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SPREAD THE MESSAGE
We’ve built a culture of storytelling. We’re constantly surfacing, identifying, and telling stories at our organization. There’s always been an intentionality. Whenever I tell a story, I’m always trying to connect that to a value.
—SCOTT HARRISON
Founder and CEO, Charity Water
(Episode #290, The Learning Leader Show)
Effective communication is the lifeblood of effective leadership. Michael Useem is a professor of management and the director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School. Each year, he teaches an Executive MBA course in which he asks his students for an assessment of a person who best exemplifies ideals of leadership. Famous leaders in history are named, of course. But, often, the students offer up the names of leaders and bosses they have worked with. Of the many characteristics the students described that made those bosses worth mentioning, one stood out the most to Professor Useem: “Their exceptional capacity to articulate a plan and lay out a way of achieving it.”
In other words: they were exceptional communicators.
What was true of the bosses of those business students was also true of the bosses of business leaders. Rob DeMartini was recently named CEO of USA Cycling. Prior to this new position, Rob served for almost 12 years as the CEO for New Balance, the athletic apparel and footwear company based in Boston, Massachusetts. While Rob was at the helm of New Balance, after a 20-year career as an executive at Procter & Gamble, the company grew its revenues from $1.5 billion in 2007 to $4.4 billion (as of 2017).1 When I asked Rob about some of the exceptional leaders he has worked with or for over the years, two examples stood out. Of Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Laffley, Rob said, “[It was] his ability to take a complicated message and boil it down into crisp words so that big organizations knew exactly what play had been called. He was very insightful.” For Rob, clarity was also the calling card for Gillette CEO Jim Kilts: “He was a hard-nosed, tough minded, crystal clear leader. So you knew exactly what he wanted from you. That made it simpler to work for him.”2
The importance of effective communication with your team cannot be overstated. As my dad has preached to me from a young age, “It is your job as the leader to be vividly clear when speaking to your team.” They must understand the big picture mission of the team, as well as their specific role that contributes to the accomplishment of that mission. They must know exactly what you expect of them at all times. Your team can’t know and do these if you don’t clearly communicate with them. If the team doesn’t have vivid clarity, then it is you, the leader, who is responsible for the failure in communication.
Some of the modes of communication that the effective leader must successfully develop and utilize to get his or her message across include:
Team meetings. Planning and conducting a meeting so that the use of your team’s time is useful for you and them.
Difficult conversations. Understanding the importance of the occasional need to have a difficult conversation. Professionals appreciate directness and even critical feedback if delivered from the “My role is to help you be spectacular” point of view.
Directives from above. Delivering a message to your team from organizational “higher-ups” that you may not completely agree with but are nevertheless responsible for carrying out.
Executive presence. Having conversations at the executive level, whether reporting results up the organization and/or working to persuade senior leadership to take a preferred action.
Public speaking. Building the framework for an effective speech, including how to deliver a one, three, and five minute “mini” speech.
Using the tools. Making effective use of the communication tools at your disposal (email, phone, one-on-one conversations, etc.).
THE POWER OF STORY
Understanding and utilizing the power of narrative storytelling isn’t about empty sentimentality and emotional manipulation. Nor is it a technique that is used instead of rational argument and solid facts. Rather, as researcher Brené Brown memorably said from the TEDxHouston stage: “stories are just data with a soul.”3 Communication works best for both the brain and the heart when it covers both bases.
“Stories are how we think,” says Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center. “They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.”4
The power of a story’s narrative structure isn’t just in how it makes people feel or in how it moves them to action. Stories make information more memorable. In a 2014 study on listening, researchers played a series of videotaped instructions to the study’s participants. For one group, the instructions were delivered in an expository form. For the other group, the content was conveyed using a story. The experiment’s results showed a correlation between how the information was delivered and how well it was remembered: retention of the material was higher for those who received the instructions as part of a story.5
My favorite authors are the ones who deftly mix stories and science in a way that draws me in, engages me, entertains me, and helps make the point memorable. For example, in Smartcuts, author Shane Snow argues that lateral thinking—attacking a problem “sideways” by questioning “the assumptions upon which a problem is based”6—“is how the most successful people have always made it.”7 To do this, Snow uses stories as varied as they are well-told: from the effort of Snow’s college roommate to shatter the world record for completing the video game Super Mario Brothers (6:28 vs 33:24 makes even the word “shatter” feel like an understatement) to a 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin using a female pseudonym to get his writing published in his own brother’s newspaper. He shares these stories initially to engage and entertain the reader before he drops the science on lateral thinking and how and why lateral thinking can help put your career on warp speed. I followed up with Shane to ask more about his storytelling process and why it can be so impactful. He said, “My follow-up book to Smartcuts was The Storytelling Edge, which explored the neuroscience that explains why stories are so impactful. Turns out that when more of your brain is engaged, you remember the material better—and more of your brain lights up when intaking a story than when intaking facts. And even more awesome, stories trigger our emotions to cause a neurochemical called oxytocin to synthesize in our brains, which, crudely speaking, makes us have more empathy for whoever the story is about.”
