The Dumbest Mistake Leaders Make in Communication
And the "Magic Formula" to counter that
As middle managers you don’t have an easy job. You form the bridge between the senior leadership, your reporting teams, and other stakeholders.
You are constantly bombarded with information coming from all nooks and corners of the company. From above, below, left and right.
Everywhere.
Do you know what most managers do with all this information?
They act like messengers. They pass the ball around.
The Dumbest Mistake
In the world of information overload, ever-exploding data, and growing mistrust of information, you, as a leader, have a crucial role to play.
A leader’s job is to gather all the information, make sense of it, and then appropriately communicate it to the respective parties.
But you shouldn’t just pass along the information as is.
You need to work on it, process it, filter it (if needed), provide context, and create a summary — essentially, add your own color and perspective to it before communicating it.
You need to own it up.
You are not the messenger. If you were, your job would have been automated and eliminated a long time ago, much before the AI bots descended on earth.
In Art or Science? What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About Leadership, we discussed how communication is an integral part of a leader’s role. So, how do you go about communicating effectively? Let’s find out.
Communicating Up
First, let’s talk about the communication that goes up from the teams to the leadership above.
I’ve seen managers struggle with not knowing what to share up the chain of leadership.
Some managers like to share everything happening in their teams with their managers and leadership team. Others fall to the other extreme and share sparingly.
Neither is a good idea.
So, what should you communicate up? Here are a few to consider:
Celebrate your team’s recent accomplishments/wins. What’s really important here is to highlight how your team contributed to the business goals, and provided value to your customers. Remember that everything you and your team does should ultimately help the organization move towards the larger goals.
Share your assessment of your organization, your SWOT analysis, and what your action plan is to address the weaknesses and threats and to leverage the strengths and opportunities. Here, you should include your asks for your boss and your leadership team. How can the leadership team help you and your team? What resources do you need to be successful?
Share project updates. Where are your teams across different projects, milestones, and commitments? Which projects are red or yellow, and what is the path to green for those projects? How can the leadership team help?
Share updates on operations and practices, and how your team is doing on the various operational metrics. Share dashboards, leading indicators, and trends, as well as their implications. Share your action plan, and again, what help you need from the leadership team.
Communicating Down
Now, let’s talk about a manager’s role in passing information down from the leadership, to their own teams.
What kind of information should you communicate to your teams? Here are a few that I think are most critical:
Cascade decisions that were made by leadership, their context, rationale and impact. Share these in your staff meetings or all hands, and invite questions from the team.
Share updates related to people (such as org changes, new hires, promotions, etc.). You should add your own perspective on these updates even if you weren’t involved in those decisions, and invite questions from the team.
Share updates on the business (such as a new product line, change in strategy, pausing a project, etc.) along with rationale and how that impacts the team. How is the business doing? How is the competition, the market, and the overall landscape? Again, invite questions from the team.
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The Magic Formula
With all the information flowing around and accessible to you, how do you decide what information to pass up the chain, what information to pass down the chain, and what is yours to keep?
Also, how do you filter the information, or summarize it, before sending it along?
This is where the Magic Formula comes in.
My magic formula is:
Be relevant and authentic.
Be relevant
In The 3 Secret Ingredients to Becoming a Master Persuader, we discussed the second pillar of the art of persuasion - Pathos - which appeals to the values and beliefs of the target audience.
When communicating up, you should only share what is relevant to your leadership, things they can use or act on, or that you need input on.
Before communicating anything up the chain, ask yourself:
Does leadership care about this information?
Do I need any input from leadership on this?
Is the information at the right level to resonate with the leadership?
If the answer to both of these questions is No, then it’s probably not worth sharing that information, as it will either be ignored or dumped. Worst still, you will end up wasting your boss’s time.
When communicating down, you should share information that is relevant to your teams: what impacts them, what they are curious about, and what they care about.
Before communicating anything down the chain, ask yourself:
Does my team care about this information?
Is the information at the right level of detail or in the right language for my team to understand?
Does this information relate to the work my team is doing?
Once again, if the answer to all these questions is No, you either need to massage the information to make it relevant for your team, or not share it at all (as it is probably irrelevant to them).
Be authentic
Okay, so you have ensured that the information you are sharing is relevant to your target audience. Great!
But that’s only half the magic formula. The second half of the magic formula is about how you deliver the information.
In The 3 Stages of Communication in Leadership, we discussed the importance of the second and third stages of communication - Inspire and Influence - in driving organizational change.
You cannot inspire and influence your stakeholders if you are not authentic.
Authenticity is about being genuine and honest.
When communicating up, be genuine and honest with your information. For example, when sharing a team update, share it with authenticity, and represent your team like you are their voice. When asking for more resources, make an honest case backed by data and a genuine need.
When communicating down, be authentic and “own” the information you share. If there is negative news, share it with empathy, and with a human heart. Invite questions, and an open discussion. When sharing a decision, “own” the decision.
I have seen some managers “pass the buck” when it comes to sharing decisions or policy changes with their team. “It’s HR’s decision”, or “I don’t agree with this, but it’s not my call”, etc.
A magic buzzword that is popular these days is transparency. I find many leaders confuse transparency for simply sharing everything. Again — you are not a messenger. Transparency does not mean that you share everything verbatim. It means you are honest and authentic.
You let your team know when you are not in a position to share some information due to a valid reason (for example, it’s better to let your team know that there is a security issue that is likely to be made public, but until that happens you cannot discuss it with the team due to disclosure clauses. This is a better approach than playing ignorant and not sharing anything).
Trust me, your team will understand.
Final Thoughts and Takeaways
Who said a leader’s job is easy, especially when it comes to effective communication?
As a leader, you need to own up to your team’s errors. You need to be accountable for their failures. You need to stand up in front of your teams, share negative news, and be open to facing difficult questions.
That’s part of a leader’s job, and great leaders know how to handle that communication by tapping into the Magic Formula.
Great leaders share relevant information, and they do so with authenticity.
What is your strategy for effective communication? Share your thoughts in the comments! 👇
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I had a boss who would forward every single email she received instead of filtering what was actually relevant. It was overwhelming, so much unnecessary information that it was hard to catch what actually mattered. And when you needed to find something later? Good luck. If you brought it up, she’d just say, “I sent that in an email.” Yeah, but which one?
I love the magic formula. It's short and easy to remember: "Be relevant and authentic."