Leaders, stop vomiting all over your people…

One of the biggest challenges in organisations, that comes out in every employee survey is, drum roll….you guessed it, communication.

It comes up every time and has done for the past 30-40 years.

Most leaders want to fix it, unfortunately they tend to err on the side of I’ll just spew out more, more, more information in the hope that something sticks. Which it does, just it stinks and sticks like doggy poop.

Leaders start:

📣 sending out more ‘status’ email updates (vomit)

📣 holding more ‘town hall’ zoom meetings (barf)

📣 creating more teams, Slack, What’sApp channels (spew)

They are trying so hard to be heard, to send out meaningful information, to keep people informed and up to date, to satisfy demand and yet are scratching their head wondering why the next annual survey has “Communication” as the top issue again.

I know this sooo well, in a previous role as a Communication Director I may have even suggested those things to our executive team myself. But they don’t work, and they work less and less every year. Here’s why:

People don’t communicate like that in real life! They chat, they banter, they have dialogue back and forth in short, brief texts and chat conversations. They don’t go to work to hear a leaders spoken or written word monologue, especially if it’s the same shite they’ve been asked to swallow for a while. Yeah, nah.

People say they WANT more communication, what they MEAN is they want more dialogue and conversation – back and forth, speaking, listening and understanding.

If you’re a leader do a little vomit audit with me. Take out all the communication pieces you’ve sent or had with your team over the past 5 business days, meetings, emails, memos, instructions, phone calls, town halls, zooms, slack chats, whatever you have had. You get 0 points if the communication was two-way, open, free flowing, chatty, constructive. You get 5 points for every communication that was one way, dictatorial, a tell rather than an ask, a deadline, a top-down share, a passing on of information with no conversation, an instruction.

5 or less and you’re doing OK

10 or more and you need to get out the bucket.

Seriously take a step back and review what you are trying to communicate and why. Think of any relationship you have in your own life, isn’t it true that we all just want an invitation:

👉 To be heard and feel valued

👉 To be safe to question and query

👉 To understand the direction reasoning and to contribute to it.

So if your team are struggling with communication, don’t send them another email, go sit with them, ask them, listen to them, pause and reflect, create space for conversation to flow. Ask “Where do you feel we have communication gaps in our team right now and what ideas do you have to improve them?”

You may be amazed by what you co-create together.

AJ