Communication Tips For Teams – Part 1

Reminders from L David Marquet’s book Leadership is Language

• Changing the way we communicate changes the culture.
• Changing our words changes our world.
• Sometimes we need to be quiet so that everyone gets the opportunity to speak up. The more you talk, the less you will listen, so if you want to listen to your team, talk less.
• Control the clock and not obey the clock.
• Get commitment instead of compliance from your team.
• Improve the outcome instead of proving an ability.
• Connect with people instead of conforming to your role.
• Replace the language of invulnerability with the language of vulnerability and curiosity.
• Leaders are responsible for designing the organization so individuals can be the best versions of themselves.
• Making decisions by discussion and then voting results in reducing variability. It is the wisdom of the loud; as one idea is discussed, people reduce the outliers by voting for that idea or a similar idea. Group members who think along different lines will decline to contribute, depriving the group of possibly relevant information and analysis. The better approach is to vote and then discuss, which is the wisdom of the crowd.
• Have clarity on if it is doing work (which requires reduced variability) or thinking work (which requires embracing variability) and then use the language appropriately. If the meetings rely on thinking and making decisions, actively avoid the anchoring effect. Vote first and then discuss.
• Be aware of the language of doing and thinking and use that where needed.
• Encourage an improvement mindset instead of proving and protecting. Prove mindset is motivated to demonstrate something positive and protect mindset is motivated to hide something negative. The prove and protect mindset is closed and defensive, in which feedback hurts and criticism stings.
• One of the barriers to speaking up is being afraid of being wrong or being labelled as wrong. Encourage resilience, verification, or a questioning attitude, which can help change the mindset.
• Make the pauses happen by planning for them. Pause is not a delay; pause is for making room for thinking and taking action to prevent something else from happening in the future. Without pause, we continuously do the work without thinking, which sometimes does not prove to be correct.
• When collaborating to make decisions, instead of taking a convergent approach, “Here is what I think. Does everyone agree?” take a divergent approach: “What does everyone think?”
• It is not necessary to get consensus or bring everyone on board about something. That is trying to convince people “I am right, and you need to change your thinking”. As long as the group supports whatever decision is made by their behaviour, that’s enough, as it’s healthy to have different opinions.
• Preplan a pause; just like in the scrum framework of agile methodology, there are two-week sprints and then there is a pause and a start-over. Pause is used to reflect, retrospect, and review.

See Part 2