Better Communication for Busy Leaders
Have you ever left a meeting feeling like you made yourself clear, only to find out weeks or months later that you were seriously mistaken? What about sending an email you assessed as concise, direct, and clear only to find it completely ignored or misinterpreted?
Many leaders’ effectiveness is crippled by communication issues. You don’t even need to make a serious mistake and experience communications like the ones above. There are a number of things going on, and once we discuss them, you will find some more effective communication techniques.
Roots of Miscommunication
In order to counter miscommunication effectively, you need to know some of the common root causes. Thankfully, by exploring just a few, you can adopt countermeasures for your specific scenario and diagnose issues when they arise again.
History of Miscommunication
Most everyone you work with, including yourself, worked somewhere else before. That means these folks experienced different communication and leadership styles. That exposure creates a rich history that people draw on to interpret what you’re trying to communicate.
Someone who worked for a leader who seemed to always contradict themselves will train that person to distrust what is said. Someone who worked for a leader whose temper and punitive style will train someone to disengage. Someone who worked for a leader who consistently withheld valuable context will train them to interpret the communication as partial and misleading and conduct themselves in a way to guard against the inevitable surprise.
This history means that when you communicate, even though you are sure you did it correctly, others will hear things through the lens of their past.
If you reflect on your past working with leaders and how you interpret what they say, you’ll likely recognize that you also have a set of filters you developed from a career of exposure to different styles, mistakes, and strengths.
Mismatched Context Creates Miscommunication
Imagine you’re planning a meal for your family and want to buy some exceptional bread to accompany it. So you go to a local bakery. After looking around for a few minutes, you leave frustrated because they don’t have what you were looking for.
Now, the baker, baked their bread and goods based on a combination of what sells well and their passion. They mark their bread and products with funny names, leading to higher sales. Unfortunately, you weren’t drawn to them because their clever names didn’t help you answer your most important question about how well that bread will go with your meal.
What we have here is a problem where the baker actually did have a perfect loaf of bread, but because you both approached the same problem with wildly different contexts, goals, and information, there was a serious miscommunication that led to your frustration and a missed sale for the baker.
That was a long metaphor, so let me clarify this. You have a set of information, goals, etc., that are very different from the people who work for you. When you communicate, it will tell part of a picture, and the people who work for you have a different part of that same picture. The distance between those two parts leads to huge miscommunication.
Gravity of Your Words Cause Miscommunication
Have you ever experienced a scenario where you made an off-hand comment that led to a fury of unintended activity?
I worked with one leader on exploring new technical practices and posed the hypothetical question: If there were a million bucks to be made today, could we do it?
This hypothesis was innocent enough, but the team took it as a directive to ship their work in less than a day. They abandoned essential quality practices because their leader wanted it done today, and they caused problems with other groups because they believed their leader needed the work done today.
This is a really tough problem to solve as you almost never can predict how your words will land, but it guarantees that your words will land heavier and harder than you ever expect. This gravity to your words can cause havoc with groups as they hurry to satisfy needs you never intended.
Techniques for Better Communication
Follow-Up and Follow-Through
Now, many of the miscommunication issues I’ve pointed out aren’t your fault. These are quirks of reality you have to deal with. This would be in contrast to a leader who actively misleads people, acts hostile, pits teams against one another, etc. When you do those things, you don’t have a communication problem—you have a leadership problem.
So when you’re not actively sabotaging people, your first technique to learn is following-up and following through.
This means that after you think you’ve communicated something, double-check people’s understanding of what you said. It is important to let people finish completely before you correct them when they tell you what they understand. If you correct them as they’re communicating, they’ll likely stop.
This simple act of checking in on understanding can help you find out where your communication missed the mark and will help you identify unintended consequences.
Follow-through is about creating enough boundaries and signals so that you can course correct quickly. A follow-through example for the million in a day would be to set a time to assess the results in terms of speed and quality.
Rule of Three
This may sound patronizing, but because people’s internal filters can prevent them from understanding things, you can adopt a simple rule of communicating the same thing three times.
Now, this rule of three doesn’t mean repeating yourself three times in the same meeting. It means that when you know you need to communicate something, you find a way to communicate it three times.
A small tip is that you don’t want to vary your message much. This is because of the gravity of your words issue where one small twist of phrase can cause something unexpected. Stick to the same messaging even if it has issues. You’ll want the consistency to better troubleshoot the issue.
Tracing Communication
One issue of miscommunication that I didn’t bring up is that every place experiences the same phenomenon kids do when they play the telephone game. You say your message, which gets reinterpreted and passed along with differences to someone else who does the same, and then people work with a completely different set of understanding.
Some of this is happening to bridge that context issue. The issue is that you don’t know how that is happening or how well it is happening, and often, there are issues.
After you communicate something you find some people several levels below you in the company and check in with them on what they understand. This isn’t a quiz for them—it’s an assessment for you.
This check-in will reveal how information is actually flowing through your company and group. It will help you isolate layers of management who might be adapting your communication too liberally on top of a misunderstanding. While this takes some time, it isn’t something you need to do all the time. You can do it periodically to ensure things are operating smoothly.
A caveat here is that if there is vital or high-risk communication, this technique becomes more important as you cannot afford mistakes. Alternatively, you can prevent the telephone game by speaking to everyone directly and then using the other techniques.
Communication is Hard
I work as a consultant, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that miscommunication causes an unbelievable amount of ineffectiveness. So, while you may find yourself reading this article thinking you don’t need this advice, try some of the techniques and see what happens.
I’ve yet to find a point of diminishing returns on making communication more effective.