Developing Communication Strategies that Work

Last week I posted a poll on LinkedIn asking if employees could improve one thing about their company, what would it be. 47% of respondents said communication. Establishing an effective communication strategy is key to driving employee engagement and morale. Too little communication, and employees can feel disconnected and alone, too much communication and employees can feel micro-managed. Getting communication right, is especially important now, as more companies explore remote and hybrid work. Leader can improve communication by focusing on improving employee engagement, providing psychological safety, developing a written communication plan, and soliciting feedback from employees on how to continuously improve communication.

Drive Employee Engagement

An effective communication strategy starts with employee engagement. If an employee is not engaged with the work that they are doing, no level of communication will be the right. You can engage your employees by helping them to understand how important their role is to the success of the organization. Many times, employees struggle to see how their contribution plays into the bigger picture, which leaves them feeling uninspired and unappreciated. As the leader, you can drive engagement by helping employees to find fulfillment in the work that they are doing.

For example, when I was the Manager of Franchise Marketing and Recruiting, one of the core responsibilities of my team was to find and screen for qualified leads. As a team, we spent time discussing how our efforts to find qualified leads helped us to contribute to the company’s overall mission to be the world’s leader of convenience. In addition, we talked about the positive impact we were making in the lives of individuals that decided to Franchise with us. Members of the team were able to take personal satisfaction in knowing that they played a pivot role in helping small business owner pursue their dreams, while also supporting the company’s vision for being a leader in convenience. This sense of purpose, helped to support high levels of engagement with the team.

Create Psychological Safety

The second best-practice to improve communication effectiveness is to create psychological safety for employees. Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (1). This can be done by treating your employees with dignity and respect. When employees feel respected, they are more likely to communicate concerns to you. This will allow you to better understand what your employees value, and how current actions or events are impacting them. This information can also help you to acquire empathy, which is essential for building strong relationship. In providing answers to your employee's questions and acting on their feedback you will build trust and rapport. Listening also puts you in a better position to influence employees when your goals or points of view do not align. After hearing your employee's concerns, you are unable to provide insights on why it is in the company's best interest to do things as they are being done.

One of the biggest reasons that employees are not more open with their employers is that they fear the consequences of being transparent with their opinions. They are concerned that voicing unpopular opinions will impact their status within the company. As a leader, you can create an environment where employees know that they can respectfully share their point of view or ask a question without losing creditability. Organizations are stronger when they leverage the diversity of thought of their employees. By showing dignity and respect, you create the psychological safety necessary for an inclusive workplace.

Develop a Written Communication Plan

A third best-practice for creating an effective communication strategy is to have a written communication plan. This communication plan should define when, where, what and how information should be shared. Creating a shared understanding around how employees should communicate with each other provides a starting point for effective communication within an organization. When questions around overcommunication or under communication arise, members of the organization can evaluate whether the problem is the execution of the communication plan, or the plan itself. This is powerful, because it establishes a shared expectation of what should be happening, along with a way of tweak expectations if individuals feel that current plan is not sufficient.

Written communication plans should be detailed, but not all encompassing. It is impossible to define all the potential reason and ways that people will communicate within the organization. The intent of a written communication plan is to provide guidelines, not to define unbreakable rules. The communication plan should be both global and local. From a global standpoint, expectations around when key meetings should be held, can help provide a predictable cadence for business. Meetings such as business and performance reviews should be scheduled at the global level to help to establish the importance of those meetings. Leadership should also provide guidance on preferred methods of communication. A famous example of this is when Jeff Bezos outlawed the use of power points presentations at Amazon. How we communicate, impacts what we communicate, so it is important to be thoughtful about the benefits and drawbacks of different communication tools. Other parts of the communication plan should be developed at the local level. For example, as a leader, when do you want your employees to text you information, instead of calling you. What type of information should be held for one-on-one meeting verses brought up in group discussions. Providing clarity around when, where, what and how information should be communicated, can help to ensure that the appropriate amount of communication is occurring.

Solicit Feedback on Communication Plan

The final best-practice is to solicit feedback from members of your organization. Everyone’s needs for communication are different. The more you understand their needs, the better able you will be to help identify solutions. When I became a Zone Vice President of Operations, some of the biggest concerns that I heard from Field Consultants were that we had too many meetings, priorities seemed to change every week, and that they were overwhelmed by non-value-added activities and communications. There concerns were all linked to poor communication. There was a lack of clarity around our zone’s mission, and there was not much discipline around how or when information was shared with the field team.

