Lean Communication

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When you rise to a position of leadership, you need lean communication more than ever.

First, you communicate more than ever before. According to one study, leaders spend 80-85% of their time communicating,  and I suspect that a good part of the remaining 15% is spent thinking about what to say and how to say it.

Second, your position magnifies your power to produce both value and waste. Therefore you have a corresponding obligation to do it more effectively and efficiently than ever before—to pay even more attention to lean communication.

And the general purpose of that communication is still the same: to get things done through others by communicating useful information that they can use to drive effective action and valuable outcomes. As Steve Dakolios, CEO of Federal Packaging told me: a leader’s job is to convert potential energy into kinetic energy. Your communication crucially affects both the measure and direction of that energy.

I will use the next two podcasts to explain how lean communication is different for leaders. In this one, I will talk about delivering value, and use the next podcast to address brevity, clarity and dialogue.

Value

What are a leader’s responsibilities and opportunities when it comes to communicating value? To answer that question, let’s re-visit our value-test checklist:

When you communicate, you deliver value through one or more of the following:

• Improved business outcomes
• Improved personal outcomes
• Relationship is respected

So far, so good. But, what’s different about leadership communication?

Improved business outcomes

As a leader in a business organization, your first responsibility is to improved business outcomes. By definition, the leader is responsible for something bigger than a single person—bigger than any single follower and certainly bigger than yourself. You are the spokesperson and cheerleader for the big picture. If you don’t speak on behalf of the larger purpose and group goals, who will?

In lean terms, that means that you should explicitly explain the WIFU, or “What’s In It for Us?”. What’s the business reason for what you’re telling them? Don’t assume they already know; don’t assume they don’t need to know; don’t assume they don’t care, because they do. And if they don’t, it’s your job to give them reasons to care.

Some leaders play things close to the vest, and tell subordinates only what they need to know to do their jobs. Maybe they buy into the outdated ideas of scientific management, where Frederick Taylor said: “You’re not supposed to think. There are other people paid for thinking around here.” Maybe it’s because they’ve fallen into the ethos trap, and think that “because I said so” is good enough reason. Maybe they think it’s more efficient; because it saves time not having to explain their rationale.

But there are good reasons to share the big picture and provide the “why” in your communications. As I mentioned in the previous podcasts, complex and dynamic environments present novel situations to front-line employees faster than the leader can react, so the person on the spot can benefit from having a clear idea of how their decisions may affect the larger enterprise.

Second, they also feel more connected to the purpose of the enterprise, so they are more likely to put in discretionary effort. It may make the difference between a front-line employee telling a customer it’s not his job, versus taking the initiative to make sure the customer is happy.

Third, when they know your thinking, they may have other pieces of the puzzle which they are more likely to offer up if they know they’re important. As Steve Jobs said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Improved personal outcomes

Even though WIFU takes precedence, you may still have to appeal to personal self-interest, or WIFM.  It may seem unnecessary, because there is always at least an implication that they will do what you say if they know what’s good for them.

But there are three levels of agreement: compliance, commitment, and leadership. Compliance means that they go along with your idea. They may say yes, or agree not to block your efforts. At the next level, they take an emotional and personal interest in the idea and commit to seeing that the idea gets implemented become enthusiastically committed to it. This is the difference between following the letter of your request and promoting the spirit as well. At the highest level, they make the idea their own and take an active leadership role in promoting and extending it.

If simple compliance is all you’re after, it would be wasteful to say anything more, but if you want more, you need to address their self-interest, both extrinsic and intrinsic.

It’s easy to appeal to your listeners’ extrinsic self-interest; you’ve got plenty of sticks and carrots at your disposal. But appealing only to extrinsic motivators can actually create more waste in the long run, in the sense that you may be leaving a lot of effort, engagement, and creativity on the table if that’s all you rely on.

As a leader it makes much more sense to appeal to intrinsic motivation than pure extrinsic self-interest. It‘s the difference between having followers who are “coin-operated” vs those who are self-motivated. It’s the difference between transactional leadership and inspirational leadership. Leaders who inspire through their communication are about as lean as can be, because they create more value through motivating greater effort, and they greatly reduce the need to constantly keep communicating, checking and reminding people what they should be doing.