Now, of course, you’re not reading this book to learn how to be a bestselling author or an award-winning Ivy League professor. So you may be wondering, “OK, those books sound interesting, and I will add them to my list of material to feed into my learning machine. But, how do I develop skills like that to use stories and narrative to better lead my team at work?”
Here are some characteristics of great storytelling that I’ve learned over the years:
1. They are relatable. The people reading or hearing the story must feel like they could be the protagonist of the story. They can identify with the situation and the characters.
2. They have a hook. As my friend Ryan Holiday told me (after reading my initial book proposal), “You must grab them by the throat . . . and make them want to continue turning the pages.” Create intrigue right away and a reason for people to lean forward and/or keep reading.
3. There is conflict. There is a challenge to overcome. The protagonist gets knocked down and must figure out how to get back up. All this while the storyteller evokes compassion and empathy for the person.
4. They tap an emotional nerve. A great storyteller appeals to your emotions, understanding how word choice or tempo makes the audience feel the way that they do.
5. They are simple. The most intelligent communicators make complex ideas easy to understand. The least effective leaders take something simple and make it complex.
6. They are surprising and unexpected. The best novels and movies make you go, “Ohhhh, wow.” When crafting your story, think of multiple avenues to get to the climax, and choose the one that will surprise your audience.
7. They are satisfying. Complete the journey for the audience. And share the reason why you told them that story and how it’s applicable in their work and life.
To improve your own storytelling abilities, study someone who is skilled at it. Whether it’s in books, movies, or podcasts, find the people whose stories move you and make you think. By studying other storytellers, you’ll gain knowledge about storytelling as a craft. Try to emulate them.
HOW MUCH AND HOW OFTEN
How much you say can be as critical to having your message heard as how you say it. Brevity is important. It is the whetstone great communicators use to give their messages a honed, razor-sharp edge. The impact of what they are saying isn’t dulled by the fluffy cushion of excess words.
To find out how an economy of words makes for a more effective message, talk to a stand-up comic. Comedian Bill Hicks advises would-be comics to “Listen to what you are saying and ask yourself, ‘Why am I saying it and is it necessary?’”8 These are two great questions that are useful beyond the world of comedy. No matter the audience or purpose, make yourself justify what you are saying and the words you are using.
Great comedians, writers, speakers, and movie directors know how to cut unnecessary fluff. When you are watching a movie that is the work of a gifted director, everything you see onscreen is there for a specific reason. A lot of time, money, and effort went into producing scenes and clips that never made it out of the editing room because they proved not to be necessary to telling the story.
How you communicate with your team or your boss should operate under the same principle. If you need to write an email to communicate an important message, take the same approach. Write the email. Then read it with the critical eye of a movie director. Ask yourself whether what you included is necessary. Force yourself to answer that question honestly about each key section and idea contained in the email. Then delete those parts that may be good, relevant, and interesting, but are not necessary. Do this every time you prepare to communicate, whether you’re sending an email or prepping for a team meeting.
This is much easier said than done, I know. It is something I still have to be mindful of and intentional about, and I struggle to do this well from time to time. That’s why it’s helpful to get outside eyes on your work. For particularly important communications, have someone else read your message while applying their own measure of necessity. Think of it like this: fluff wastes time, and as a result, people stop listening to you. However, when they know that you’ve carefully thought through everything you say, they’ll stay tuned to your message.
Just as important as how much you say is the frequency and cadence of your communication. When you’re a new manager, it is best to err on the side of overcommunicating with your team. Frequent communication can allay fears and build confidence as your team gets to know what you’re about. They’ll see that you want to hear from them and that you will do your best to keep the channel open in both directions.
Of course, there is a potential downside to frequent communication from a boss, whether new or not. You may appear to be a micromanager, or worse, actually become one. When I took over the reins of a national sales team as vice president of sales for a large multinational corporation, I was very sensitive to coming across as a micromanager to my new team. I wanted to show that I trusted my team and didn’t need to be on top of them all the time, so I didn’t want to distract them with emails too often or call too many town hall meetings. In my mind, they wanted to be left alone to do their work, so I erred on the side of less communication rather than more.
However, when I asked for feedback, I was surprised to learn that they wanted to hear from me more often. We had to work to find a happy medium. We set up a consistent weekly dialog about what was happening for everyone on the team. I set up regular one-on-one meetings with team members and blocked time on my calendar to travel and do “field rides” with individual contributors. In the end, my team and I settled on a regular schedule of consistent communication multiple times per week.