This set my leadership team and me on a mission to streamline our communications and ensure that we helped Field Consultants to have the information they needed to effectively do their job. We did this in four primary ways. First, we shifted all zone wide written communication to be distributed through Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams allowed us to create a library of shared content that everyone could use on demand. We worked with our support and administration partners to develop channels on Microsoft Teams to make information easier to find. Next, we encouraged Field Consultants to post questions on Microsoft Teams. We found that many times our support team would field the same question from different Field Consultants. To accelerate the answering of questions, we asked Field Consultants to post questions on a shared space where the support team could provide answers that were visible to everyone. Next, we defined expectations around communication. We let the team know that at a minimum we expected them to review emails daily and Microsoft Teams weekly. We also communicated that if something was sent via email, that it was urgent and that we were looking for the issue to be addressed within 48 hours. If something was communicated on Microsoft Teams, it was more informational, and we expected it to be reviewed and acted upon weekly. Finally, we would periodically do polls and surveys to gage how we were doing with improving communication. Overtime we heard a lot of positive feedback around the changes that we had made. All these changes were rooted in feedback that we received from Field Consultants. They were the best guide for solving our communication opportunities.

Effective communication strategies are what truly sets organization apart. The quicker you can gather and act on urgent information, the better you are able to serve customers. The fewer times that you must repeat a message to align everyone on a strategy, the more time you will have for executing the strategy. The time you take to build engagement, create psychological safety, establish a written communication plan, and solicit feedback on that plan, will improve organizational productivity by creating an inclusive workplace that effectively communicates information up and down the organization. Your employees are the foundation of the value that your organization creates. The better able you are to ensure they have the information they need to work, and that you have the information you need to lead, the more successful your business will be.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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References

1. Psychological Safety – Amy C. Edmondson. (2022). Amycedmondson.com. https://amycedmondson.com/psychological-safety/

The Art of Making Decisions That You Can Live With

As a leader within your organization, you are accountable to various stakeholders. Depending on your role, you are accountable to your supervisor, board of directors, or investors. You are also accountable to your peers, direct reports, and customers. If you think even more broadly, you are accountable to your vendors, community, and society at large. With so many people you are accountable to, it can be difficult to know what action you should take when dealing with a complex and important decision. Having a framework can make the decision-making process easier. As you tackle complex problems, I encourage you to define the decision you need to make, explore different perspectives, make values-based decisions, and stick to your commitments.

Define the Decision

Taking the time to explore the different perspectives of those impacted by your decision is a great way identify potential actions you can pursue. Before you can explore different perspectives, you must clarify the decision that you are looking to make. In doing this, you want to define the decision in one sentence with no judgement. By clearly define the decision that is under consideration with no judgement, you open yourself up to see thing more clearly.

Gain Perspective

Once you have identified the decision, you can begin to explore the perspective of different people that will be impacted. Talking with individuals that represent different perspectives is ideal. When you are short on time an alternative approach is to imagine yourself from the perspective of different stakeholders. By doing this, you can explore how your opinion on what should be done changes based on those perspectives. For example, if you are trying to determine whether to offer better health benefits to employees, you could start by imagining yourself as a middle-aged employee with children. What would they want the company to offer in benefits? Would their opinion be different than a single young professional within the organization? How about your customers? Would they care about the quality of benefits you provide employees? Now consider your Chief Financial Officer or your company’s investors. Would they have a different point of view on what the company should do? By pausing and considering each stakeholders perception on the topic, you expand your thinking, and are better able to see all the potential risks and benefits of your purposed actions.

Make Value-Based Decisions

Once you have taken the time to consider the various perspectives related to your topic, it is time to consider what values you will use to guide your decision making. Leveraging your values when making decisions is crucial. It helps to ensure there is alignment between who you say you are, and the actions you take. People follow leaders that they trust. Being inauthentic is one of the quickest ways to erode trust. When you clearly communicate your values, and use them to guide your actions, people can rely on you being consistent. This consistency promotes psychological safety and encourages trust.

After defining the values, you will use in making your decision, it is time to start brainstorming. As you brainstorm, you want to develop solutions based on the different perspectives that you have identified. Going back to the earlier example, from a middle-aged employee perspective, you might see value in adjusting the benefits package to be the best in the industry, because retirement and health care benefits are more important to you than base salary. From a young professional’s perspective, you may keep things the same, since you see more value in a higher salary than better benefits. From a customer perspective, you may be in favor of better benefits provided it does not lead to increment product or service cost. From the chief financial officer or investor perspective, you may be in favor of improving the benefits if you can reduce other cost, or past the expense on to customers. As you consider these perspectives, you want to bounce the purposed actions, and anticipate impact off your guiding values. This will help you to determine if the actions you are considering resonate with who you want to be as a leader.