Relationship is respected

Business and personal outcomes are about results, and relationships are about people. Leaders can benefit from the proper balance between the two. According to a survey of over 60,000 employees, leaders who were primarily results-focused were rated as “great” 14% of the time; people-focused leaders 12% of the time; leaders who focused equally on both, 72% of the time! If that sounds obvious to you, reflect on the estimate by David Rock that only 1% of all leaders do this.[1]

Relationships based on mutual trust and respect create value in two ways. First, everyone feels happier and more engaged, and second, because that translates into better business performance in general. A study by Gallup reported that companies in the top quartile of engagement are 21% more profitable and 17% more productive than companies in the bottom quartile. (Of course, if you need studies to convince you to treat people well, you’ve probably already stopped reading by this point.)

Sharing information about the big picture and appealing to your followers’ self-interest show respect to your followers and enhance the relationship in and of themselves. But there are also so many ways to foster good relationships that it would take many more articles than this one. I just want to mention one very useful approach that is easy to remind yourself to do: try to always bring a social gift to every communication opportunity.

There are three social gifts that you can bring to every communication opportunity: appreciation, connection and elevation.

Appreciation: Make people feel important. You can do this easily by simply paying attention to them, soliciting their input, praising them sincerely and specifically, and giving generous credit for success.

Connection: Connect with people on a personal level and find things you have in common. Some companies, such as Southwest Airlines, make this feeling of “family” a powerful part of their culture.

Elevation: One thing about leadership is that you can’t not communicate. Even when you’re not saying anything, people are watching you closely and reading your mood. There is such a thing as emotional contagion, but it usually works in only one direction: from the more powerful to the less powerful. As Daniel Goleman reminds us: “Everyone watches the boss. People take their emotional cues from the top…even when leaders are not talking, they were watched more carefully than anyone in the group.”[2]

You have to take special care to project an upbeat, elevated attitude even when you don’t feel like it—especially when you don’t feel like it!

See also:

Lean Communication for Leaders Part 1: The Ethos Trap

Lean Communication for Leaders Part 2: Empathy Erosion

Lean Communication for Leaders Part 3: The Control Paradox

[1] Travis Bradberry, Results or People: Where Should a Leader Focus?, Forbes 12/23/16.

[2] Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee, Primal Leadership, p. 8.

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One of the hardest communication skills to master may be to know how to refrain communicating when necessary. In other words, knowing when to shut up.

Being a leader has never been easy, but in some ways it’s tougher than ever today because of the complexity and dynamism of our environment. When the task is simple, and you have a pretty good idea of what future conditions will be like, you can specify very clearly what you want people to do and expect that they’re not going to encounter many exceptions. If they do, they can ask for direction and you’ll have plenty of time to make the appropriate adjustments.

But when too many changes or unexpected events happen at once, that comfortable system can quickly break down—particularly when a more nimble competitor is behind some of the unexpected events.

In an uncertain environment, the first casualty is clarity. People are less sure of what to do, so the natural tendency for the leader is to step in and tell them. In other words, the reaction to uncertainty is additional detail: “when this happens, do this.” It’s meant to be helpful, but clarity and detail are not synonymous, nor is there a direct linear correlation between them. Sometimes additional detail helps, especially when it gives concrete direction, but too much detail can obscure meaning by overwhelming the person on the spot who is trying to figure out how to react to the novel situation; it can be hard to figure out what’s relevant at that particular moment. It may be an extreme example, but I’m reminded of the recent tragic picture of pilots rapidly thumbing through a loose-leaf manual as their 737 pitches up and down violently and seemingly randomly—and we all know how that scene ended.

As a leader, you value predictability. That’s what plans are for. You plot your moves, forecast their results, and communicate them to the people who have to execute.  But there is a lot of room between intentions and results. When you say do X because you expect Y will happen—but instead Z happens, or Q or K or some totally unexpected such letter, you feel a loss of control. When the situation is slippery, your impulse is to tighten your grip; you put in tighter controls.