The mistake I made is an easy one to make. When taking a new position of responsibility for a team of people you don’t know very well, the impulse to put your stamp on the team by micromanaging can be strong. In an effort to avoid this leadership sin, it is easy to overcorrect to a posture of silent distance. Neither of these approaches is good; it’s your job to find a happy balance. How you structure your communication with your team depends on the company you work for, the level at which you find yourself, how many people you lead, whether you or your team members are remote, the health of the team and its ability to work together, and many other factors. If you work remotely, regular communication is even more important to make up for the lack of face time your team gets with you. In the end, a mindful focus and intentional effort are necessary to get it right, along with the transparency that comes from asking your new team for their input on the appropriate frequency and cadence of your communication.
Is it possible to have too much communication? In short, yes. You don’t want your meetings and in-person discussions to be a drain on productivity. This applies to the amount of time and effort devoted to communication in all directions: between you and your team, but also between you and those in the organization around and even above you. The greatest piece of advice I received when I became a manager came from a mentor of mine. He told me that I would feel pulled in many different directions by other people from all parts of the business. “They’re going to try to get you to go to all their meetings, both in person and on the phone, and your job is to spend the majority of your time with your team.” He advised me to pay close attention to my time and say no to anything that didn’t serve the direction of the team. Elon Musk has told his staff that if they can’t add value to a meeting, and it isn’t valuable to them, then they need to leave the meeting.9 It may sound harsh, but it’s a good rule.
CONNECTION
When it comes to communication, it’s important to always remember its purpose: connecting with other people. Without the connective tissue of communication (whether through words, pictures, gestures, or even just a look on our face), we are all islands unto ourselves. We communicate to build relationships, express feelings, share ideas, and work together to accomplish what we could not do on our own. If you’ve ever felt alone in the middle of a crowd, you know the value and power of just having someone to talk to. Connection is why we communicate, and whether we connect is one way to measure whether effective communication has taken place at all.
Amy Trask is the former CEO of the Oakland Raiders and now a football analyst with CBS Sports. In addition to her television work, Trask serves as the chairman of the board for the BIG3, a professional three-on-three basketball league. Throughout her time as a female executive and authority figure in a male-dominated world, Trask understood how to quickly build rapport with those she worked with. Her advice to leaders in all positions centers on the need to connect with others. “No matter your industry, don’t erect walls, don’t build divides between various components of an organization,” she told me. “The most important words when it comes to getting things done are: communicate, cooperate, coordinate, and collaborate.”10
Connecting with your team goes back to having genuine curiosity and care for the people that you serve and lead. I love the way Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, described it: “Communication is seeing somebody that works in your department and saying, ‘Emily, I sure am glad to see you back. I heard you had a little difficulty with the baby. How’s the baby doing?’”11
The key to connection is to avoid the (manager) monologue. Instead, the conversation is about helping the other person figure out the answer that will motivate them to move forward. While there was a chain of command and rules, I didn’t run my team by telling them what to do directly. I wanted them to figure it out and feel motivated because they had learned the lesson for themselves. It took time for me to understand my own approach, but I would describe it as close to the Socratic method. I diligently asked questions of my team, but I’d start very casually. I might ask a team member, “What’s going on? What’s been good? What’s not going well?” And I would keep drilling down and asking questions based on their responses, tone of voice, or body language.
I didn’t see my role as the team manager as that of Chief Answer Provider. Rather, my job was to use communication as a means of stirring up my team’s interest and creative problem-solving. By not filling the answer space, I gave them the opportunity to come up with the answers on their own.
Another approach to connecting with your team lies not in how you communicate, but in how you listen to them communicate. Researchers Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman describe great listening as doing more than just receiving or even absorbing a message:
While many of us have thought of being a good listener being like a sponge that accurately absorbs what the other person is saying, instead, what these findings show is that good listeners are like trampolines. They are someone you can bounce ideas off of—and rather than absorbing your ideas and energy, they amplify, energize, and clarify your thinking. They make you feel better [by] not merely passively absorbing, but by actively supporting. This lets you gain energy and height, just like someone jumping on a trampoline.12 [emphasis added]
PERSUASION
Every day I spent in Birmingham, Alabama, preparing to start my post-collegiate football career, I followed the same routine religiously. If we did not have a game, I would wake up at 5:30 a.m., lift weights, and run. At 8:30, I would go to the arena to watch film, meet with coaches, and then practice. In the afternoon, I would sit outside in the hot Alabama sun and read (and reread) the one book I had brought with me from Ohio, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.
I had purchased the paperback after being told that it would help me learn how to be a better sales professional. But in Birmingham, the book took on a new level of appeal for two reasons. First, as the quarterback of a team that I had just met, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I needed to build trust among my new teammates so that they would respond to me as their new leader. Being the resident “Yankee” (not something I’d ever been called before; where I’m from, it’s just called being from Ohio) on a team in the Deep South, I knew I needed all the help I could get on influencing others and creating followers. Second, I knew that I wouldn’t be playing football forever, no matter what happened with this unexpected opportunity in the Arena League. I recognized this as a chance to learn even more about leading in my natural environment on the field and in the locker room, so that I would be better prepared to lead people off the field in the business world.
