The other day, someone sent me a private message on LinkedIn and asked if I knew of any resources that could help him communicate better with his team. As a leader of an entire office, he recognized that his messages to the team weren't always as clear as he hoped. With a desire to improve his communication in 2025, he reached out to me. Here is some of my advice to him.
“I told my team _____. Why don’t they get it?”
A leader wrote me today asking for help communicating better with their team.
One, any leader who is willing to admit they need to grow in this area is a leader worth following.
Two, holy cow communicating as a leader is challenging and so multifaceted. There really is no one size fits all.
But there is at least one rule of thumb that applies across the board: just because you said something once doesn’t mean your team *heard* it.
Let’s dissect that.
You may share an important update for the team in a weekly staff call. Well, guess what? Team members are usually passive participants in your meetings. So even the most engaged person on your team may “hear” what you say, but it may not fully register what that thing means for them until they run into that thing as a change affecting their day to day work.
Now let’s say you repeat the thing in an email. Perhaps this is a meeting recap. Maybe it’s a weekly staff email. Ok now you’re said the thing twice. That engaged person is now reading about the thing in a different context and can “hear” it differently.
Next, imagine that engaged person is having a 1:1 with their supervisor and this thing is a talking point for that meeting. Now the engaged person can have an active role in hearing about the thing became they can ask questions to their supervisor.
Communications is not a one and done thing.
I don’t know who said it first but “when you think you’re over communicating, you’ve only just begun.”
Kudos to this leader for wanting to improve in this area!