But tighter controls require more metrics, which means more reporting, which means less work creating value, while at the same time sending a message to followers that you don’t trust them to use their own judgment, which stifles initiative, which causes you to impose even tighter and more stringent controls. Eventually the control system may require more attention and activity than the environment you’re supposed to be operating in. You become more internally focused, and activity becomes more important than output. In lean terms, more and more of the work you do does not contribute to value for the end customer, who doesn’t care about your policies, processes and KPIs. Eventually the system collapses under its own weight, or you get your clock cleaned by nimbler and more efficient competitors.

The control paradox is that you begin to focus on preventing waste and lose sight of creating value. It also means that reporting replaces dialogue as a means of communication; it makes you—not the end customer—the arbiter of what constitutes value, and thus violates the most important principle of lean.

The drive for control means well, because it’s meant to prevent waste, but reducing or preventing waste, while extremely important, is never the main reason for doing anything; creating value for a customer is.

How to avoid the control paradox

You may find it surprising to learn that the cure for the control paradox comes from an organization that most people don’t know for their flexibility: the military. But it does make sense: what other organization operates in such a chaotic and competitive environment than the military?

Comparisons between military and business operations are often way overdone, but in both fields, an organization attempts to achieve certain goals in a competitive environment. Businesses strive to increase their share value by achieving profit and growth objectives. Their plans, however don’t act on inert objects. They run up against the independent will of customers and competitors, not to mention suppliers, regulators, legislators, general public opinion, changing technologies and even nature itself in a world that is ever more tightly connected and changeable. All of these impact each other in innumerable feedback loops, creating complexity that makes it impossible to plan with precision.

Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military officer, introduced the concept of friction, his term for all the “uncertainties, errors, accidents, technical difficulties, the unforeseen and their effect on decisions, morale, and actions.” In other words, a general can plan in meticulous and brilliant detail how a campaign will go, but things will always deviate from the plan, and an organization must have the capacity to adapt to changed circumstances.

The 19^th century Prussian army, under the tutelage of Helmuth von Moltke, worked out an approach to communication to allow the organization to adapt and avoid the control paradox, and its methods have permeated military planning in the US today to address what writer Stephen Bungay[1] calls performance gaps, but which we can also see as sources of waste:

Knowledge gap: As a leader, you  do not have all the information you need to decide on the best course of action. Or you have too much information, much of which is simply noise.

Alignment gap: Your instructions may not be correctly understood or interpreted by lower levels, or they may not act on them as expected.

Effects gap: Even if everything is done as planned, it does not always have the intended effect, especially when competitors or customers don’t do what we want.

To deal with the knowledge gap, von Moltke said, “Do not command more than is necessary or plan beyond the circumstances you can foresee.” Rather than detailed plans and orders, the leadership communicates its strategic intent, that is what needs to be achieved and why. They set the direction, not the exact path, and let followers figure out the how.

Address the alignment gap by: “Communicat(ing) to every unit as much of the higher intent as is necessary to achieve the purpose.” Make sure that each level clearly understands the intent of two levels above. Thus, when subordinates have to make a quick decision in a new situation, they ask themselves: “What would my boss tell me to do if he knew what I know now?”

Finally, because the top can’t react immediately when actions don’t have the intended effects, “Everyone retains freedom of decision and action within bounds.”  The person on the spot is in the best position to decide what to do.

In other words, the paradox of control is that the only way to retain control is to give it up.

[1] See my previous post recommending his excellent book, The Art of Action.

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In part 1 of this series on Lean Communication for Leaders, I talked about the ethos trap, which is the tendency of people in powerful positions to rely on the big stick of their title and authority to influence others, and less on convincing others through the logic of their idea. In short, leaders get lazy.

But laziness is easy to overcome as long as you care about getting the job done right. If you truly care about putting together the best possible message for your followers to hear, you already know how to do it—you’ve done it countless times in your career, or you would not have risen to the level you have. As long as you care about what your followers think, you can avoid the ethos trap.

But, what if you stop caring about what others think? What if you start seeing others more as tools to exploit to get your way? It’s a form of “altitude sickness” called empathy erosion, and unfortunately it’s a condition that is likely to become worse the higher you go.

Let’s first remind ourselves how important empathy is in communication. It’s so important that it’s the first rule of lean communication: I call it outside-in thinking. That’s because the number one imperative of communication is to add value, and only the recipient defines value. That means that you must be able to take the other person’s perspective on every issue, and communicate in a way that they are most likely to understand, believe and accept. Two sides can communicate much more effectively—and pleasantly—when each side strives to meet the other more than halfway by seeing things from their point of view.