Fast-forward to more than a decade later. Thanks to the opportunities resulting from my podcast, I was fortunate enough to finally connect with Dr. Cialdini and record an episode with him.13 By then, his book had gone on to become a bestseller, with millions of copies sold. From his book and our conversations, I learned the principles for creating influence and persuading others. Because this skill is vital to success as a manager/leader, here are the three that I’ve found to be most effective:
1. Reciprocity. Look to give first before seeking to receive anything. Don’t give and keep score. Don’t give with the intention of receiving. Give to help others and serve them. Approach being generous in this manner, and the odds are high you will receive much more in the future from others in unexpected ways.
2. Social proof. People will follow you if they see others they respect following you. Involve the key people of your team early and often. Build genuine relationships with them. They are the influencers others will look to and ask for advice. Earn their respect by empowering them and helping them, and they will help you win the team as a whole.
3. Consistency. People are more likely to fulfill written, public, voluntary commitments. Just like goal setting, there is a higher propensity for the action to happen when it’s in writing and discussed openly. Create a plan with your team and put it in writing. Then do the same with each individual person. Finally, make the commitments public.
HOW
How you communicate with your team will depend in large part on the way your workplace is set up and the cultural expectations of the organization. However, regardless of those specifics, I believe the best form of communication is done in person. Face-to-face interaction is the most effective at utilizing all of the tools at our disposal. Set aside for a second the question of having members of your team working remotely. Even when everyone is located in the same place, all too often, managers default to sending emails or making phone calls instead of getting up from their desk, walking down the hall to their team member’s desk, and talking to them in a much more powerful and personal way.
This isn’t a new observation, obviously. In their landmark management book In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman coined a simple phrase to describe this most basic form of leading others. They called it “Management By Wandering Around,” now often referred to simply as “MBWA.”14 In the best-case scenario, a manager engages in MBWA multiple times a day. The purpose of MBWA is to connect with your people through the serendipity of random interactions, to gain a qualitative understanding of what’s happening on the front lines. However, there is a fine distinction between successfully employing MBWA to better know your team and their work versus crossing over into the dreaded practice of micromanaging. Nobody wants to see you showing up at their desk when it feels like another round of The Boss Looking Over My Shoulder.
It was during my time roaming the aisles that I had my most effective conversations. These “micro-coaching” moments took place in the form of informal eight-minute talks, and always occurred as chance dictated. Rarely did they happen by premeditated design. So much of our team’s bonding and (more important) learning took place during these moments. Scheduled one-on-one meetings with your team members are no replacement for this more casual communication format.
There is something powerful about learning by doing, and this is no less true when it comes to professional managers. Create moments for yourself to actually do the job that the people on your team must do. The best way to gain an understanding of how things work is to immerse yourself in it. The best way to learn is to do it.
Here is one example from my experience: As a telephonic sales organization, our team’s job centered on cold-calling prospective customers. We would do a coordinated phone blitz, and I would join them on the phones. We would divide the list of prospects, and each time someone created an opportunity, we would share the news in teamwide emails. Doing better than the boss became a not-so-subtle motivation.
Additionally, I would sit in the cubicle of a team member and make calls on his or her phone to model the behavior. These sales calls weren’t simulations or role-playing. There were actual customers or potential prospects in a live, totally unpredictable conversational environment. It energized the group when I got in the trenches with them, battled the nerves, and risked experiencing the same rejection they do. As the manager, this gave me invaluable insight into what my team was dealing with. I could hear exactly what the customers or prospective customers were saying on the other end of those phone lines: their objections, what they liked, disliked, etc.
Later in my career, I took over the leadership of a field-based team spread all over the country. This didn’t mean I abandoned my MBWA strategy. It simply meant I had to adjust my tactics to the logistical realities. Instead of just getting out of my office and walking down the hall, I needed to get out of my city and fly across the country. Even though the frequency of these personal moments with my new team was much less than that with my previous teams, the intention and the effect were the same. What I used to do in the aisles between cubicles now occurred in the car or over meals. When before I joined the calling competitions, now I joined customer appointments in person, during which I asked questions aimed at uncovering what customers liked best and what we could do to improve. As before, I learned how to better lead my team by listening to them and the customers they served.
Most of the time you spend at work should be spent with the people you lead. It’s like flipping the organization chart upside down: you’re on the bottom and the people who report to you are on top. Even if you’re not all in the same building, you can still structure your day in the same way.
If you’re communicating with your team via email, remember that economy of words is essential. Have a purpose for every single email you send. If you start forwarding a bunch of meaningless emails with a note saying, “See below,” the chances that your team will read them will drop dramatically. If they sense your emails have no point most of the time, your people are going to delete them and miss the important messages that you do send.
