Effective Business Communication

I’ve been in various management or leadership roles for many years, and one thing I’ve consistently tried to mentor my managers in is effective communication.  Over that time, I’ve had folks who struggled with enough communication and others who really over-commun-icated.  How you pass on information in a business environment very much depends on who you’re talking to – which from my perspective really breaks down into five areas:

• Your team (people who report to you).
• Your peers (people in your organization at your level).
• Your leadership (people you report to).
• Internal customers (people within the company who use your products/services).
• External customers (people outside the company who use your products/services).

There are nuances for each of these, but broadly this covers the types.  Your style of communication will need to change depending on the audience.  To keep this relatively short, this post will focus on the first three.  Following blogs will pick up on the last two.

Your Team

As leaders, we have accountabilities to our own management as well as the business as a whole.  We are responsible for the performance of our team, and should always be willing to step up to that responsibility when things don’t go as we planned.  You are the face of your team to your leadership, and they and your team will respect you more if you don’t ‘pass the buck’ if a deliverable is missed or an initiative fails.

So, in order for your team to deliver, they need to know what’s expected of them.  The type of communication to your managers and their staff should clearly and with as much detail as possible lay out the strategic direction, specific deliverables (with deadlines!), and why what they’re doing is important to the success of the business.  Often, we overlook that last part – for example, an IT support team can get very focused on simply assigning and working tickets, and forget that for every person that’s down due to system issues there’s a financial impact to the company, or a negative hit on customer satisfaction (internal or external).  It helps when our teams know not just what they have to do every day, but why what they do matters.

This is not a ‘one and done’ thing, either.  Regular one-on-ones, staff meetings, or stand-up meetings are a priority to keep everyone aligned on the strategic direction as well as promote internal discussion and improve the overall culture and morale of the team.  I’ve always felt that 75% of being a good leader was simply building good relationships with the team.  It’s been said before – your success as a leader is dependent upon the performance of the people who work for you, so they need to now everything possible to aid them in succeeding.

Your Peers

You’re almost always going to have other managers or leaders at your level that you need to work with to be successful.  How well you communicate with them, building those relationships, means a lot to your overall success.  Keep in mind, everyone works for the same company, and everyone has the common goal of making the business successful.  Other teams need to know what your strategic objectives are, and you need to know and understand theirs.  Too often over the years I’ve seen situations where different teams were unknowingly working to solve the same problems.  Once they would find out that others were working on it, rather than talking and teaming together, it felt like they were at odds with each other.  They forget the common goals and focus on being territorial.  A good leader is always willing to compromise and find common ground.

How often do you talk to your peers?  Is it only during your leader’s staff meetings, or when you need something?  Building a rapport with them builds bridges that can make everyone successful.

Your Management

This can be a challenging area, as everyone is different in what they may expect.  Some leaders are hands-off, letting their team address issues as they see fit.  They only need regular updates on how things are running or where a deliverable is against its deadline.  Other managers are very much hands-on, desiring a lot of detail and wanting to understand the nuances of each project, see the metrics on how the teams are performing, and closely monitor all of their direct reports. 

You’ll need to tailor your communication to your manager’s expectations.  Most (not all) that I’ve worked with prefer brief summaries of what’s going on within your organization.  They’re frequently very busy, have their own accountabilities to the senior staff, and so need to be able to quickly cover at a high level the overall performance of their group.

As a manager, you have to be able to distill a lot of information coming from your team down into basically sound bites that quickly but accurately describes metrics, progress, or roadblocks.  Avoid generalities, and focus on hard data whenever possible.  Don’t overwhelm with numbers (unless you have a boss that likes all of the background data!), but highlight the key performance indicators for your team.

This has been a longer post than usual, and if you’ve made it this far I appreciate it!  Communication is one of the most important things we do as leaders, and understanding how we need to adjust our style depending on the audience is critical.  Next time, we’ll look at the last two areas as well as some general advice on how to be accurate and convincing.