How To Communicate Effectively At Work

You cannot not communicate, but you can do it really poorly. Hey, leader. David Berkus here, organizational psychologist and author of four best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. Part of doing your best work ever is communicating with your team, communicating effectively at work. Communication is the lifeblood of any relationship. It's the lifeblood of the relationship you have with individual teammates and with your whole team. So if you want to be an effective leader or you want to be seen as a leader, you're going to need to communicate effectively. And the first thing to discuss when we're talking about how to communicate effectively is that your communication needs are, well, to be honest, they're kind of irrelevant because as we're fond of saying on this show, the team outweighs any individual talent. What the team needs from you as a communicator outweighs what your preferences might be. The second thing we should discuss is that communication, well, it isn't really one problem. Poor communication isn't one problem to solve. It's two problems. There is asynchronous communication and there is synchronous communication. And there are rules for each and there are different times where you would want to use each. So in this episode, we're going to break it down, asynchronous and synchronous, and I'm going to give you two tips for improving your communication in each of those two areas. It's like a two for episode that isn't twice as long, but maybe twice as powerful for communicating effectively with your team. So when we're talking about asynchronous communication, we're talking about communication that happens when you're not there or when you're not real time with other people. Now, you might think that this is just email, right? That this is just text-based, but this could also be voicemails or other prerecorded messages. We're going to focus pretty heavy on the text, but keep in mind, again, it's more than just drafting memos or emails. If your team uses a Slack channel or if they are constantly texting each other, these same rules apply. And rule number one for asynchronous communication is to add positivity and some personality into whatever you are sending. There's a very real human bias to assume negativity in text-based writing. I mean, it's something we've seen often in the research, but you don't need me to break down the research on that. I mean, think about your own life. You ever got an email from your boss that says, get 15 minutes to chat later today, or can I talk to you on Friday afternoon? You think you're getting fired, right? You might actually be doing a great job, but we have this tendency, devoid of any positive or negative cues about the intent of the communication to default to the negative. This is something that most humans, especially in the Western world, tend to have. So you need to counteract that when you're writing by infusing positivity into it. If you are going to send a request, do you have 15 minutes to chat today? By the way, it's all good news, right? Or could you talk on Friday afternoon? By the way, good things, right? Little things like that, adding extra congratulations. It might even be adding things like emojis, or I'm pretty old school, I prefer emoticons. You know, that's when the smiley is sideways. Infusing those things in helps people read the message as positively as you wanted it to be read. If all else fails, read the message back to you and try and do it in monotone, and then think about how it might be received. You're naturally gonna wanna read it in the voice and with the emphasis that you would like, but try and read it in monotone and see how it might be perceived. Then, see what you can do to infuse a little more positivity into it. Rule number two in asynchronous communication, ask for comments or consensus. We often send out messages, and this could be emails, this could be text messages or Slack messages, this could be prerecorded presentations or voicemails out to the team, but we often send them out as sort of like this report, an update from us, instead of asking people what we need. And ask twice, right? So say right at the very beginning, I wanna keep us all updated on what these numbers are, but before we do that, I want you to know that I'll be asking for some of your feedback later. Or I wanna propose something to you, but before I get into the details, I want you to know that I'll be asking if you agree or disagree at the end. And then, of course, ask also at the end. And we have the tendency to do the opposite. A lot of times, this asynchronous communication, it's an open communication medium, email, Slack channels, et cetera. Anybody can comment, and so we assume they will. But if you need consensus, or if you need commentary, you need to ask for it, for two reasons. One, people might not actually think you want it, right? Remember the thing about infusing positivity? They might have read it more negatively than you think, and now they think, do I really want to respond? But number two, remember, it's asynchronous communication. People may not actually be processing how much time they have to respond. So they may read your thing, wanna think about it over the weekend, and didn't realize that you need an answer by the end of the week, or that you want an answer on Monday. They think they've got more time, and so they don't give you any of that commentary. If you want commentary, if you want consensus, ask for it, maybe even ask for it at the beginning and the end, and set a deadline on when you need it by. Make sure you're communicating all of that in addition to the message you wanna communicate. Now, those are two big rules that'll help you communicate effectively at work asynchronously, but there's also synchronous communication. In other words, real-time communication. Yes, that is one-on-one