Feel free to make use of the wide array of communication channels beyond just email. As technology evolved and culture shifted, I started keeping an open dialogue with my team through text messages. The members of my current Learning Leader Circle are remote, and we use the application Slack to communicate in between the video meetings we have on Zoom. I’ve found this to be a useful tool for in-the-moment “burstiness,” when a group of people are literally bursting with ideas, as Adam Grant would say.15 We have threads on books, current events, issues, sales, and more, and it gives us a way to pose a question to the group and receive a wide variety of opinions quickly.
How to Deliver a Mini-Speech
Being able to stand up in front of a group and give a great talk will create more career opportunities for you than perhaps anything else you can do. This ability yields more credit from senior leaders than virtually any other professional business skill that you can demonstrate. And it’s not just about being able to give a good speech. Perhaps even more important is demonstrating skill in handling tough questions effectively in group settings. It’s imperative that you learn to be a great oral and written communicator. Joining the ranks of management will present you with many chances to either maximize those opportunities or squander them.
When most people think of delivering a speech, they think of the prepared presentation with a well-crafted slide deck that the speaker spent hours practicing. As a new manager, you may never be asked to give a talk under circumstances like that. However, it is likely you will be delivering a speech of some kind every time you meet with your team. You might have to give a one-minute, two-minute, or five-minute talk on a weekly basis. Knowing how to deliver a focused, concise, and impactful speech, no matter how long, is a vital skill.
Even if you’re giving what seems like a simple one-minute opener to a meeting, you should put thought into it. Start mapping out your speech by clearly defining your purpose. Think about why the meeting is being held and let the answer guide what you say. From there, you are ready to outline the four basic components of a speech: a compelling opener (preferably a story), the main point you want to make, the information supporting your main point, and the summation and call to action.
A powerful story is typically part of a great speech. You will never have the attention of your audience as much as you do at the very beginning of your talk. If you can cultivate interest and pique your teams’ curiosity early with a narrative that grabs their attention and engages their emotions, you can keep them listening through the rest of your talk.
Here is a framework to use as you draft a speech to deliver, no matter how short. The first comes from one of my personal mentors, Charlie McMahan. Charlie is the lead pastor at SouthBrook Church in Centerville, Ohio, and one of my favorite speakers. When I asked him how he builds his messages and weaves stories together in such a compelling manner, he shared with me his five-step process for teaching on stage:16
Teaser. Share something that grabs the listener.
Tension. Present the problem that your team or your listeners are facing. Let them know why this is important.
Truth. What is real, usually supported by research/science.
Take-home. The practical action step or takeaway that the listener can implement.
Together. The inspirational ending that leaves them motivated to act. “Isn’t this the kind of person we want to be?”
Regardless of what process you follow, the key to giving a successful speech of any length is being thoughtful about your preparation.
How to Have a Difficult Conversation
At many points in your career as a leader, you will be faced with difficult conversations. While there are many ways to approach this, there is one hard-and-fast rule: It should never be a surprise to someone that they are being put on a performance improvement plan, or probation, or whatever term your company uses. If your employee is surprised that you’re having this conversation, then you haven’t been doing your job as a manager prior to that moment.
It probably comes as no surprise that the primary feeling most managers experience when it comes to these conversations is fear. I was no different. I wanted everyone to like me, and I was nervous about sharing an unpopular decision. So I put it off. And I kept putting it off until the moment when I realized that I had a problem. I had two employees make a request for a territory change. In sales, this is common if a great performer is promoted; others are attracted to their old territory and will put in a request for it. Of the two, one was male and the other female. On paper, the male had more experience with the company and a longer track record of success. I gave him the territory. I told him. He was happy, and we got back to work. I never had the conversation to tell the other member of my team the bad news.
“Bad news doesn’t get better with age.” These words have been shared with me by more than one mentor in my career. On some level I was thinking that maybe it would get better if I didn’t address it, but we all know that isn’t the way it works.
Not immediately telling the other member of my team the news hurt her. She felt like I was playing favorites, and even made a comment about “the old boys club.” I was crushed. I had made the decision based on past performance and rewarding the longer-term successful sales professional. But that’s not how she saw it. This was my fault. Her perception was created by my fear of telling her the bad news. This was a mistake that took a long time to overcome. I had created a lack of trust with this team member, and fixing the damaged relationship took much longer than any discomfort I would have felt had I just been up-front and shared my decision and what motivated it with her immediately.
It became clear that the team had lost some respect for me because of my failure to communicate. I learned a painful lesson: there is a price for failing to act, and it doesn’t only negatively impact the people directly affected by the decision. Failing to address questions in a timely manner also has an impact on the rest of the team, too, particularly a team of high performers.
