapt to life. With every course, practicum,
and internship Ive come closer to this moment of clarity. I will never know everything, but if I
can ask the right questions, listen, observe and work hard, Ill always have a place somewhere in
this world. My internship with Chicago Scoops is the beginning of a promising future and
although its extremely challenging to work for this company, I wouldnt want to start my career
anywhere else. Im thankful for all the opportunities Ive had over this internship to define my
character within the company and elsewhere.

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