face-to-face discussions or in-person meetings, but it's also phone calls and video calls. And depending on how you and your team feel, this might actually be something like a text channel or Slack if people feel like it's real-time, like they're expected to have that immediate response. And so there's some things we need to think about here to make sure that A, we're not misunderstood, but B, we're seen as bringing out the best in the entire team. Rule number one for effective communication synchronously is talk last and talk less. I had to pause there because I have a lot to say about this, but I wanted to emphasize the less idea. Talk last and talk less, meaning if you're in a discussion with a team, a lot of different people, or even in a one-on-one, it's not about downloading your thoughts on the other person. The best thing you can do, the best thing you can use real-time communication for is learning from other people, learning from people on your team, letting them discuss and you sit back and observe. The dynamics of synchronous communication, especially in person, synchronous communication, are such that if you're in a leadership position or even if you're just an influential team member, once you start speaking, you affect what people are gonna say afterwards. And so if you can push it back to as last as possible to give your input, you'll get a better benefit of hearing from everyone else. The same thing about talking less as well. The less you share right off the bat, if you have to share right off the bat, the less you'll influence future communication. And we only have the moment that we're in. So it's important that we make sure that in that time we hear from everybody's ideas. Unlike asynchronous communication, we only have this moment. And then a lot of times we decide the meeting's over, you had your chance, so it must not have been that important. And we drill ahead with whatever it is that was decided at that meeting. So if we're gonna do that, we need to make sure we run that meeting effectively. And that involves as a leader from a communication standpoint, talking last and talking less. Rule number two for synchronous communication, mix up the mediums. Mix up the mediums of communication. Now, a little vulnerability here. A couple years ago, when the great work from home experiment began, I was a huge advocate for, we're doing these meetings we used to do in person, let's do them on video call and everybody turn your video on. And pretty quickly Zoom fatigue set in. It became obvious that that wasn't the right answer. People have different comfort levels with being on camera, but the truth is there's different times to be on camera. One of the things we know now from the research is that certain conversations, you listen better when you're audio only. You have better emotional empathy when you're listening just to their words and not being able to see that pixelated version of them or not being distracted by being in a room with tons of different people. For a one-on-one meeting where you're really trying to get the emotions behind it, you don't want that to be a video call. You may not even want that to be an in-person meeting, a phone call might actually work best. If you're talking about a team-wide meeting, mix up the medium of communication maybe by switching back and forth between when their cameras are on and when they're off. And of course, mix up the medium of communication between in-person and between virtual meetings and between teleconference or audio only meetings. Mixing it all up allows not only to get the benefits of each type of communication, but because different people are comfortable with different mediums, you get the benefit of hearing everyone's brilliance because you're always switching back and forth between mediums that, yeah, they might not be comfortable in but other times they are. And so everybody gets a shot. You pick one medium and you stick with it, pretty quickly only the people who are comfortable communicating in that medium are the people you're gonna hear from. That's gonna bias that line of communication, that's gonna bias the flow of that meeting and that's even a rule for number one, we don't wanna do that, we wanna hear from everybody. So mixing up that medium of communication is going to be the best way to do it. Now I could go on for lots of other episodes with lots of other rules on effective communication at work but I think we're gonna stick with just those four. We have two for synchronous, we have two for asynchronous and we have four that you can get started on right away. But if you catch nothing else from this video, remember the lesson we led with at the top that the best thing you can do to communicate effectively at work is to distinguish between asynchronous and synchronous communication and recognize that there are rules for each and there are different people on your team who prefer each one. And it's not about what you want and it's not about your needs, it's about the needs of the team and the individuals on the team. If you can just pay attention to that and play to their needs and their desires, you're already gonna be a better communicator. And then when you add these rules on top of it, you're gonna get even better and when your team starts to follow some of these rules, they're gonna collaborate better until eventually you've built through more effective communication, you've built a team that can do their best work ever. Oh, one more thing. You may be watching this video because you recognize you need to work on communication in order to be a new leader or a better leader. If that's the case, you're gonna wanna check out this video here on how to get into a leadership position. You'll find in this video, I communicated several practical tips for how to prepare yourself for a leadership role or be a better leader if you're already there.