Kim Malone Scott believes that if you care personally about your team, then you should be willing to share tough news early. As Kim said in our podcast conversation together, “It might feel like you are ending the employee’s life, but that’s a dramatic way to look at it. It’s a temporary setback, and they are now free to pursue something they are happier doing in the long run.”17
A piece of advice that I often hear is to approach difficult conversations with PCP: praise, criticize, praise. Although it might seem like a logical approach, it’s not genuine if you don’t truly mean it. If someone needs criticism, don’t sandwich it with fake praise. You will lose credibility when it’s time to offer them genuine praise if you get in the habit of using praise as a way to package negative feedback. Simply aim to treat each person with respect and deliver the news in a straightforward manner. They might not like what you have to say, but they won’t dislike you for telling the truth about the situation.
This is especially true of great performers. They want feedback and will seek it out. They certainly expect it of their manager. High performers want to improve, and that doesn’t happen without you providing that feedback loop for them. The greatest performers in the world hire coaches for a reason. They demand excellence of themselves, and they know they need direct feedback on a consistent basis. As the manager, this is now your job.
How to Communicate on Behalf of the People Above You
As a quarterback, I had to learn how to relay a message to my team with authority and conviction, even if I didn’t believe in it 100 percent. At times, my offensive coordinator would call a play that I didn’t like. However, I couldn’t express that to teammates in the huddle as I called the play. I had to call it with confidence and a belief that it would work. If I called the play with indecision or my confidence appeared shaky, it was a virtual certainty that the play would fail. I had to spend that brief moment after I received the signal (the play call from my coach on the sidelines) to find a way to believe in the call, and then relay the message to my teammates in the huddle.
Doubting or disagreeing with your boss’s decision will happen from time to time in the corporate world. There is no getting around that fact. As a manager, you will be given a directive to share with your team, a message with which you may not be 100 percent on board. While it’s important to remain authentic and “never fake the funk,” as Brian Koppelman would say,18 a manager needs to confidently share the message. “Of course,” you’re probably saying right now, “but how?”
What I’ve done in the past is force myself to think through the directive, plan, or message from all points of view—mine and those above me in the organization. Only when I could truly see the issue from other points of view would I be ready to deliver the message to my team. This helped me remain authentic, but also not “throw the bosses under the bus.” As a manager, you can’t sell out the CEO and senior leaders. Not only are you prone to error (as you rarely, if ever, have all the information they do about the issue), but it is a surefire way to sow the seeds of a toxic culture.
One caveat that really should go without saying but is far too important to not say: if you are asked or told to do something that is illegal or immoral, then it’s your duty to speak up and not blindly follow. People doing as they’re told, even when it was obviously wrong, is how Enron and Theranos happen. Don’t put your name on the long list of middle managers who sold their soul to not rock the boat, only to end up going down with the ship themselves.
How to Communicate with the People Above You
Communicating your message to senior-level executives in your company can be an intimidating experience. What do I say? How do I say it? How do they talk in that conference room? Am I talking too much? Not enough? The preparation process can be exhausting.
I once worked as part of a team that began preparing for a meeting with the CEO two months in advance. Countless meetings were spent agonizing over revisions to a bloated PowerPoint deck that was stuffed to the gills with information about every nook and cranny of our section of the business. The combination of people skills and hours spent on a simple message seemed both wasteful and yet necessary. The last thing anybody wanted to have happen was to appear unprepared to the CEO.
Finally, after weeks of frenetic preparation, the moment of the meeting arrived. The CEO skipped right over the crafted story we had wanted to walk him through and ignored most of the data we had included. Instead, he focused on only a few slides and drilled down on a few specific questions. Well over 80 percent of the work done in the previous weeks was utterly ignored. The material merited not a single word of acknowledgment in the meeting. I know this is not uncommon.
That unfortunate reality of corporate executive life notwithstanding, it is vital that you make the most of your opportunities when you find yourself in front of senior-level executives. You are representing your peers, your team, your boss, and others in your orbit. This may also be the lasting impression executives have of you as they are looking to promote people for bigger roles. Like anything else, there are exceptions to the rules, and every leader’s personality is different, but here are a few tips that I’ve learned and gathered from others over the years:
Get to the point as soon as possible. Unless they engage in small talk and show a desire for that, start the meeting by getting right to it. “The purpose of our time together is to cover . . .” Remember when we talked about economy of words earlier in this chapter? Almost every manager makes the same mistake when they’re talking to an executive for the first time: they talk too much and take too long to get to the point. Not surprisingly, a combination of nerves and a desire to impress leave the manager unfocused. Strive to be concise and compelling, and be ready to answer any rapid-fire question the executive may ask. Above all, keep from talking too much.
Share the big picture and what it means. Details are important, but don’t go down a rabbit hole in the first five minutes when meeting with an executive. Learn how to present an “executive summary” and distill the essence of the message.
Prepare. This should go without saying, but being overly prepared for the topic of discussion is a must. Anticipate questions the executive may have. Rehearse with a mentor and/or someone who has held a similar role to those of the people at the meeting. “Preparation is the greatest medicine for fear.” Know your material cold. Be a subject matter expert.
