This article provides advice on communicating effectively with your team. The focus is on what to communicate and why. Your communication style is another dimension of communicating effectively that will be covered in a later article.
When you are reading this, I recommend that you consider the advice given from the perspective that you are a leader who acts in service to your team. If you can give them what they need, they can perform their roles and responsibilities and you get the outcomes you seek and accountable for. The right communication at the right time directly impacts on your collective success.
If you’ve recently moved into a leadership role, you may find yourself wondering why one of the key pieces of advice you will receive from experienced leaders is “Communicate, communicate, communicate.” This article answers two questions that you may have, why communicating with your team is so important and what to communicate and why. It also reminds you of the importance of listening to your team and working on improving your own communication.
Here goes.
Why communicating with your team is so important for you and your team
The key reasons why fostering regular, open and transparent, two-way communication with your team are important are:
- You can’t lead if your people can’t follow. How can your team possibly follow your lead if you don’t keep them informed of your direction?
- Your people can’t meet your expectations if they don’t know what they are. To expect your team to meet unspoken or vague targets is unfair to them.
- Everyone needs validation they are doing the right things. Providing your team with validation of their performance, good or otherwise, helps them to perform and grow. Without a feedback loop, assumptions will be made that may be the opposite of what you think.
- You won’t know if you don’t ask. You cannot provide support or be of service to your team if you don’t know what their impediments are or what they need to do the job you are asking them to do.
- You can’t manage the team’s level of engagement or mood if you don’t know what it is.
Your communication with your team directly impacts on how your team members feel and their subsequent level of engagement. It is not enough to expect your team members to maintain their engagement on their own.
What to communicate to your team and why
Below are 3 key areas of communication that, at a minimum, will set you and your team up for success.
1. Roles and Responsibilities
You must be very clear on roles and responsibilities for yourself and for members of your team.
Do not assume everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities, or yours. Confusion about who has what job to do throws everyone off. Make sure each team member understands what their role is in the team and for the team.
For example, if a team member’s role statement has them accountable for gathering information from others in the team to construct regular performance reports for you then make sure they are clear that is their role and responsibility to them and to the rest of the team. Make it clear you expect all others to support them by providing the information required by the date and time it is required. Make it also very clear that you need the completed report to exercise your responsibility to report up on the team’s progress.
Similarly, if it is your team processes information, or creates products from inputs or information from somewhere else and sends the output elsewhere, make sure the inputs and outputs are clearly articulated.
2. Expectations
Spell out your expectations as clearly as possible so your team understands the standards and behaviours they need to meet. Examples of things that you are likely to expect from them are:
- Everyone is working towards the team goals, what they are, and how you want them to do it.
- Everyone will be fully compliant with all corporately set requirements such as adherence to corporate policies and process. Make sure your team members understand you expect this because it is expected of you as well.
- Everyone will provide complete transparency in status meetings. Help them to understand that it is not OK for them to wait until underperformance becomes an issue before letting you know about risks and problems. Equally, let your team members know that you expect them to problem solve first before escalating issues to you.
- Everyone is expected to focus on their roles and responsibilities while they are at work. Note that it is a good idea to let your team know that, in the event of personal difficulty, you can support them with understanding, compassion and flexibility if required.
3. Good and Bad news
Keeping your team advised about what is going on will help to keep them engaged. No one likes to be kept in the dark about bad news if it directly affects them and, conversely, everyone likes to hear good news! Examples of good news could be:
- The team is doing great evidenced by performance measures results.
- You have received positive feedback from management on the team’s performance
- You may have news that previous work of the team has yielded great results
- You have received positive reviews from clients
- You may have a change of roles and responsibilities that will improve the team’s effectiveness
- You may have received additional funding for more resources
- You may be moving to a better area in the building with more space
Examples of bad news could be:
- The converse of all the above good news
- You are leaving or you are getting a new boss (though this could also be good news for you and them depending on the circumstances!)
- The organisation is restructuring or stopping services that directly impact the team.
Communication with your team is a two-way street
Since effective communication involves both sending and receiving messages it is important that you set the conditions to enable your team to communicate with you.
You can’t possibly know what they need from you if you don’t ask them, and actively listen to what they say.
Apart from being an excellent way of gauging how your team is going, listening to your team and demonstrating through your actions you have heard them will build their trust in you as their leader. Put simply, they don’t have to like you, but they will respect you and appreciate working for you if you enable them to talk to you and you listen to them.
Setting the conditions for effective communication means creating opportunities for your team members to talk directly to you. Some examples of conditions that you can set up to help you to receive messages from your team are:
- Have a regular team meeting with an agenda balanced equally between you communicating with your team and your team communicating with you. While this can be tricky, allow enough time on the agenda to give your attendees the opportunity to speak up. Note, it is up to them if they take advantage of it or not!
- Have an ‘open door’ policy. This means you are accessible and open to talking if they need to talk to you without waiting for a regular meeting to occur. You may not have the time immediately but being open to make time in your calendar is creating an opportunity for them and you.
- Ask pointed and open questions in the tearoom/lunchroom. Having an informal chat can be a great opportunity to build rapport and allow them to talk under less formal conditions.
- Make time to wander through and talk to people at their desks from time to time, especially if you know they are under pressure and you have supported them changing how things are done. Gathering intelligence from the floor might put a different perspective on what your performance measures are telling you. For example, the numbers might look good on paper, but you can see that the team is working very hard and energies and engagement is flagging.
Regularly review your own communication
It is never too late to do a personal stocktake on whether you are communicating effectively. Try the following steps to self-assess if you are communicating effectively with your team:
- Write down all the times you formally communicated directly with your team. Is it working? Are you the only one talking? Are the team asking questions?
- Now write down all your informal chats and coffee meetings if you have them. Are you only having informal catchups with a couple of them? Are you demonstrating some preference to talk to some and not others?
- Write down all the opportunities you create for your team to communicate with you. Do they come to you outside formal meetings or bottle up issues to raise at the meetings (if you don’t have meetings – start!)?
- Think about times you feel you have had to repeat yourself or re-explain something. Could it be you and how you are sending your message? Do you have to change your language?
- Now think about what it is your team repeats to you that they need that you haven’t acted on. Are you listening, or wishing they would stop whining?
- Have there been instances where your team have found out what is happening in the organisation before you have told them? Don’t include all staff communications here. Are you having important conversations with them in a timely manner?
- Do you feel like you know what is going on in the team? Do you get surprises when you look at your performance metrics?
- Are you really tapped into the mood of the team or do you know whether they are fully engaged or not? What does your unplanned leave profile look like? Are you constantly having to replace people? These are generally a good indicator you need to look more closely.
Now think about what you can do to improve. Be clear about what you want to change in how, why, when and even where you communicate so you can re-assess a few months down the track to see if your team has responded.
Effective communication is not something you do once. It needs to be worked day in day out by you so you can be sure that words like ‘he or she doesn’t communicate with us’ isn’t something that is shared outside the team by the team.
If you like the photo I used for this blog article you’ll find more like it from Cathy Yeulet on 123rf.com
