Communication

Impact, Audience, and Format

Every time you communicate, you’re looking to have a certain impact, on a certain audience, and you choose the format you think will best help you do that.

That may feel a bit grand for describing an emoji response on Slack, but it’s true. 

Think about the times you feel you got a piece of communication right (not necessarily in the workplace) - you probably understood the person/people you were communicating with, knew the impact you wanted to have,  and chose the right way to do it.

This article is (hopefully) an example of that:

• Audience: busy first-time managers who are keen to learn but unlikely to have lots of time to digest new ideas.

• Impact: to help you improve your communication skills.

• Format: concise, written articles, where the key takeaways are easy to digest, and our audience can return to the key points for future reference. 

Conversely, if you think about a time some communication didn’t land well, you probably got one of these three factors wrong.  For example, that big strategy e-mail to senior leadership which didn’t get read or that team meeting where everyone on the call seemed disengaged.

Although it may seem overkill at times, if you’re trying to get your communication right consider these three factors:

• Audience: who’s the target of your communication?

• Impact: what’s the impact you want to have with that audience as a result of your communication? What behaviour/knowledge/state do you want to change? 

• Format: given what you know about that audience, and the impact you want to have, what’s the best way of communicating your message?

It can be particularly useful to return to these principles when you’re trying to troubleshoot poor communications practices that you’ve inherited from other leaders (i.e. team meetings).

Common Communications

We’re going to look at three key types of communications you’ll make as a new manager and some approaches to consider.

• The team update: how you keep your team informed.
• The boss update: how you keep your boss informed.
• Group Discussion: how you can run productive group discussions.

We’ll consider the audience, impact, and format of each one.

The Team Update

Audience

Your team.  You’ll know them better than we do, but some aspects to consider include:

• Patterns of work: how busy are your team? When would suit them best to receive this communication? When will they be most attentive? 
• Location/time-zone: are your team in-person or remote? How does that impact the effectiveness of your communication?  

Impact

Team updates are interesting because often you’ll want to have multiple impacts with your audience. These may include:

1. Digesting important updates: financial results, new hires, company updates etc. 
2. Celebrating wins: ensuring your team knows why the team succeeded.
3. Reflecting on challenges: ensuring your team understands why they happened and how they were overcome
4. Taking questions: giving clarity to your team and ensuring everyone’s voice is heard. 

Format

For points 2, 3, and 4, you may decide the best format for that is a meeting (either in-person or virtually).  These are all elements which benefit from discussion in real-time (‘synchronous communication’) and could be a good fit for a meeting.  There are also intangible benefits in terms of team spirit and morale to celebrating wins and discussing challenges together in the same place. 

Point 1 is different.  If you’re trying to help your team digest information and retain knowledge, is the best format to present it to them in a meeting?  Probably not.  It’s often best to put this information in writing (either email, or in a wiki, or however you store your docs) so individuals can digest it whenever it suits them. This type of communication doesn’t require participants to be together to be effective (‘asynchronous communication’).  It also enables you to share information beyond those who could make a meeting (e.g. your boss or other stakeholders).

Some of the most effective team updates include both formats - an information update which you distribute ahead of time, followed by a meeting to collectively discuss any important points.

‘Meetings exist for synchronous discussion between everyone involved. If that’s not what you need, don’t have a meeting.’  Matt Schelhas

Final Tips on Team Meetings

• Take notes: make it someone’s job to write-up the key points from any discussion, and any next steps. It creates a single source of truth from the meeting, keeps everyone accountable, and enables you to send the notes to others.

• Inclusivity: although collecting everyone together on a call or in-person can be great for team morale, it can have the opposite effect for anyone excluded.  This often happens due to timezone issues or other commitments.  Make every effort to avoid this (change your timing if the same individuals are regularly excluded) and use notes and asynchronous communication to keep people included.

• Facilitating questions: we’ve all been in lots of meetings when there’s tumbleweed as the presenter asks ‘any questions’ even though there’s an elephant in the room. Creating a safe space for your team to ask you questions and offer feedback is invaluable, but can be tricky.   Some people won’t be confident speaking up in the room so consider asking if anyone wants to submit questions in advance for you to answer.

• ‘Async meetings’: in certain instances, you may also choose to exchange team ideas asynchronously - for example in a forum, or using a shared doc.  This is different from an information update because the format you use includes the ability to discuss, leave comments etc (various teams are increasingly experimenting with these).  Although you lose the fast exchange of synchronous discussion, they can lead to more considered exchanges as participants have time to consider their responses.  They can also be more inclusive, as those who feel less comfortable in a meeting setting may feel more confident contributing. 

The Boss Update

Audience

Your boss.  Again, you’ll know them best.

Impact

When updating your boss, you’re typically looking to keep them better informed on matters that will:

1. Help them do their job: for example, data and information on team performance, noting of successes, identification of upcoming challenges. 
2. Help them help you: for example, any areas you want them to intervene on your behalf - perhaps to get information, advocate for a team member, put you in touch with someone, or create an opportunity. 

Format

You’ll remember that we’ve already covered this in Alignment & Managing Up.  Your boss will have a preferred format for receiving updates from you, and you should discuss this with them.  It may take a bit of trial and error to get there (and ask for feedback) but you should be able to settle on something that works.

