To prevent communication train wrecks and surface concerns you may have overlooked, don’t assume everyone on your team is aligned until you’ve tested the alignment. Don’t assume everyone will cascade that communication effectively unless you give them a tool to do it. And don’t assume it’s been done if they haven’t returned and reported.
In this episode, we address the most common mistakes leaders make when communicating important decisions and information by sharing three proven strategies to ensure your decisions create clarity and alignment throughout your organization. Misalignment and miscommunication can lead to confusion and inefficiency, but with the right approach, you can keep everyone on the same page.
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Episode transcription
Peter Green
Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show. I’m Peter Green. Richard Lawrence is in Dallas presenting at the Agile 2024 conference, so I’m solo today, talking about how leadership communication goes wrong and three strategies to improve it.
I was recently working as an executive coach with a CEO who had a big development goal of being less assertive and more inquisitive with her staff. A month or two into the engagement, she invited me to sit in on her team’s quarterly business review, the QBR, as an observer to see what I noticed.
The meeting covered a lot of ground, reviewing major initiatives, OKRs, and “health metrics” on how the company was doing. As they moved through the agenda, there were several discussions about performance, suggestions for improvement, and debates about what should change going forward. I could see the CEO really doing her homework, waiting for others to speak first, reformulating opinions as curiosity-driven questions and as the team finished the last agenda item, the CEO asked if there was anything that was unclear that they should align on before they wrapped. The team, having been at it all morning, generally looked a bit toasty. They were ready for lunch, and nobody spoke up.
During lunch, the CEO pulled me aside and asked me for any quick impressions. I complimented her on her clear improvements, and cited a few specific examples that stood out to me. Then I asked her what her goal was for how she concluded the meeting with that question about anything that they needed to align on. She shared that in the past, people would leave the QBR with different opinions or takeaways. There was even one trainwreck example she shared, where they had discussed what to do about a project that was in trouble. They talked about three options: move the deadline back, get some help from a vendor, and, I think, renegotiate the scope with the customer of that project. She described how, then, after the meeting, different versions of all three of those options somehow made it into the rumor mill of the org, and things had blown up a bit until they spent the time to clean it up. So she wanted to make sure they were aligned. I told her I had some advice about a more effective way to do that in future meetings, and that’s the advice we’re going to share in today’s episode.
But first,
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OK, to prevent that kind of misalignment that CEO experienced, there are three strategies leadership teams should do in order to cascade communication well. Strategy one, Align & Assign, happens in the meeting itself. Strategy 2, Communicate & Listen, is a specific structure for cascading the communication down, and Strategy three, Return & Report, is about closing the loop on that communication.
Starting then, with Strategy One, Align & Assign, this is one of the more important parts of any leadership meeting. In fact, I advise all my clients to conclude every team meeting with 5-10 minutes to get clear on who will communicate what to whom, and by when. It’s not enough to make decisions in these meetings; you have to over-communicate those decisions for them to make their way into the collective consciousness of the organization.
If you’ve made a decision and you want it to stick, you need to be able to answer five specific questions about that decision. First, what problem are you solving with this decision, and why is the problem important? As much as Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why” probably could have been a long blog post, the core idea is super-solid. Start with why you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing.
Second, what is the solution? This is what you’ve probably spent the most time on in the meeting, so capture those details. Third, every decision you make has side effects. And it’s good to capture the side effects you’ve thought about and how you plan to address them.
Next, the fourth question, what obstacles do you anticipate in implementing the change? Obstacles are different from side effects, where we assume we could make the change, but it will have down stream impacts. The obstacles are about what time, resources, and focus will be needed to succeed.
Finally, the fifth question is to answer who needs to do what in order to execute on the decision. Make sure those people know they have permission to do what they need to do and that it’s prioritized appropriately.
Ask someone to capture the answers to those five questions as you work through them, Problem, Solution, Side Effects, Obstacles, and Collaboration, then have them read it out to the team. This gives team members a chance to chime in on anything that was overlooked or that wasn’t what they expected to communicate and gives you a chance to get aligned on those things.
