“I already told you this … twice.”
I know how frustrating it can be to share something important with your team, only to find out they don’t remember ever hearing it. It’s been said that if you say something seven times, half of your team will tell you they heard it only once.
Here are some common mistakes that can make a leader’s communication seem to vanish without being heard.
🔵 Sharing facts without impact. It’s one thing to give people information. But if you want them to remember and apply that information, you need to connect the facts to a specific effect on the person. What change will they experience? What do you need from them as a result? Make those things clear.
🔵 Sharing too many irrelevant facts. When you overload your communication with details that don’t apply to your team, you condition them to tune out when you start speaking. When you have regular FYI information that your team may or may not care about, be sure to isolate your important communication into a separate message with a distinctive presentation so they can discern what is crucial from what is simply background information.
🔵 Sharing unidirectionally. If you want to make sure your team has received crucial communication, ask for something in return. Perhaps ask them to propose a response or to brainstorm how the change might affect them. When they have to craft a meaningful reply, they’re more likely to internalize whatever you’re trying to communicate.
When you’re sharing something your team needs to understand in order to succeed, be sure to highlight the expected impact of your message, in a separate and distinct communication, and ask for something in return.
And if you’d like to build other skills and habits so that managing engineers can feel natural to you, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
Leave a Reply