Tag: Communication

Categories
Coaching Leadership

All Good

Red letters spelling out GOOD in a city landscape
Photo by Carson Masterson on Unsplash

We use feedback to help us grow, understand what’s going well and think about areas we might be able to improve. Sometimes it feels like we’re only getting positive feedback. We get told we’re doing a great job, but there’s not much actually actionable in the content.

There’s a few different types of “All Good” feedback, and there are couple of different techniques you can use to grab some value from it. So if you feel like you’re just getting positive vibes, but are struggling a bit to progress your goals, dive in and figure out which types of feedback you are working with to let you take it to the next level.

“Good Job”

Super frustrating when you reflect on it. It’s usually an attempt at continuous feedback that doesn’t quite hit the mark. “The presentation was great”, but what about it specifically? What was a real strength, and was there anything that could have been made even stronger.

This type of feedback is real vanity metric stuff. It makes you feel good in the moment, but it doesn’t tell you any specific about what’s really going well. Lean into this opening and ask some valuable coaching questions. “What about it was great?”. “I felt that slide 7 was a bit wordy, what’s your view on that section?”. “How do you feel it landed with the Marketing team?”.

Don’t let these opportunities slip by. Even if the area is a strength you will get better faster with more targeted guidance. Otherwise it’s just like hitting golf balls blindfolded and listening for the applause.

“The quiet parts”

A real problem when you look at feedback coming from more junior people or peers you have to work with often. Even when trust is high, people will still tend to default to positive feedback, rather than leading with areas of opportunity.

If you’ve got three key areas that are important in your role and one is totally missing from your feedback, maybe reflect on why. Imagine you are great at coaching and supporting people but there’s nothing about setting strategy. That quiet part should be a concern, something to follow-up on.

Sometimes you also get some very light criticism flowing through the positive words. If you are reading just the good stuff, this can be easy to miss or gloss over. Instead, try pretending that the softness is a really hard and stark statement. Dial it up to 11 and then figure out if it’s something you want to change or do differently in future. Turn “Makes lots of contributions and suggestions” to “Stifles thoughts of others and takes all the space in the room” and see how that could drive different behaviour.

“Missing people”

A classic end of year performance problem. You’ve only got good feedback because only the people who wanted to share positive stories have decided to.

This can be because you’ve asked a sensible set of people from your stakeholder map, but as it’s easier to share the good stuff, you’ve missed out on all the people who didn’t want to do the work to share growth opportunities.

In which case, try leaning on second order feedback. Ask some trusted colleagues for their thoughts on what the missing people might be saying. Be careful to avoid straying into gossip if you do this, consider starting off by working with your manager (as they are someone who is likely to already be getting some more actionable from these missing voices), and go from there.

Consider as well the benefits of anonymous feedback. Some people will be much more likely to share something useful if it’s not directly attached to their name, especially if mediated through a standard 360 or similar process.

Alternatively, you might have missed some of those less positive stakeholders. Reflect on that map of people who are important to your now and next roles, look at where you’ve not even asked for any thoughts and go and seek them out. Maybe you’ll learn something important through taking the time to extend the reach of your search for feedback.

With any of these approaches you might suddenly get a tranche of new feedback that doesn’t meet your previous expectations. Don’t discount it because it’s different or unexpected, but make sure to take time to reflect on it, seek the useful and good from and use it to learn and grow.

“The Irrelevant”

A sneaky tactic I’ve seen used to deliver “constructive” feedback is to put the positive sounding comments in terms of what you do, but the more difficult sections in terms of what we do or what the organisation does.

If you discard the second part then you are risking doing yourself a massive disservice. “You laid out the options well, but we are not great at making decisions so haven’t moved forwards”. A quick reading is that you did a great job and someone else didn’t.

Try flipping it to “You laid out the options well but it didn’t lead to a decision being made”. How would that make you feel? Does it still feel positive, or does it suggest there’s something to try doing differently in future?

“The Last Job”

Look at the feedback you are getting, and think about the level that it reflects. Is it activities focused towards your next role, or is it all around the expectations of your current job? Even weaker, is it all about your last job?

It’s a painful problem that’s most common amongst people who’ve just been promoted. It’s all too easy to slip back into the comfortable parts of your previous job, and then get positive feedback on doing easy tasks well.

This is the hardest type of positive feedback to fix as it’s not going to get better by seeking out more feedback. Here you need to look at what you are doing, what you should be doing, the gap between the two and how you need to move from one to the other.

Similarly if you want to be promoted, positive feedback on your current role is baseline table stakes, instead work to understand the expectations of the next job, and start doing the work to be in those rooms and get feedback about those activities instead.

If it’s All Good it’s No Good

If all you are getting is positive feedback then it’s going to be really limiting to you in the long term.

Reflect on your situation and the information you’ve gathered and see which of these buckets you fall into. It might be more than one!

Put together an action plan and go out and fix it.

