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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 19th 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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I just finished reading Shoot for the Moon, a wonderfully gripping tale by James Donovan about the Apollo 11 moon landing. Although I read it for entertainment and personal edification, I did not realize that I would also glean a valuable lesson in strategic persuasion. The story is this: [1]
NASA scientists and engineers began thinking about the problem of getting a man to the moon and back almost as soon as NASA began operations in October 1958, but at the time it was a distant and extremely difficult dream. At that time, the US had managed to get four small satellites into orbit in 13 tries. In fact we didn’t even put a man into space until May 5, 1961, when Alan Shepard went up and came back down.
So you could imagine the shock that hit NASA when just three weeks later, President Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and challenged the US to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. As the book says, they were “aghast”. (Imagine that, a President taking the professionals totally by surprise—no way that would happen today.)
When they began to consider the problem in earnest, there were two principal approaches that were being taken seriously.
The first approach was direct ascent, in which a rocket would take off from earth, travel directly to the moon, then turn around and land. It would then blast off from the moon and return directly to earth. That was the way that most science fiction books and movies envisioned it. It was the most straightforward and “simple” approach, but it would require a massive rocket, far larger than any in existence or in the works at the time. Werner von Braun’s Marshall space center had designed one, but it would probably take to the end of the decade to produce it. But one thing it had going for it is that the most influential committee in NASA, called the Space Task Group, favored it.
The other approach was known as earth-orbit rendezvous, (EOR). Planners envisioned building a space station orbiting the earth, which would be used to assemble a rocket with parts and fuel flown up separately. It would require more complex maneuvers to permit space craft to rendezvous in orbit, but it could be serviced with the Saturn rocket that was close to development. Werner von Braun’s team was developing the Saturn, so of course they favored EOR, which would require at least two Saturns per mission..
As those two heavyweight groups squared off against each other, a lightweight challenger arose. There was a third way, called lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), which would involve flying a modular spacecraft to lunar orbit. From there, a smaller spacecraft would separate, descend to the surface, and then rerun an even smaller portion back to the mothership. It was perceived to be much more risky because of the distance involved, and no one took the idea seriously. In fact, when it was presented to NASA by outsiders in 1960, “researchers laughed at the idea.”
In the end, as we all know, the idea that everyone laughed at was the one that won the space race for America, but it was far from a foregone conclusion, and the story of how it happened carries a lot of lessons for anyone trying to get a big idea through a large organization. Let’s rewind the tape back from Kennedy’s announcement and get the rest of the story.
The LOR approach was not totally new. In fact a self-taught Russian mechanic (those Russians again!) had suggested the idea in 1917! The idea was first introduced within NASA by two engineers, Clint Brown and Bill Michael, who wrote abut did not publish a two-page paper about it in April 1960.
Then the hero of our story comes into the picture. A NASA engineer named John Houbolt, began researching the problem and became fascinated with the idea; in the summer of 1960 he had an almost religious epiphany about it, and he vowed to dedicate himself to the task of selling the concept internally. Although he was a quiet introvert by nature, he began evangelizing the idea in “countless briefings, lectures, presentation, and one-on-one talks.” He won a few converts, but not at the influential Space Task Group. His first efforts seemed to fall flat, His listeners were not openly opposed, but no one seemed enthused about it either.
But then the claws began to come out. At a presentation that December, the assistant director of STG all but called him a liar because he took issue with some optimistic figures about weight reduction. He had a point, but it was considered a shocking departure from normal professional behavior.
Emotions were starting to take control on both sides of the discussion. Houbolt pleaded with the STG to just do their homework and look at the data, but for months they refused to do even that.
For a few months, Houbolt kept trying to intensify his efforts. According to the official NASA history, he was energetic, persistent and eloquent—but not shrewd in organizational politics. His first instinct when he failed to persuade others was to find better arguments.
In April he was desperate enough to risk his job by sending a letter to NASA #2 man Robert Seamans, who responded by appointing another committee to consider all possible ideas, which was at least progress. But at their initial meeting, a high level NASA official said “Well, look fellas, I want you to understand one thing. I’ve been right most of my life about things, and if you fellows are going to talk about rendezvous, any kind of rendezvous, as a way of going to the Moon, forget it.” His words directly violated the charter of the committee, and to their credit they ignored him. They did consider the LOR approach, but rated it a distant third anyway.
