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:

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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

Influencing up: Gain more influence with your leader by building trust

Influencing up is an important skill to master. While there is tons of literature on leadership, there is not a lot on followership. Followership can loosely be defined as the ability to understand a leader's vision and help them bring it to life. Followership differs from leadership in that, as a follower, you have less organizational power, fewer resources at your disposal, and competition for your leader's attention. In this article, we will explore followership and how you can gain more influence with your leader by focusing on building trust.

Executing is the ticket of entry when it comes to influencing leaders.

Leaders of organizations must deliver results. They are held responsible for achieving organizational goals over anything else and must make difficult decisions around people, processes, and resources to achieve goals.

Leaders know that they have blind spots, so they rely on the people around them to give them data and insights to help them understand how business is going and the type of changes they need to make to maintain current performance and strive for improvement. The people they choose to trust and listen to will directly influence their ability to reach organizational goals.

For this reason, leaders tend to rely on employees who have proven records of delivering results and are reliable sources of information, insights, perspectives, and solutions. You must start by executing your role at a high level to gain more influence with your leader. Once you can do this, your focus should also expand to include helping your leader achieve their goals.

How do you become a trusted source?

It takes time to build a trusting relationship with your boss. It starts with you making small investments around being on time for work, doing the tasks that you are assigned, and consistently being forthright about challenges and obstacles. By executing what you are asked to do, you establish credibility with your boss. Over time, this creditability can grow into trust, which will provide opportunities for you to share your opinions, thoughts, and ideas.

Whenever your boss comes to you with a problem, and you can provide a solution, you expand your influence with your boss. Think of delivering results as being like building a bridge of trust. Each time you help solve a problem, another brink is laid, strengthening your relationship with your boss.

When you disappoint, fail to deliver, or provide inaccurate or hard-to-understand information, you damage a brink on your bridge. If you have a lot of bricks, a minor mistake will not disrupt the integrity of your bridge. But if your bridge does not have a good foundation, you could find yourself on shaky ground.

Communication matters

Once you have established a strong trust bridge, you can begin the process of influencing your leader. Having a good relationship is the first step in the process. The next step in the influence process is communicating brief, clear, and compelling information to your leader.

• Being brief is important because the higher your leader is in an organization, the more people pull on their time and attention. Your ability to summarize complex ideas into a 5 to 10-minute conversation is essential to getting your leader's attention and getting them to care about the information you have to share.

• Being clear is important because your leader likely does not have time to help you flush out your ideas or help you refine your logic. That is time and work, which can be seen as an additional problem to be solved instead of the solution you want it to be. Test your ideas with a trusted peer and ask them to help you refine your thinking before presenting a new concept, idea, or solution to your boss.

• Being compelling is important because there are always competing priorities and perspectives. Your idea needs to be better than others your leader is presented with. If you want buy-in, you must present solutions that feel like no-brainers because they are easy to understand and can provide a qualifiable benefit to your leader.

Summary

Building your followership skills is essential in growing your capability as a leader. It may seem counterintuitive, but all great leaders started off as great followers. Being a great follower can give you more face-time opportunities with your leader, greater influence within your organization, and incremental opportunities to take on important, high-profile work.

Being a great follower starts with executing your role at a high level and then providing insight and perspective that helps your leader and organization perform at a higher level.

One word of caution: not all leaders deserve great followers. Do your due diligence in identifying leaders to follow that align with your ethics, values, and beliefs. If you are going to go all in on supporting someone else success, you want to be confident that it will be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Share this article with a peer or an employee who would benefit from this message.

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Thank you for reading this blog

I am a father, husband, executive coach, and former retail executive. My coaching expertise comes from 21 years of leading operation, sales, and marketing teams. I understand what it is like to feel stuck, undervalued, and underappreciated.

I also know what it takes to invest in professional development, climb the corporate ladder, and find fulfillment at work.

Your career path is a scavenger hunt. Each opportunity prepares you for the next. Allow me the opportunity to help you clarify your path and accelerate your professional development.

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Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com