If you aren’t learning you are falling behind, so don’t sit overconfidently on the good stuff. Seek out opportunities as they won’t be handed to you!

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Moving House

I’ve been off schedule because I’ve just moved house, hopefully for the last time in a long time!

It’s really true how much stress this change can bring to you, even though you signed up to it and knew it was going to happen.

So rather than a big long essay about how houses and software are similar (It Depends is not just a software phrase!), I thought I’d give you a chance to reflect a bit on that change, as it’s common to so many of us.

It’s something that’s mostly within our control, where we decide the when, where and how but it’s still really hard work. Whether that’s the size of the change, the new location, the costs or the disruption to daily life, it’s a big impact that can take a lot out of you.

So think about changes where there’s less control to the people undergoing the change. A re-org or change of priorities at work. It’s smaller than uprooting your whole life, but maybe it isn’t to the people it’s impacting in that moment.

Even worse if you live and breathe the change for ages before it happens. You can fall into the trap of thinking it’s smaller than it is.

Go back to moving house, you thought it was easy to cope with, but when you do it, it turns out it wasn’t. Again, you had more control there, the reality didn’t match the story you told.

You need to think about how to communicate changes, think back to these big changes to remind you when things were tough, and build your message with empathy and care.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Repeat the Message

Repeating White Balconies in a Large Building
Photo by Joshua Chai on Unsplash

When I turned on the TV the other day, I was lucky enough to catch the end of a teleshopping segment. These shows are real masters of a particular aspect of communication, repeating the message.

It’s something that I often have to remind myself of. Things that are important to me should only need to be said once. It’s important, so people should be paying attention and they should remember what’s being said.

In reality, this is far from true. People may not recognise that it’s an important statement. They might not be ready to hear the importance of it. Maybe something else is on their mind, or they simply aren’t listening.

Teleshoppers know that you may just switch on to the channel, that you aren’t likely to be be paying attention but they want to catch you and get you to take an action.

They endlessly repeat their core message. Pay attention. This thing solves a problem. It’s a problem you have. It’s good value, it’ll be better for you if you buy this thing today.

They also do it in a range of ways. Someone shows the product. They talk about it. Messages scroll across the screen or take over the entire display. The words change, but the point is made again and again until you have no chance of misunderstanding it.

These are techniques you can bring into use when you have an important message to share. Think about how you’ll repeat it. You need to share it more than once, and you need a plan. Use different channels to help it land.

Say it face-to-face. Broadcast in an All-Hands. Send an email newsletter. Repeat it next time. Follow-up to confirm that people know what’s going on an to confirm the message is landing. Adapt if you need to.

Don’t overdo it, and don’t use this for every message, but if you need something important to be understood, steal a leaf out of the teleshopper playbook.

Categories
Leadership

Alignment

Photo by William Warby on Unsplash

There are lots of ways to set goals, and lots of ways to get going on achieving them. It’s pretty much the same approach when you are setting your own personal goals as to when you are setting those for your organisation. The difference is in the circle of people you consult with (more professional overlap for the org goals!), and then how widely you share them.

Sharing your personal goals helps you commit to actually making them happen. It’s not vital, but it’s certainly useful. Sharing your org goals is vital! It’s the only way they are going to happen, and it’s the only way that people will know what you are trying to achieve as a group.

Banging them in a slide deck and calling it a day is not going to cut it. That doesn’t give the alignment that you need to have everyone pulling in the same direction to chase down these big goals.

Instead, you need to get your comms plan in gear, figure out the arenas you can sell your goals in. Present them to people, tell them why these particular goals matter and why they are more important than other things we could be doing. Take questions and answer them honestly. Record some sessions for people who are on leave. Share them in Slack, put them on the Intranet (woo!) and finally point people to the deck!

Then repeat this, and go again. Talk about progress towards the goals, share the successful steps towards them and keep them in people’s minds.

This multi-channel approach might get decent visibility and some good buy-in, and the repetition will help, but you won’t actually know how aligned people are to these goals.

Ask them!

As a leader you’ve got more context, you know what’s going on and you have more background than most people in the org. It’s all obvious to you, but it might not be to the Individual Contributors doing the work.

So, ask some questions:

  • What is our top goal for the year?
  • Why are we going after this?
  • What are we not going to do?

Look for patterns in what comes back. What’s missing, what’s wrong, what has actually landed with people? Take these themes, then use them to rework your comms. Address the misconceptions, dive deep into the gaps and celebrate the good understanding.

You build alignment with clear messaging, repetition and rework.

It’s not a one-and-done deck and presentation, and if you think it is you are destined to fail.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Everything Old is New Again

Photo by Conor Luddy on Unsplash

In a large enough organisation, it is easy to lose the thread of where we are now. Great practices and processes can be lost as people move on to different roles or focus on new things. As you grow, people joining the company will bring their own experiences forwards, without necessarily understanding the history of what has gone before.

This is another classic communication conundrum, having people tread the same ground multiple times, solve problems that have already been solved or go chasing off in multiple different directions is incredibly wasteful. What can you do to reduce the likelihood of this happening?