In November Houbolt wrote a longer letter to Seamans, fully expecting he would lose his job. Seamans handed it to a new hire named Joe Shea, who “prided himself on going wherever the data took him.” As he talked to others within different NASA groups, they started coming around. Ironically, once momentum finally switched in favor of LOR, the most opposed group started trying to claim it was their efforts that won the day! The crucial point, however waited until June 1962. Von Braun had finally asked to read the papers and was impressed enough that he stunned his own staff at the Marshall Space Flight Center when he publicly came out in support of Houbolt’s idea.
After two years of arguing and campaigning by the proponents of each of the three approaches, NASA Director Jim Webb announced the choice on July 11, 1962. and the US managed to meet its ambitious—some thought impossible—goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Although the decision seems obvious in hindsight, it took a lot of courage, persistence and careful work to get there. When the decision was announced, his division chief said to him: “I can safely say I’m shaking hands with the man who single-handedly saved the government twenty billion.”
But probably his greatest accolade came on July 20, 1969. Houbolt, who by this time had left NASA, was a guest at mission control in Houston when the transmission came in: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” As the room erupted in joyous pandemonium, von Braun turned to Houbolt and said, “John, it worked beautifully.”
What lessons can we draw from this story about strategic persuasion?
- Just because it’s a straightforward engineering problem, does not mean that facts alone will carry the day. Even rocket scientists need persuasion skills. That’s because engineering problems are never just technical. They’re economic, political, social, and psychological problems at the same time, and anyone trying to get something approved in a large organization has to recognize this.
- It takes time to win people over. As I’ve written before, there are zones of acceptance, and most people don’t have sudden conversions. They need to be moved gradually, and trying to move them to far too fast can get them to dig in their heels and even move further away from where you need them to go.
- Even in a large organization, one person can make a huge difference if they have the commitment to persist in the face of huge obstacles.
- Despite what the chief said, no one can do it single-handedly. Houbolt needed to win allies, and those allies helped to put his idea over the top. It’s especially important to share credit. As Harry Truman said, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you let others take the credit.
- Sometimes you have to bend the rules—especially if the system is stacked against you. But if you’re going to do it, make absolutely sure you have your best arguments and data available, and be able to justify it for the good of the bigger picture.
- Early opposition, if you can survive it, is going to sharpen your idea and its presentation. Sometimes, rather than arguing against the naysayers, you need to make the effort to understand them, learn from them, and possibly incorporate what will make your idea better.
[1] I uncovered additional detail in the official NASA history about the topic, Enchanted Rendezvous, by James R. Hansen. Available here in pdf.
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I taught a module last week on social intelligence, and as part of it I gave my students a homework assignment to find opportunities to practice the skills I taught, especially the skills that make for favorable first impressions. They have to look for opportunities to practice their nonverbals, their social gifts, adjust their warmth and competence, etc.
There are opportunities everywhere you look; I know, because I have this strange habit of feeling compelled to practice what I preach. Since class ended on Wednesday afternoon, I have practiced these skills on TSA agents, gate agents while boarding my flight, old friends in a social situation, new friends in a social situation, supermarket checkers, a homeless man, and even my brother-in-law (that last one probably surprised him as much as it did me). I’ve also watched others practice these skills and have learned from them. Conservatively, I consciously practiced my social skills on at least a dozen occasions in the past four days.
Seriously, every time you speak with someone, no matter how briefly, there is a lot going on. You are exchanging words, participating in rituals, giving or withholding appreciation, transmitting and receiving messages about your respective moods and mental states, gauging their warmth and competence unconsciously while they do the same to you, making decisions about how much intimacy to seek or allow, etc. We are performing a rapid and unconscious algorithm to measure how much we like, respect and trust the other person, and it’s all going on below the level of conscious awareness.
Another way to practice mindfulness in social intelligence is to observe others, particularly those whose social skills you admire. What do they do differently than you do? What do they do more of, or less of? How do others respond to what they do?
Most of us go through most of our days without even thinking about what’s going on, which puts us on autopilot. The nice thing about autopilot is that it’s efficient; the sad thing about autopilot is that no learning or growth is taking place.
Practice the habit of being more deliberate and mindful in your interactions with people, and you start seeing other things that most people miss. You notice how people respond to questions about themselves; you see how a smile elicits an equal but not opposite reaction; you quickly find out that your mood is contagious; you may actually learn a thing or two. And best of all—others benefit as well!
In this podcast I go into detail about how to increase your awareness, adjust your attitude, practice the proper skills, and work towards turning your new skills into habits.
