Team Archive - The Art of Communicating

Who’s responsible for that?

What empowerment means:
The leader trusts the team with making choices.

How it’s often done:
The leader trusts the team with making choices as long as it’s the same choice the leader would have made.

The worst version might be this:
The leader trusts the team with making choices as long as it’s the same choice the leader would have made and unfairly assigns responsibility for any negative outcomes to the team, even when the leader would have made the same choice.

Do you work for a leader who truly trusts their team? Please drop me a note! I’m assembling a list of leaders who light the path.

Leadership lessons from Germany’s Qatar disaster

Among the many fascinating leadership lessons from Amazon’s “All or Nothing” documentary about Germany’s Qatar football disaster, here’s one that stood out for me:

For Germany’s coaches, it was US and THEM, not WE.
“Us” the coaches and “them” the players, not “we” the team.

The coaches expected them to deliver.
As opposed to being in this together.

When the coaches expect the players to deliver, it delegates the responsibility the wrong way. It frees the coach from the responsibility and puts that burden on the player. Basically, the message is this: “I’ve told you what you need to do. If you fail, it’s on you.”

A leader who lights the path would turn this upside down. They would trust the players to deliver. They would believe in the players to deliver. Because they would figure out a path and light it in a way that the players would see it, believe in it and trust in the path (and themselves), too.

No need to expect anything.

But Germany’s players didn’t trust in the path (or themselves). Head coach Hansi Flick’s words made it sound like he didn’t trust in the journey and in the team’s ability to deliver. And so, the players couldn’t find that trust, either.

Flick used pressure (“We expect X from you”) as a substitute for trust. But that can’t work when the players don’t even trust in themselves.

Worse, when it’s US and THEM, i.e. when the TEAM is missing, then you can’t compensate lack of trust with will power (despite the obvious individual strengths of the players). For will power to surface you’d need a reason – such as belonging to something bigger than yourself. As there was no team, there was nothing bigger. Who would they stretch themselves for? The coaches? But why?

The documentary is a rare glimpse into how professional top-level leadership actually performs (or doesn’t). You’d make a mistake to assume that 1) this example would be the rare exception and 2) businesses would be any different.

Which is not to say that there aren’t businesses that are different or that there aren’t leaders who truly light the path. But it’s certainly not the default.

“Leadership skill” is still largely expected to just somehow come to leaders “naturally”. You’re either born with it or not. Training, coaching and professional advisory around communication is still the exception to the norm – and even when it’s done it’s sometimes just to check the box.

And yet, communication can make or brake leadership – even if you’re highly skilled in other areas.

If you’ve watched the documentary, what was your biggest takeaway?

PS: It was heartbreaking to see the outsized role that PowerPoint played in the team meetings. PowerPoint is no substitute for empathy and trust and the way it’s being used in these meetings is a bitter example of that.

“Can all of you see my brilliance?”

Status updates are supposed to quickly inform everyone about the status of a project.

Too often, though, these updates are much rather about the status of the people in the project and carry double meanings along the lines of “I’m not to blame for the delay.”, “This is my kingdom. Don’t you dare to invade it.”, “I’m smarter than her.” etc.

In many cases, this happens when the team can’t see how the project is about something bigger than themselves. And so, they lack a sense of belonging to a team that achieves more than anyone could achieve on their own.

Which means that, effectively, everyone’s on their own team.

Which is why they need to protect their status.

Great project leaders create that sense of belonging. They light the path by communicating with irresistible clarity where we’re going as a team, why we’re going there and why everyone belongs.

Alex, the brilliant time waster

Alex is brilliant. Her words are often full of wisdom. In fact, I only know a handful of people who know as much about their field as she does.

Alex is also a huge time waster. Because her wisdom is usually the team’s to discover. Her thinking is dense. Her slides are packed with stuff that’s totally clear to her but not to her team. Her language is quite special with words that have a specific meaning to her but not to the team.

The sad part of the story is that this happens not only with brilliant minds like that of Alex but it is often the default even for people who are far less brilliant.

In fact, often we find ourselves to be ok with communication that lacks clarity. Somehow, it seems acceptable to have the team figure out what it all means. Rather than have one person invest the time to figure out how to speak with clarity, we have all the others invest the time to figure it out.

Great teams get stuff done more quickly because they have figured out how to speak with clarity (among other things, of course).

PS: Of course, Alex is not her real name.

It’s the crappy days we can learn the most from

When you’re used to being first, it hurts to end up on the 7th place. It hurts more when it’s not your fault but the fault of others.

But the reason why you end up being first most of the time is because you don’t stop at being hurt but take it as an opportunity to learn. And you don’t blame the others but take responsibility for the crap and take it as an opportunity to grow.

Lewis Hamilton, arguably one of the best Formula 1 drivers who ever lived, suffered from a bad decision by his team in the last race and ended up becoming 7th. There was nothing he could do about it.