Document the good stuff! People are unreliable over time, so write it down if it’s good. Give access to people who are interested in the specific topic, and make sure it’s easy to edit and keep up to date. This is great for repeatable processes like hiring, and it’s super good for recording decisions, especially when you choose not to do something.

Next, make sure there’s someone who has responsibility for the thing, and time to manage it. For small stuff, that might be part of a role, but again, as you grow you might find it’s important enough to hire someone, or build entire teams around it. I’ve taken onboarding practices from an ad-hoc group of volunteers, to a defined part of people’s roles, to the entire job of a small team. This gives amazing continuity and saved us from re-inventing the wheel multiple times.

Then you need to communicate it. Remind people where things are stored. Ask them if they have seen the docs, or talked to the people who are already doing the thing. Connect them up. If someone is keen to improve a recruitment practice, hook them into the groups already working in that space.

If people are new and want to investigate a product area that’s previously been discounted, then accelerate them by giving them the state of the art. Get them to answer the question “What’s changed?”, and they’ll save massive effort on getting to where you have already been, and be well prepared for any long-serving nay-sayers they meet on the path.

Also, make sure the people who are already doing a thing are easy to find and noisy about what they do. This is when you broadcast, that’s where you share your wins on the public channels. That’s an excellent use of the wiki, intranet or company Slack. Help people find you early, and you don’t crush their dreams when you tell them that you’ve already solved that problem.

It’s poisonous to leave people solving problems you’ve already solved, it’s the quickest way to waste massive sums of money and great tracts of time. Build that organisational memory, and propel people to the novel and new.

Innovate in fresh areas to drive on to great success.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Point to Point

Photo by Annabel Sumardi on Unsplash

Different messages need different types of communication. Big broadcasts will not always cut it, sometimes you need to think about when it’s right to use methods when there are only a couple of people in the conversation.

Going point-to-point is great when the conversation is nuanced, any time that you need to discuss something in a back and forth way. That might be having a difficult conversation about development, or when you need to discover more information before making a decision.

It’s also great if the topic only affects a few people, or if there’s an outsized impact of a change on a small group of people. For example, if you are going to make a change to how a process is run, it’s almost certainly going to be a broadcast message. However, if there are a few people who will be negatively impacted, you should communicate that directly and personally in an individual setting. This is especially relevant for times when the changes are impacting people slightly differently, you use the capacity for back and forth to understand the impact on them, and make sure you are acknowledging that impact.

You might go point-to-point to build up support for an idea or change before sharing the big broadcast. Similarly to the way you look at people who are negatively impacted, here you look for people who will have an outsized positive change. These will be big supporters, so get them onside before you go public.

Not every communication in your working life will be best served with a Slack message, an email blast or a shout out in the all hands. Look out for times when you need the personal touch, and go point-to-point when the time is right

Categories
Leadership

Communication

Photo by Tiana Borcherding on Unsplash

There’s not much that tests your communication skills as quickly as building furniture. It’s something that can seem simpler than it actually ends up being. It needs more than one person to do effectively, and those people usually have different levels of experience to bring to the activity.

Firstly, you should read the instructions. Look at all the stages and each detail of those steps. This brings out any assumptions and smooths them over. This first activity starts to balance out those gaps in experience.

Next you arrange your tools and make sure you’ve got everything you need. This lets you agree some terms upfront, building your shared language and ensuring early understanding of term.

Then you talk early, before starting a particular action. You are sharing expectations early, rather than hoping that someone figures out what you want after you’re already straining under the load of a heavy lump of wood. Trying to share meaning in stressful situations is hard, and often just raises the stress.

So, to communicate well you should:

  1. Uncover assumptions early
  2. Agree terms and their meanings
  3. Set expectations before it gets stressful

This wont just help you put furniture together more easily, it’ll make you more effective in any situation where you need to communicate something important.

Categories
Leadership

Communicating Change

Photo by Bluehouse Skis on Unsplash

When you are attempting to communicate with someone, you need to always hold on to the idea that “it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear”. Once you’ve internalised this, it gives you a chance to build the shared pool of meaning that’s required to communicate something effectively.

Communicating “change” is a whole level beyond this basic interaction. Change brings uncertainty. It will take time, and it will affect a number of people.

With these added complexities, you need to bring another skill to bear. You need to be consistent.

You will have to repeat your message many times, in many formats and to many people. A single broadcast in a single medium will not have the impact you hope for.

If you are communicating change, you will have had more time to get used to the idea, to see the benefits and to see the path forwards. Anyone new to the idea will not have this, so your first announcement will feel like a bolt from the blue.

People will react to this in different ways, excitement, shock, even anger. Be ready to refine your message and to share it in different contexts and mediums, but always hold your consistent points in the front of mind.

When you’re sick of saying it, people are starting to get it, so get your head down, craft your message and give it multiple times with consistent focus.