Communicate to build relationships

Exercise:

Now that you know how to prepare & deliver communications, as well as actively listen, it’s important to know when and how to communicate to help build your relationships.

When the house is on fire, do you yell “fire” when you’re already outside of the house? Or, do you yell “fire” when you see smoke and alert everyone in the house to either put out the fire or evacuate? Transparency, tone, timing, and frequency are important.

Transparency: when communicating with colleagues or your manager, it’s important to be transparent with the status of your work, the risks involved, the wins to celebrate, the people involved, how you’re approaching it, the resources needed, and other details that will help you be successful and will help others be aware of how it impacts their own success. In some cases, it’s helpful to also be transparent in how you communicate and interpret how others communicate. If you find that you need more direct communication from others, ask others to be direct with what they need and how they feel the work is going - it’s okay to inform people that you have a hard time reading in between the lines and that direct communication is more effective.

Tone: pay attention to your tone when you’re communicating. Are you excited about an initiative? Are you overly excited and should tone it down? Are you nervous about something? Are you doubting yourself and need to convey confidence? Are you being too direct and need to soften your language? You can ask for specific feedback from others to help get a sense of your tone and to improve it over time.

Timing: think about the best time to communicate with someone. If the other person is about to head out on vacation, it’s not the time to propose a huge, new idea and expect attention or action on it. If the other person just dealt with a major customer escalation, it’s not the time to ask for a promotion. Think about the situation that the other person is in and how it may influence how they react to your communication. As mentioned in the earlier lesson, think about importance and urgency, when do you need to bring something to their attention in order to get the right response and outcome? When about to communicate, ask yourself, how is the timing of this communication and will it help get the right outcome?

Frequency: think about the frequency needed for your communications. How often do you want to communicate with each stakeholder? How often do you want to send status reports? How often do you want to send newsletters? How often do you want to have team meetings? Think about the communication flow across the organization and what frequency makes sense. If you receive quarterly priority updates from the leadership team, that may mean that quarterly priority updates specific to your team may make sense. You can ask your stakeholders how often they’d like to receive communications to help build your communications plan. Some stakeholders may have their own communication plans where they may look to your updates to provide the latest status by certain dates. Feedback and flow are important.

If you’re transparent with stakeholders, including your manager, pay attention to your tone, and think about the timing and the frequency of your communications, you will be in a good position to build relationships.

Action: create a communications plan by listing out all of your main communications, the timing, the frequency, the high-level topics, and the targeted audience.