The last thing we check on is the timeframe for communicating things. Sometimes it’s important that people hear about decisions at the same time. If Team A learns of a change in compensation policy before Team B, the rumors might hit Team B before the official communication, and that’s not good. So, agree when people will share the communication. Almost always, this lands on something like “within 24 hours,” but sometimes it’s more urgent or less urgent and it’s good to get aligned on timing.
So that’s Strategy One–Align & Assign. Align on your answers to the five questions, then assign who will communicate what, to whom, and how at the end of the meeting.
Strategy two, Communicate & Listen, is a structure for how to share the information aligned on in step one. This structure achieves two goals. First, it helps decisions stick by ensuring that they are clearly communicated, and second, it helps surface concerns the leaders may not have been aware of when they made the decision. This structure, by the way, is a variation on the Humanizing Work Feedback Process. If you’re unfamiliar with that pattern, you can check out Ep. 121 to learn more. We’ll drop a link to that in the show notes, and we’ll share a graphic for specifically how to use this process for communication.
The process has six steps. Steps 1, 2, and 6, the opening two and the closing one, are about sharing something. Steps 3,4, and 5, the middle steps, are about listening to specific things. Step 1 is to set the Context. What’s the background on why we’re talking about this today? The problem that you aligned on at the beginning of “align and assign,” is good context for this. Step 2 is the actual Content. Share the decisions as well as the side effects, obstacles and collaboration. Whatever it is. Then over to the listening side, step 3 is for Questions, specifically clarifying questions. For people you have communicated to, what didn’t make sense, what did you not understand about the context or the content? Then onto Step 4 which is Kudos–what do you like about this decision or this direction? Now, if you’re sharing bad news, skip this step. You don’t need to ask people what they liked about the reduction in force. That’s just counterproductive. Otherwise, ask it. It’s often enlightening to hear what stands out as positive to different people on your staff. and for the people that may be uncertain about a decision or direction, it’s good for them to hear from the enthusiastic ones on your team instead of directly from you.
Step 5 is Concerns. What about this decision has you a bit worried? Focus on listening and capturing concerns here. It’s not a debate, and you don’t need to immediately address those concerns or even commit to doing it in the future. If there are some concerns that are easy to address, like maybe somebody misunderstood something, or wasn’t aware of what resources are being made available, feel free to address them immediately. But in this step, the primary focus is on being an empathetic listener. People want to be heard. So make sure that their concerns are heard.
Finally, back to sharing for step 6, which is Your Conclusions. What are you hearing in the Kudos and Concerns, what are the themes? What are your big takeaways? and what can you commit to do about the concerns, if anything. Again, you don’t have to commit to addressing those concerns. A big risk here, in fact, is sort of complying with your team’s concerns at the expense of honoring the commitment to the decision you made with the leadership team. That’s not the goal of this process or this step, and it’s not healthy. The real purpose is, again, for you to be empathetic and aware of how the decision impacts people. Think about mitigating the downsides of the decision, not changing the decision.
All right. That’s Communicate and Listen.
Finally, strategy 3, Return and Report, is about closing the loop. If everyone on the leadership team has used Strategy 2 to share the key points from strategy 1, return and report to the leadership team that you’ve done it, and share your Conclusions from step 6, the kudos and concerns that stood out to you when you shared it with your staff. Creating shared awareness of what people are excited about and what they’re concerned about helps the leadership team prepare to execute the decision well. Don’t wait for the next meeting to share these, send them via email or slack or teams or whatever you’re using as soon as you have them.
Using these three strategies, Align & Assign, Communicate & Listen, and Return & Report prevents communication train wrecks like my client experienced, and also helps surface concerns that the leadership team may have overlooked. Don’t assume everyone on your team is aligned until you’ve tested that alignment. Don’t assume everyone will cascade that communication effectively unless you’ve given them a tool to do it. And don’t assume it’s been done until they have returned and reported. Try these three strategies out at the end of your next meeting and let us know how it goes!
Thanks for tuning in.
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