How good is your boss: Day 2: Communication - Message received or mayhem resumed? ; In the second part of a four-day series, management consultant and author Dr Nigel MacLennan tells how to assess your boss on his or her communication management skills. What is communication like in your organisation? State of the art? Two way? One way? No way?: [FIRST Edition]

Yesterday we asked what are the key responsibilities of a chief executive? In whichever order you prioritise them the word central to delivering all of any CEO's responsibilities is communication, and in advanced companies, the phrase is communication management.

How important is communication in the leadership of an organisation? Sometimes the best way to show the importance of something is to demonstrate what happens when it is absent.

Just how much damage can poor communication do to a company? Hold on to your seat, this will shock you. In study after study, conducted in every Western economy over the last 50 years, researchers have found that around 80 per cent of all problems in all organisations can be attributed directly to poor or absent communication.

In practice that means that four out of every five problems in your organisation are caused by poor communication. Rarely in any field of life do we find all problems so strongly related to one cause. It presents both a problem and an opportunity. By improving communication in your organisation just a little you can see a huge return. Imagine the payback if you improved communication by 50 per cent. You could wipe out two in five of the organisation's problems. The best chief executives know that, and act on it. To demonstrate just how important communication is to good leadership answer the following questions. If you were running a business would you have a business plan? Of course. If you were running a marketing department would you have a marketing plan? Of course you would. If you were running an HR department would you have an HR plan? You would indeed.

So, if you spent 80-95 per cent of your time communicating (as all CEOs and directors do) would you have a communication plan? Of course you would, but fewer than 1 in 1,000 CEOs even know what one looks like.

Contrast that with the world's best. Great bosses find the idea of trying to lead without a communication plan as bizarre as trying to live without breathing. To them, managing a company without managing its internal communication is just career suicide. Time toassess if your CEO is breathing. If the answer to any question is 'I don't...