Be a great communicator

Effective communication is key to good leadership. As a leader you need to be constantly communicating with your team. You need to be providing them with direction, inspiration and insight. And you also need to be listening to them, clarifying your message, and addressing their concerns.

This is an important topic and it fills many books. I can't cover it all, but here are some guidelines for communication that I have adopted over the years:

• Be clear and consistent with your message 
• If you are trying to get your team to understand a new concept or to move in a new direction, it is very important that you make your point clearly. It is also extremely important to be consistent each time you give the message. Inconsistency can result in confusion. To do this well, you need to purposeful in your communication (your days of winging it may be numbered!). 
• Provide as much information as you can
• Over communication is better than under communication. Give as much context to the message as you can. The more people know, the better they understand what you are saying. I have found that explaining how I made a decision makes it much easier for people to accept the decision even if they disagree. 
• Repeat the message
• You will need to repeat your message for it to sink in. It may be unnatural for you to repeat yourself because you may feel like you are nagging or boring the team. But the fact is that you need to repeat your message until you see others talking about it; until the team has really internalized it.
• Tell the truth
• It is important for you to tell the truth when you communicate. I talked about this in a previous blog but because it is important I repeat it :-) . Don't make things up. Do your research. Know what you are talking about. 
• Know your audience
• Not all people will want or need the same level of detail in communication. If you provide too many technical details to a non technical crowd you may bore them. If you provide too few technical details to a technical crowd, they may think you don't understand the subject or that you don't understand them. In both cases, your message will likely be lost. 
• Make personal connections 
• It is very helpful in communicating to be able to make personal connections. In a presentation or a meeting, you want to be engaging the individuals. To help with that, you should make a point of getting to know the people on your team. And in emails, where appropriate, making a personal connection is always helpful.  If you want to highlight an accomplishment, it is best if you can be as detailed as possible, talking about specific people, teams, and actions. 
• Communicate often 
• You should be communicating with your team as often as you can. Much of it can be informal or one on one, but it is important to communicate with your whole team. This can be difficult if you have remote members of the team. You need to remember them. You need to make a real effort to communicate often to your entire team. A special note here regarding remote teams: it is important to know about and respect their time zone and their culture. Include the remote teams but do it reasonably. (My coworkers and bosses in Silicon Valley loved to call me after 7pm EST and on stat holidays such as Canada Day)
• Listen
• Communication is a two way street. You need to listen to what people tell you and use that information. If your actions show that you have listened, they are more likely to continue to listen to you. As well, if you are going to make an impact on an organization, you need to understand the organization and that is much easier if you listen to what the members tell you.  It takes time but it is worth it. At one job, I was consistently the voice of development for the executives. When I would get asked how I knew what the developer's thought, my answer was always the same ... I asked them and they told me. 

Although these guidelines can be helpful, if you don't use them correctly, you could end up in some trouble. To help with that, remember to avoid the following pitfalls:

• Empty communication
• You should never communicate with a team if you have nothing to say or if what you are saying has no real meaning. You have probably been in a meeting where you rolled your eyes, looked at your watch, or played games on your smartphone. Don't be the person who called that meeting! You have probably also read that congratulatory email that was so generic that it was meaningless. Don`t be the person that sends that email. Make sure you have something to communicate. 
• Interrupting your team
• Unless you absolutely need to communicate something right away, make sure that you are not interrupting your team. This is a bad habit that I have. I will often ask just because I would like an answer and not because I really need an answer right away. Development is a concentration intense activity and interrupting a developer and getting them to context switch costs time.  To avoid interrupting, I now usually swing by their desk or text them and ask them to drop by when they have a break. 
• Talking too much
• You can actually talk too much or too long. When you do that you waste people's time. I have worked for someone who loved to talk and could talk for hours. Although much of the information was useful, it could have been said in half the time. Don't take any more time than you need. Be respectful of their time. 
• Taking too long to respond
• There will be times when you get asked a question and you just can't answer right away, so you let the people know you will get back to them. Make sure you do. I have seen so many people say they will and then they either don't response or respond so long after the question was asked that it might as well have been left unanswered. People don`t forget it when you do this. The next time they have questions or concerns, they may just decide not to bother bringing them to you. This pitfall was the primary reason that one of my colleagues lost the faith of his team and eventually was moved to the side. He was genuine in his wanting to understand the issues but never did a thing with the information he was given. 
• Keeping secrets unnecessarily
• It is necessary some time to keep things confidential. But too often, information that is not confidential is kept secret. The thinking is that not everyone needs to know everything. That is true, but people like to know what is going on and giving them information is almost always beneficial. I have seen too many times when rumours started just because of a lack of information. And as we know, rumours can be very disruptive. 
• Surprising your team 
• This is one area where I tend to get a lot of disagreement when I make this suggestion. My view is that you should not completely surprise your team (unless you are throwing them a party!). If there is big news (good or bad) or a change you are trying to make, I recommend bringing in a few key people and talking to them about it in advance of the wider announcement. Then when you roll it out to a larger group, although some will be surprised, not everyone will, and having people other than you who understand the change will help. This approach takes more time and planning but if there are any concerns, it will come up in these early discussion and you can adjust so that your message becomes clearer and more impactful. 

There are many ways of communicating and many facets to communication. Solid presentations skills are essential. One of the best resources for this is Power Presentations. Jerry Wiessman's book, Presenting to Win, is pretty helpful but if you have the opportunity, I would highly recommend taking his course. Jerry is very knowledgeable and the course provided me, my peers, and my team members with effective and immediate tools for improving our presentations.

Email can be a very effective way to communicate, but use it wisely. It should not be a substitute for face to face communication. In my next role, I am going to insist that email is something that is only read two to three times a day and is for sharing information that needs to be written down but not actioned immediately. Instead of email, I encourage you to to walk over to see them, pick up the phone, or open a chat window and have the discussion that way instead (but try not to interrupt them when they are concentrating). Reading email should not take up most of your day. If it does, there is something wrong. Trust me. I have been there.

I have a similar concern regarding meetings. They are a great way to communicate but they need to have a purpose and they need to have minutes that document the outcome. If it was not worth writing down, then it was not worth having the meeting (the exception to this is one on one meetings with your team members where minutes are not necessary). I have lived the scenario where I had 40 hours of meetings most weeks. It resulted in me not paying attention in the meetings, not having time to listen to my employees, not having the time to get my messaging clear, and generally resorting to after hours email for most of my regular communication. The meetings started a cascade of bad communication habits that were extremely hard to break. I will never get myself into that position again. If you are there, find a way to get out. You probably don't need to be in as many meetings as you are scheduled to be in (ask to read the minutes!).

Communication is very important and must be done wisely. I have been reading a lot lately about agile and lean methodologies. Among other things, these methodologies promote keeping things simple, focusing on adding value, eliminating waste, and empowering the team. A lot of the guidelines I have provided are aligned with these principles. Don't waste your team's time with communication - make sure it is adding value and giving them the information they need to make their own decisions. Keep the communication simple but make it effective.