Four steps to better communication

WorkForces is about people, and how their feelings, ways of thinking and relationships with one another can impact the structure and strategy of a business.

Businesses are not machines because humans are not machines. The purpose of this article is to help you to understand human dynamics at work. My hope is that it will help you harness them so that both your people and your organisation benefit.

Today’s message is not about a communication breakdown. Nobody falls out, nobody refuses to speak to their colleagues, nobody sends a passive-aggressive email.

No drama.

Instead, it’s a story about the quiet — but no less dangerous — consequences of what can happen when a senior leadership team is no longer able to have the difficult conversations, and how to fix that problem.

It’ll take around two minutes to read. If you find value in it (or if you don’t), please let me know.

It starts with communication.

“We’re struggling to nail our strategy, Phil.”

I was working with a senior leadership team who told me, in no uncertain terms, that they had a strategy problem. But it quickly became clear that they didn’t have a strategy problem at all: they had a communication problem.

It was having a profound impact on nearly every aspect of the business, yet none of them were aware that it was even an issue.

How does a room full of smart, experienced and emotionally intelligent leaders miss this?

The perils of familiarity.

Firstly, the people in this team were blinkered by their familiarity with one another. Two things happened as a result:

• Assumed roles became customary. The “quiet one” played their role dutifully, the “cynical one” remained a cynic regardless of how they might’ve actually felt. It’s hard to escape these roles once you fall into them.
• The team began to second-guess each other’s thoughts and feelings as a means of short-cutting the perceived need for the conversation. Why have the difficult discussions if you already know how they’ll go?

They’d accidentally built an echo chamber and trapped themselves inside. Decisions became a foregone conclusion before a discussion had even taken place.

Conflict averse = decision averse.

Most of us are hardwired to avoid difficult conversations. The psychology behind this is simple: as human beings, we instinctively gravitate to objects and situations we find pleasant, and avoid objects and situations that we find unpleasant.

This leadership team was no different.

They didn’t want to have the conversations they needed to have, firstly because they already felt they could surmise the outcome and secondly because they didn’t want the potential conflict.

But avoiding a conflict doesn’t mean it’s not there.

So how do you solve this type of communication problem in a senior leadership team?

Four steps to better communication.

1) Acknowledge the issue.

It takes courage to recognise a problem, but if you don’t, it’ll find you eventually. The bill always falls due, it’s just a question of how much interest you’ve allowed to accrue.

2) Investigate.

Take a moment to investigate the views of others. It gives them an opportunity to shake off the shackles of the familiar role they’re playing, and their rationale behind a certain opinion might be surprising.

3) Psychometrics.

Psychometrics can help us to better understand how members of a senior leadership team think and respond to situations. Reply to this email with the word “tools” if such tools are of interest.

4) Training in conflict.

Conflict is normal and can be healthy. It exists in every business. Owning this fact makes it loads easier to deal with. Usually when leadership teams have a communication problem, they’re struggling with an underlying fear of how acknowledging it will make them feel.

Training them to embrace conflict as a vehicle for better decision making wasn’t an exercise in helping them learn how to fight to the death, but rather a way of making them curious about why these differences of opinion existed in the first place.

It’s little wonder that this team couldn’t see the core problem: you can’t read the label from inside the jar.

Learning that their issue was one of communication, not strategy, liberated them. Over-familiarity, role-based assumptions and a fear of conflict had put up intangible barriers to progress. As soon as they acknowledged these barriers, those barriers began to crumble.

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