Be known as the go-to person on a topic. The most effective way to build a real relationship with a senior-level leader is to be known as someone she can go to when she wants expert advice in a particular area. Most CEOs need to be generalists in order to run the company. Be known as the person who knows the most about that one subject that can fill a knowledge gap for that executive.
Be easy to work with. Show up on time and prepared for meetings. Do more than what is asked of you, consistently overpromise and overdeliver (thanks to James Altucher for this advice). Always deliver on what you say you’re going to do, work hard, and be nice to other people. It’s amazing how far that alone will get you.
How Not to Run a Meeting
As a manager of others, meetings will represent a large slice of your communication time, efforts, and (hopefully) effectiveness. Far from being a necessary evil and mental afterthought, it is vital to get meetings right. Before we dive into that, though, let me tell you about the “worst meeting” I ever attended. I put “worst meeting” in quotes because what I’m about to describe wasn’t a single meeting. It (sadly) happened more times than I would ever want to count.
I walk into the conference room as one of the invited attendees three minutes early. I’m the first person to arrive. As the clock strikes 9:00 a.m., less than half of the people whose attendance was listed as “required” are in the room. Finally, by 9:07 a.m., the rest of the group has finally shown up. Small talk fills the room until, at 9:12 a.m., the vice president who called the meeting finally arrives and takes his seat.
“Sorry, I’m late. I had an eight o’clock that went long. You know Jimmy doesn’t know how to end a meeting on time. Anyway, how’s everyone doing?” Quiet murmurs from the crowd. “Good. OK, who’s presenting today? Can you hook your computer up to the TV screen, so we can see the deck you’re presenting?” This question raises a slight problem: nobody sent out an agenda prior to this meeting, and nobody knows who is presenting or what is to be presented.
The vice president deftly shifts gears. “OK, Jessica, I saw that new product rollout deck that you shared in our other meeting. Can you do that for everyone in this meeting?” Jessica, left without any option but to comply, says “Um, I guess so.” Seven minutes later, Jessica’s deck (which has already been seen by more than half of the audience) is on the screen. She goes through it as the vice president looks at his phone and responds to texts and emails. Suddenly the VP pushes away from the table. “This is really important. I have to take this.” He then leaves for a 21-minute phone call. Jessica powers through her presentation. Just as she is on her last slide, the vice president comes back in the room. “OK, was that helpful for everyone?” I am exaggerating a bit, but we’ve all been in meetings like this. As the manager, you have the power to change it. Be intentional about every meeting you host.
How to Run a Meeting
Let’s now consider all that is at stake when you decide to have a meeting. Legendary investor and the creator of Y Combinator Paul Graham writes:
The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals. . . . By default, you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done. Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command.19
The other group of people, the ones who report to you, actually make things. They are on the “maker’s schedule.” “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon,” says Graham. A meeting dropped into the middle of the afternoon breaks the remaining parts of the afternoon into segments that are too short to get anything of consequence done. “It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”
I am not proposing that we outlaw meetings or get rid of them completely. As a leader, you need to meet with your team. I’m arguing that we must be more mindful of a few fundamental questions way before the actual meeting:
Why are we having this specific meeting? Is it really necessary? Are we having it merely out of mindless habit and unchecked inertia?
What is the goal of this meeting? What absolutely must go right in this meeting to make it successful?
Who needs to be in the room? Only invite the people who need to be there.
When will this meeting take place? As Graham points out, this is perhaps more important than most people realize. In order to create as much uninterrupted time for getting work done as possible, can the meeting take place at 8 a.m. or 4 p.m.?
Regardless of the industry you work in, you want your team to be full of makers. Whether they are selling a product or working on a project, creating an environment with the most uninterrupted time possible (a maker’s schedule) will put them in the best possible position to succeed. As the leader, you are responsible for the result. It is your job to do everything within your power to foster an environment of excellence for your team.
Unfortunately, most meetings don’t proceed by design born of thoughtful consideration. Too many managers simply book time on their entire team’s calendar for every Monday morning at 10 because that’s what their boss did. And even though the team meeting is on the calendar at the same time every week into the far-flung future, they still end up scrambling to put together an agenda 15 minutes prior to the start of the meeting. Then, once the meeting begins (usually not on time), the manager slowly wanders through the opening (“hey, how was your weekend?”), and meanders through the middle and end until everyone’s free to leave at 11. The result? The entire first half of the first day of the week has been wasted because “that’s just how we’ve done it here.” Break the cycle. Do it better. Be known as someone who has incredible meetings. And if you don’t have a reason to meet, by all means, cancel the meeting.
Here are my rules for running a productive meeting, honed from years of suffering when it was done poorly and thriving when it was done well:
Be on time. Every time. No exceptions. The leader sets the tone for the meeting. Never be late. Block the 30 minutes (on your calendar) prior to the meeting to ensure this happens. (More on this in a bit.)
