You already know how important team communication (and your team communication strategies) are to success.
In my last video, I talked about how to build trust among your team. Today, we’re talking about how to improve communication!
Honestly, I think communication is the BIGGEST factor for success! When you talk about how to improve change management, making sure that you know how to improve communication within a team-first is absolutely critical.
In today’s video, I’m talking about the Golden Idea for professional communication and team collaboration and giving you three great resources, including how to give (Great) feedback.
Learn more about my other favorite tools, Radical Candor, and Marshall Goldsmith’s FeedForward!
Lead Kick Ass Meetings
Download this toolkit and you'll get resources to:
- Easily manage task items from every meeting
- Design agendas quickly and allow folks the right info to prepare
- Hold your next effective staff meeting with focused content
- Run a quick daily meeting so your team gets more shit done
- Have your staff turn in meaningful updates so meetings are shorter
- Start meetings in an engaging way. Get everyone to laugh, not roll their eyes.
Read the full transcript:
So, this is a twofer. In the last video, I talked about how to build trust. Today, I’m talking about how to build and strengthen communication within the team. These are the two most common problems that my clients bring me in for and then I help them solve for through executive coaching, team coaching, and other trainings. So, here’s the secret to increased and better communication within team. You have to give them more tools in their toolbox.
There are so many secret awesome processes out there to increase your team’s ability to communicate. But, there is not one catch-all to solve all of your problems. And so, I think as leaders sometimes we think, “Oh if we could just learn this one tool, that will fix it.” And in my experience, often time your team needs three, four, five, 10 tools to adapt to a variety of situations before you can say you have improved, increased communication.
And, you have to be willing as a leader to really dig in with your team and ask them the questions what’s not working about communication? What business results are we not getting because we don’t communicate well? How does not communicating impact our team?
Don’t just let the complaint of, “well, we don’t communicate enough” fly. You really have to ask about five more questions behind that statement to really figure out what’s going on to then determine what tools will be most helpful.
So, I know I’m not giving you the silver bullet today because there is no silver bullet. Here are my three favorite tools that I think you should pick up. The first is a book called “Radical Candor” about how to care personally and challenge directly within a team which leads to increased communication. It’s fantastic.
Number two is the feedback process called Situation-Behavior-Impact. We’ll put these links in the notes with this blog post over on stefaniekrievins.com.
And then third is a tool from Marshall Goldsmith who is the executive coach of all executive coaches. He has a process that’s even better than feedback. It’s called feed-forward which is about, when someone asks you for advice about a future activity, you give it in a structured way.
It’s a really amazing process to one, increase communication, two, increase trust between two individuals, but then, provide guidance on how someone should adjust their behaviors in the future because the future’s always safe to talk about. The past can get hairy and emotional when we start bringing it up. So, dear leader, this is my advice.
If you’re having communication problems on your team, bring in more tools. Don’t expect your team members to just pull them from thin air and start behaving correctly. They need more guidance from you. All right, wherever you are watching this video, I wanna hear from you. How has increased communication improved your team results? How have you seen decreased communication really bankrupt a team? ‘Cause your stories gonna help us all learn and do better in the workplace. All right my friend, let’s get off the internet. Let’s get the real work done and I’ll see you next time.