For some leaders, making money is a core value, and they will allow this to guide all their actions. For other leaders, fairness is a core value, and they will sacrifice earning in pursuit of this end. Regardless of what your guiding values are, you will only find peace in your decision if the actions you take align with your values. Taking the time to define your values upfront, and then sticking to them through the decision-making process will help you to be at peace with the decisions that you make.

Commit to Action

Once you have aligned on your course of action, it is important to make a commitment to execute your plan. During the brainstorming period, it is great to take in as much information as possible. You should talk to different stakeholders if you can, and get their thoughts on potential solutions, but once a decision is made, you must commit to it. Trust in organization wavers when leaders do not honor their commitments. There is a time for fact and opinion gathering, a time for commitment, and a time for action. As a leader, it is important that you are clear with our organization when each of those time periods start, and when they end. This will give your organization comfort in knowing that you allow for debate but once a decision is made, it is final.

To rise into a leadership role, you must demonstrate to people that you are trustworthy, and that you will take care of their interests. As you move higher within organizations, the number and diversity of the people that you serve increases. This creates both the satisfaction of being able to provide value to more people, the challenge of competing priorities and the burden of making decisions that will result in some people being winners, and other people being losers. When faced with complex problems, it is easy to give in to the loudest voice, or to the stakeholder with the most power. When leaders do this, they typically make decisions that do not align with their values. Non-value-based decision-making leads to inauthenticity, inconsistencies in actions, and an erosion of trust. As a leader you must fight the impulse to move quickly. Being purposeful in defining the decision you need to make, seeking out different perspectives, making value-based decisions, and committing to decisions once they are made, will help you to build a culture that aligns with who you want to be as a leader.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

What is Co-Active Coaching?

The Co-Active Training Institute has been around for 30 years and has trained over 65,000 coaches worldwide. The program has been certified by the International Coaching Federation which is the largest coaching accreditation organizations in the world. The Co-action training model is powerful because it challenges clients to declare their values, self-reflect, develop actions items, and commit to change. The model’s foundation is based on 4 guiding principles.

People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole

The first principle is that people are naturally creative resourceful and whole. In the Co-active model, it is not the job of the coach to fix the client. The client does not need fixing. What the client needs is assistance defining who they want to be, support in identifying negative thoughts, strategies for tapping into internal motivation, assistance in identifying options for improving their current situations, and encouragement to hold themselves accountable for their goals.

Dance in the moment

The second principle is dance in this moment. This principle is rooted in the fact that coaching is not therapy. During coaching sessions, we will only lightly touch on the client’s past. The past is fixed and cannot be changed. Our focus and attention are on the future. During coaching sessions, coaches will talk about what is happening now, and coming up with strategies to help the client move from their current state to their desired goal.

Focus on the whole person

The third principle is focus on the whole person. In the co-active model, coaches examine a client’s life from nine different segments. Career, Family and Friends, Significant other/Romance, Fun & Recreation, Health, Money, Personal Growth and Physical Environment. The reason coaches focus on all these segments is that they are all interconnected. As a client works on one segment of their life, it is important to understand the impact that it is having on other areas.

Evoke Transformation

The final principle is evoke transformation. People work with coaches because they want to experience a change in their life that they have not been able to achieve on their own. Coaches are taught to hold space for clients, so that they can self-reflect, gain emotional intelligence, define their goals, establish and renew motivation and develop actions plans to improve their lives.

Within my coaching practice, my primary focus is helping leaders define what they want from their careers and developing strategies to help them grow. As a former corporate executive and small business owner I know the importance of surrounding yourself by people that push you to be the best version of yourself. I help clients transform by deeply listening to them, asking thought-provoking questions, and reflecting back to them the things I have heard. With the information, I affirm the client's identity, challenge thinking that does not serve them, encourage action, requesting commitments and act as an accountability partner.

In summary, the Co-active coaching model can be summarized as a coaching approach where a coach, helps clients to define who they want to be, and what actions they will take to transform from who they are today, to who they want to be. Part of the magic of the coaching process is clients having the ability to get personalized unbiased help. If you have never experience executive coaching, I encourage you to give it a try. It will likely be one of the first times in your life that you speak to someone for 45 minutes, have their undivided attention, and know that they are exclusively listening to you with the unbiased goal of helping you self-reflect and develop plans to improve your career or business.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771