Like the team update, communicating well with your boss likely needs multiple formats - concise, written updates for information updates with meetings for any topics that need to be discussed.

Group Discussion

Audience

The group discussion is different from the other two examples here because the audience is defined by the impact you want to have.

Depending on whether your topic for discussion is ‘Brainstorm product ideas for Q3’ or ‘Marketing Campaign Retrospective’ or ‘Decisions on New Hires’, that will define the audience who should be in the room.

Your first step to creating a great group discussion is getting your guestlist right - deciding who to include and who to exclude.

The second bit is the tricky part.  Often you’ll feel pressure to include people who offer little value to the discussion (often for reasons of seniority, or because ‘it’s the way it’s always been done’).  

Try to resist this. These people will diminish the discussion by diluting the impact of those who have the most to offer.  

Focus on gathering the people together who will give you the most chance of achieving your impact.  If you have to exclude people who you think will expect to be there, take the time to explain why rather than giving them the cold-shoulder and compromising any relationships.

‘Thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering’  Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering

Impact

Being clear about the impact you want to have is vital for having a successful discussion.  It will help you keep it on track when the topics of conversation drift.

If your broad topic is ‘Brainstorm product ideas for Q3’, what exactly are you hoping to get out of the discussion?  Are you just throwing around ideas for an hour or are you hoping to define a roadmap?

If you’re doing a retrospective on a marketing campaign, what do you want to know? Do you want to reflect on challenges? Celebrate successes? Focus on specific areas? 

Be specific about the impact you want to have, and use that to create an agenda, and shape the discussion to achieve it.

Format

Many group discussions will take place in a meeting (although as discussed previously you could use an Async Meeting).  The setting enables fast exchange of ideas and debate in real-time.  

When it comes to group discussions in meetings, assuming you have selected the right audience, and have a clear purpose, we’d also consider:

• Distributing information in advance: you don’t want discussion time taken up by people getting up to speed on the facts they need to participate, so send it in advance.  Amazon famously allocations additional time at the beginning of meetings for people to read any materials in silence to make sure everyone has the necessary context.

• Separating discussion and decision-making: making good decisions is hard - particularly if you’re trying to base them on a discussion you’ve just had, and doing it in the remaining five minutes of your meeting.  It can be more effective to separate out your ‘Discussion’ meetings from the meetings where you make decisions - you’ll do both more effectively. 

• Setting the scene: at the beginning of the meeting, re-state its purpose and the agenda you’ll be running through to meet that purpose.  It should re-focus your audience.

• Having a referee: there should always be someone who ‘runs’ the meeting.  They’re responsible for keeping the discussion on track, and ensuring that all voices are heard in the room.

• Taking Notes: make someone responsible for sharing a summary of the key points from the meeting.  Like team meetings, it creates a single source of truth from the meeting, keeps everyone accountable, and enables you to send the notes to others.

General Advice

As you develop your communication style and the communication culture in your team, you may want to consider the following:

• Set communication boundaries: in most modern workplaces, there is an overwhelming amount of communication.  Learning to lean in enough so you get what you need but not too far that you’re overwhelmed with notifications is a tricky balance.  You can help your team achieve that balance by setting some boundaries around healthy communication.  For example, around after-hours communication and expectations of being online and available.  If you don’t need your team to resond to Slack messages/emails in the evening and weekends, then tell them. (The UK government had this example of being deliberate about team culture and communication).

• Always respond: no-one likes being ignored.  Even if it’s just to acknowledge receipt of someone’s message, let them know you got it.

• Get feedback and check understanding: communication is like any skill at work, we need feedback to get better.  Don’t be afraid to ask your team about your communication style.  ‘What’s one thing we could improve about our team meetings?’, ‘Are there any meetings you wouldn’t attend if you had the choice?’ ‘Are there any topics you’d like to hear more from me on?’.

• Be clear: bias towards clarity in your communication.  Be upfront about the key points in emails.  Say the important stuff first in meetings.  Don’t try and bullshit your way out of difficult situations.  Your team will smell it a mile off.  

• Audit your meetings: check your calendar to see if all your meetings really needed to be meetings rather than written updates, or whether you needed to be in them.  Encourage your team members to do the same. 

• Put more in writing: written communication is amazing because it scales far beyond the initial interaction.  Once you’ve written it down, many can benefit.   If you find yourself answering the same question 2 or 3 times, write the answer down somewhere and direct the next person to the resource. 

• Repeat yourself: to have the impact you want, you’ll likely have to repeat yourself multiple times to the same audience.  That’s not because they’re not listening (although some might be).  People are just busy, and influencing them to change their habits and/or understanding takes time.  Good news is don’t worry about repeating yourself!  Studies have found leaders are 9x more likely to be criticized for under-communicating than over communicating. 

• If it’s sensitive, talk in person: because we communicate so much through email/Slack (and are wary of time-consuming meetings), often the instinctive response to answering a tricky question is to write a long, thoughtful email.  Instead, write a short, thoughtful one: ‘I think we should discuss this’.  There’s almost certainly nuance they’re not telling you in writing, and meeting offers you the opportunity to understand the details, and show you care about the individual’s concern.