But there was something he can take away from it. After he got over his initial frustration, his mood changed:

“I’m often grateful for crappy days like this, as it is days [like this] when you learn the most. If you’re winning all the time, you learn less.”

But there’s a twist about how the learning happens. While others focus on finding out who’s to blame, Hamilton’s Mercedes team has a different approach:

“We don’t like to kick each other when we’re down. I think… there’s no finger pointing, so no one individual that takes the blame. We win and we lose as a team. We have a very open and honest discussion and it’s not personal. It’s like: ‘hey man this should have been better, this should have been better, why didn’t we do this?’, we all take everything onboard. It’s constructive discussions, and if there’s any constructive criticism we take it onboard, then we huddle up, do the work, get on the call.”

So, what was a crappy day you were grateful for? And how did you learn from it?

Simplifying decision making

“I try to make one decision that removes 1000 decisions.” – Tim Ferris

Rather than to struggle each time you’re standing in front of the candy aisle, it’s much easier to decide that candy just isn’t for you and skip the aisle altogether. Or that you only buy this or that chocolate brand. Might be a totally different decision for you, but Ferris’ point still holds: making a thousand decision is actually exhausting, even if they are small. Whenever you can find a general rule for your actions, life gets easier in that regard.

What Tim Ferris uses as a life hack works even better for teams.

It can be super frustrating and totally exhausting when every decision escalates into a discussion about tiny details and different perspectives. Aligning your team and focusing everyone on a common mission takes this load off of your team and makes life so much easier for everyone on the team.

But it does more than that: if everyone agrees on a guiding star, decision making can become distributed. When it’s obvious how a decision is made, everyone on the team can make that decision.

What’s required is to get clarity about what actually matters for us as a team and as a company and then communicate this openly and frequently.

The difference between bad and good leaders

There are good leaders and there are bad leaders. The thing to keep in mind is that good and bad leaders sit on opposite sides of a spectrum.

It’s not that bad leaders are similar to good leaders, just not as good or maybe less effective.

Bad leaders are the opposite of good leaders. They can destroy the morale of a team and frustrate the members to a degree that leads to struggles and fights, greed and envy.

Good leaders don’t do things similarly to bad leaders, just better. They do things differently.

Yet, there’s one thing that both kinds of leaders have in common: Both lead by example. By the things they do and in the way they communicate, leaders make or break a team.

The important thing to see is that that’s a decision. You decide what kind of leader you want to be. And then, when you have clarity about your vision of leadership, it becomes a skill that you can improve.

The double meaning of status updates

Monday is status update day in many teams.

Sadly, the name has grown to carry a double meaning. Because too often it’s not only about the status of the project anymore but also about the status among the people in the team.

Too often, status updates are about “look how much I did last week”, or “look what I’m up to”, or “look, I’ve got everything under control”. In too many teams, the purpose of the status update meetings is rather to ensure that the boss sees how well people do than it is to actually discuss the actual project status.

How about a shift this week? What if rather than about status you made it about enabling? Instead of “What have you done to support the team?” you asked “What can the team do to support you?”

That way, the purpose of the meeting itself becomes to raise the status of each member as much as possible. It’s about making each member the best member they can be. A team member that creates better because we – as a team – enable her to do so.

Monday could be team enabling update once a while.

Communicating to your team

The reason we all gather in a room (no matter if it’s online or offline) is because you are adding something that can’t be put on a slide. That’s especially true when you communicate to your team.

A presentation is not about the transfer of information but about the transfer of perspectives.

Information is much more efficiently – and usually also much more effectively – transferred asynchronously. Send me a document, point me to a link or book and I’ll take the info from there. I can read faster than you can talk. I can skip back or ahead. I can compare with knowledge I already have. I can take notes. All at my own speed.

The value of a presentation is in providing your perspective on the subject. Why does this matter? How are we affected? Why is this good news? How can we make best use of the info? Where do we go from here? As a team? How do you – as a person – handle the tough situation that follows from the info?

Communicating as a leader means more than providing info. It means showing up as a person who cares. It means lighting the path. It means making your team feel seen and heard.

And when they do feel seen and heard. And when they get your perspective. And when they align with your perspective because they get why it matters. Then they become more than the sum of their brains. They become a team.

PS: Next week, I’m launching a free five-part series on leadership communication.

The clarity to focus your team

Good leaders hire great people.

Great leaders make them a team.

After all, a team of brilliant members might not accomplish much when everyone follows their own agenda. Five brilliant people pushing in five different directions can provide much worse results than five average people pushing in the same direction.

Focus and dedication towards a common goal are often underrated but they are among the most important tasks of a great team leader. The ability to communicate that vision and to lead by example, thereby lighting the path, is even more important today in this remote world.

In two weeks from now, I will publish a free 5 part deep dive to help you find the clarity to focus your team. Actionable tips to focus your team on a common vision. It will be published exclusively via email and you can subscribe here (no obligation, your info will be immediately deleted after the course).

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