In leadership terms, outside-in thinking is about getting followers to do what you want for their own reasons. As Dwight Eisenhower said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

How Leadership Can Erode Empathy

Leaders should be able to effortlessly think outside-in—it should actually be easier for you as a leader,     because after all you’ve been in their shoes but they haven’t been in yours.

But what happens in reality to perspective taking as you gain power? Unfortunately, a lot of evidence suggests that you’re less likely to take others’ perspectives into account as you become (or at least think you become) more important. In his book, The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner says, “When we experience absolute power, our attention shifts to our own interests and desires, thus diminishing our capacity for empathy—understanding what others feel and think.” (p. 101)

Keltner refers to absolute power, but Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky has demonstrated that people who are primed to feel powerful even for just a short time, show diminished empathy in three ways.

• When asked to write the letter “E” on their foreheads, they are almost three times as likely to write it so that it appears backwards to an observer. In their own minds, they see it correctly from their own perspective, and they fail to take into account how it looks to others.
• They’re more likely to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, which means that when you know something, you assume that others do as well, so you leave out important details and context to help them understand—and probably get impatient when others don’t get it.
• When shown photos of people expressing various emotions, they become less accurate at reading them.

Galinsky summarizes by saying: “…power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how other people see, think, and feel.”

And what could be less conducive to outside-in thinking than  feelings of entitlement? Here’s more evidence: In another study, researchers observed a four way stop sign, and counted the number of times a driver cut someone else off by going before their turn. They found that drivers of expensive cars cut off people 30% of the time, four times as often as drivers of less expensive cars.

In another experiment, college students of different socio-economic backgrounds were brought in for a study, and afterwards they saw a jar filled with candies. They were told the candies were for young children involved  in another study down the hall, but they could have some if they wanted. The richer students took twice as much candy as the poorer ones.

Finally, there’s the additional problem that Heidi Grant Halvorson, in her book No One Understands You, tells us that people in power tend to view others more instrumentally: how can they make use of them? You see them less as a person and more as a tool. You can even measure the erosion of empathy. There is a phenomenon called motor resonance, which simply means that when we observe someone else doing an activity, the same areas that are firing in their brains during the activity are firing in ours. We feel them, and it’s what helps us imagine things from their perspective. But those with more power showed diminished motor resonance in in MRI scans of their brains. They do think differently! As Halvorson says: “It’s not so much that they think they are better than you as it is that they simply do not think about you at all.”

Why does it matter?

If you step back and look at the problem practically and non-judgmentally, is it really such a bad thing if leaders are less empathetic? There are times when the job demands less empathy; sometimes you have to make hard decisions for the greater good and if you tore yourself up about each person it’s going to affect, it would probably paralyze you. Eisenhower knew that thousands of those troops he led would not survive executing his orders—but he had to issue his orders anyway.

And you have so many important tasks on your plate that it’s tempting to put efficiency and speed over relationships. You just don’t have the time, and if you don’t get it done, they’ll find someone who can.

But there’s the paradox: the fact that you don’t have enough time to devote to thinking about the people side is exactly why you need to take the time to think about the people side: no one can do everything by themselves. They have to trust others to do things, and they need for them to give their best efforts. Who will give their best efforts for someone they don’t think cares about them? When someone does something because they have to, they will generally do exactly what they’re told—and not a bit more. When they do it because they want to, they do it for pride, for meaning, for each other—maybe even for you as a leader whom they respect and admire. (If they respect and admire you, that is…)

So, think of empathy as an investment in long-term leadership effectiveness.

The good news about empathy erosion

But wait, there’s good news in all of this. There’s evidence that the condition is not incurable.

Other research shows that when leaders are reminded that the goal requires them to see others’ individual differences, they can actually do it more effectively than the less powerful—so maybe their empathy isn’t eroding—it’s simply being put aside for most of their tasks.

So, the simple cure is to accept that empathy is a critical tool in your leadership toolbox, and to remind yourself that it’s not something you “have” or “don’t have”; it’s a skill that you can and must cultivate. As a leader, you have countless opportunities to strengthen and demonstrate your empathy—as long as you make it a priority.