“Honor the present.” Start the meeting on time, no matter what. Don’t say, “We’ll wait a few minutes for John and Suzy to get here.” Start every meeting on time, and your attendees will quickly learn that they cannot be late to your meetings.
“No agenda, no attenda.” When it comes to running meetings, I love how bestselling author Cameron Herold puts it in his book Meetings Suck: “No agenda, no attenda.” Prior to the meeting, send a detailed outline of the topics that will be discussed. It doesn’t have to be long, although Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is famous for sending a six-page Word document to every attendee before a meeting with the full expectation that they read it. The point is that what you send out is not only going to help your team prepare for the meeting, it will help you keep the meeting on time and on point, ensuring that time is well spent.
If you’re not willing to prepare for the event, then don’t have it. Using the same agenda meeting after meeting is worse than having no agenda at all. It communicates to your team more clearly than you realize that you’re running the ship on autopilot. Invest the time necessary to prepare for a useful meeting, and send the agenda out at least a day in advance so your team can prepare to participate, offer ideas, and engage. You expect them to speak intelligently about the topics so that decisions can be made in this meeting, so you must do the work ahead of time to equip them to do so. Everyone should be on the same mental page that says, “We’re working to reduce the number of meetings. The best way to do this is to get things done while in this meeting.”
Ask great questions of your team. And then let them talk. It’s your job as a manager to ask great questions, ask your team for input, and then stop talking and listen. Your ratio of listening to talking should be 80/20. This means that instead of telling your employees what to do, you’re asking them for feedback and helping them figure it out.
Set clear responsibilities. Be vividly clear in communicating your expectations for everyone as a result of the meeting. Ensure each person knows what they are responsible for doing. Do not leave a meeting without verbally letting everyone know what they are expected to do and deliver next.
Follow up on email. After each meeting, send a recap email detailing what was covered, the actions steps to be taken next, and who is responsible for taking them. I’m a big believer in the meeting recap email. Does it take time? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes. When I was an individual contributor, it helped reinforce what I had learned in meetings and reminded me of the tasks that had been assigned to me. When I prepared them as the leader, it helped reinforce the action steps for me, too. (I do the same thing with my Learning Leader Show podcast. I write my own detailed show notes after every episode. It helps me create faster recall and deeply reinforces what we talked about during the interview.)
There are some guidelines to writing a good recap email. Just sending someone the minutes, the actual transcript of the meeting, is typically not helpful. In my experience, the email won’t get read. Even if your team does read it, they’ll be trying to decipher what they are responsible for. Instead, I list what we spoke about in bullet points, making sure to highlight who is responsible for what, and any due dates that apply. It’s even more effective if you add your own thoughts and takeaways, as well as moments of appreciation. I also include links to books or articles that we mentioned in the meeting to make it easy for my teammates to learn more. On that same note, having an assistant put together an email is not as effective because it lacks your input and voice.
You might be reading this and thinking, Are you kidding me? Meetings already take too much of my time. This will cause them to take up even more. Yes, that is correct. But remember, the purpose here isn’t to reduce the amount of time devoted to meetings (although that will happen if you’re being honest with yourself about whether a meeting is even needed in the first place). Rather, the goal is to greatly increase the effectiveness of the meetings you do have. To do that, there are no shortcuts, and extra work will be required of you as the team’s leader. If you’re going to have a meeting, you need to prepare, create an agenda, have direct action items, present a purpose for the meeting, and then close the loop afterward by making sure everyone knows the play and their responsibilities in executing it.
Leave the laptop behind. Leave your computer at your desk. Obviously, it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the content of the meeting and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. Only it isn’t. Research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write their notes on paper learn more. Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops.20
People pay less attention to what is being said if they have electronics in front of them. Even the presence of a phone facedown on the table has a negative group effect on trust toward the owner of the phone. Instead, take notes the old-fashioned way: with a pen and a pad of paper, and leave your phone in your pocket. Also, in your one-on-one meetings with your team members, your phone should not be in sight. If you’re constantly peeking at the computer or your phone, your conversation with your team member will suffer. In those moments, the person you are meeting with is the most important person. Your team members need to feel that, and you should give that to them if your goal is an open and honest dialogue. And move from behind your computer. I made a habit of moving my chair to the side of my desk to remove the obstacle (the desk) in our path to create a more open environment for speaking.
As the leader of the meeting, be prepared, be present, have a purpose, be engaged. One final tip: block off the 30 minutes prior to your meeting on your calendar and do not accept other meetings during that period. This ensures that you are punctual for your meeting, and it gives you time to prepare and change any minor parts of the agenda leading up to it. As the leader, your team looks to you to set the pace, and they will model their behavior after yours in their other meetings. When someone from your team earns a promotion and takes over a team of their own, they will likely pattern their meetings after how their boss always ran meetings. Give them an excellent example to follow.