Communication is the job
Why is it important for a leader to master communication
I recently read a post by Boz, CTO of Facebook, with the same title. It was an eye-opening post that gave words to many topics swirling in my mind but couldn’t cohesively put together on a page. When one reaches middle management, communication becomes a vital part of the daily work life. This is not to say that communication is unimportant for an individual contributor. It becomes the job, a prominent one, once you transition as a manager and stay important all through the roles on the ladder.
Here are the things that work for me to be better at communication.
Tools
You have to be on top of your email inbox, slack(or any of your internal communication tools), and documents.
Email
It is important to have an effective strategy for sorting the inbox and making it more manageable. I have seen inboxes of folks with thousands of unread emails. Once we let the drudgery of emails get to us, we will have an insurmountable tomb, and there is no way to get back to sanity. There are several strategies for getting to inbox zero.
What works for me is to have an inbox layout system of unread and read emails. Getting to inbox zero was anxiety-inducing and required constant attention. I strive to have at most ten unread emails at any point. I don’t check them often and opt for batch-processing emails. I configure several filters and only the remaining emails that need my attention land in the inbox. YMMV.
Slack
It is easy to get into ‘channels hell’, and it is downhill after that. But one can only hope for good times. It is essential to be on top of channels and DMs. DMs may need quicker attention and sometimes within the hour. However, channels can be consumed slowly, typically within a day or two. YMMV. We should have a monthly practice to archive or exit the channels where we don’t add value directly or indirectly. While staying on top of information is essential, having sanity from an overdose of information is critical.
Documents
Individuals and teams share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or any collateral to managers and leaders expecting inputs and approvals. Those are the best ways to collaborate async and align quicker. Suppose managers and leaders ignore consuming the documents or postpone the consumption for a laidback day; teams suffer, leading to slower decision-making. While it may sound banal, ignoring this responsibility will be akin to the death of the team, objective, and company(in that order) by a thousand cuts.
Signals
One should proactively look for signals from all the chatters in all mediums to make sense of the health, progress and direction of the objective or a team.
It can be a case where a direct report is critical of their directs in a public forum. It can be that your team member is arguing incessantly with an external team member. Your direct might be responding to chats late at night. All these are signals for you to observe and act appropriately in a proactive manner. This one thing sets apart a great manager from an ordinary one.
Subtract. Delegate. Delegate
If you are overwhelmed with information, it is a cue for you to prioritise the ones that you want to stay on top of and delegate the rest. Once you delegate, you can set expectations with your directs to share summaries periodically. Let us say you want to know the health of a project that is important but not critical; then you can ask your directs to send weekly updates (or any cadence that works) and explicitly set expectations to share a section ‘call for help’ in those updates. This way, you can help and unblock the team.
Be Useful
Your role as a manager or a leader is to be useful. BE USEFUL. That is it. It is a simple concept that requires daily work.
Sometimes life happens, or you are deep into a priority and find little time for other must-do things. In the end, being useful is the reason for the existence of this role. The team and, ultimately, the company will identify the people who are not useful and remove them. In a startup, it is easy to identify this. But in a large organization, this is super hard, and it takes months or even years, to identify this. By then, it is usually too late to save the team and, eventually, the company.
To be useful, one needs to be at one's best every day, and communication is critical to that.
Decisions
A manager or leader is paid to assimilate all the information from varied sources, make unique sense of it with their distinct mental models, and make a timely, well-informed decision. Once a decision is made, it has to be reviewed and communicated widely.
The cost of making wrong decisions is high as one goes up the ladder. Of course, only some decisions have a high price. As Jeff Bezos popularised, there are two types of decisions - one-way doors and two-way doors. Either way, you have to show up for every decision with all of yourself and take a decision. It becomes easier if you have the correct information assimilated and a communication strategy that works for you.
Setting expectations
When new to the role or the company, setting the right expectations with your team on your information assimilation and communication strategy is essential. Setting expectations early will help your team members work with you without friction and confusion. This simple step can avoid a lot of workplace anxiety. Yet, this one doesn’t always get prioritised. Dharmesh Shah, the CTO of Hubspot, has a great strategy using tags that he calls ‘Flashtags’.
Create impact
Apart from being useful, one other trait is creating impact. The role exists to create a positive and long-lasting impact on your team. Impactful managers and leaders are preferred by team members any day. BE USEFUL and CREATE IMPACT are two cornerstones of being an effective leader.