Three things business leaders should question about their communication during this pandemic

In this (third and final) post, communications expert Sophie Clark highlights some recommendations specifically for business leaders.

Sophie’s clients are everywhere from Los Angeles to Sydney and in between working with companies such as Warner Music, Morgan Stanley, BT, HSBC, Nestle through to entrepreneurs.

What three things do you think business leaders should question at the moment during this pandemic?

I ask these questions to any business leader I work with whether they are running the company, are a head of a division or managing a small team.

1. How well do you really chair your meetings?

If your team were asked to give you a rating out of 5, like an Uber or Trip Advisor rating, would you be happy with the number? It’s between a rock and hard place to chair well virtually, so some questions that may be good to ask yourself are;

· Has my format and interaction changed at all from the original face to face meetings?

· What percentage of time am I talking versus the rest of the group?

· Which meetings have clear outputs and which end without clarity? Why?

· Is the meeting being dominated by the same voices every time?

· Am I hearing from everyone I should be in all the meetings I chair?

· Does it always start and end on time?

· Am I talking over people when I shouldn’t be and am I standing up for those getting talked over?

· What’s the energy like? Flat? Upbeat? Dragging? Bouncing like a pin ball machine?

Take some time out to reflect and ask yourself where can it be better?

Want to empower your team? Can you ‘share the chair’? Rotate who runs the meeting within your group. It can bring variety to bog standard regular meetings and habitual patterns. It can give members of your team an opportunity to step up and push themselves and understand the complexity of the chair role… and see how difficult it can be when others don’t pay attention or turn their cameras off!

Want more impact? Cut cut cut. Cutting unnecessary meetings, cut the length of meetings, cut the amount of information being shared, cut the number of committees. One media head client of mine inherited a 1 hour weekly management meeting and changed it to 30-minutes completely mixing up the format. People’s attention spans are so short and this helped reduce Zoom fatigue.

Going to ask someone a question? Use the person’s name at the beginning. “Rosie….… please can you give us the marketing update?” Rosie’s ears prick up at the sound of her name and it saves her looking a bit foolish if she wasn’t paying attention in that moment. Don’t say their name at the end of the question.

Have a meeting attendee who drones on? Ask softly ‘In the interest of time, if there’s one thing we should know about this, what is that please?’ It does not have to be aggressive, just gives a gentle nudge to help them summarise their point.

Want more engagement? Ask people to put their videos on and do this in advance if needs be. Do you ask for a show of hands and encourage discussion? Got a super quiet group? Small breakout groups can by dynamite for them to share opinion without being singled out and share afterwards.

2. Do you talk openly about your failures and what’s not gone to plan and encourage others to do the same?

Lack of transparency is becoming a bigger theme year on year.

Many leaders I work with do not get as clear a picture as they should to make the highest quality decisions. Why? Some people are trying to be ‘perfect’ all day, every day. Making mistakes is of course a natural part of working and yet people are trying for their work life to match their Instagram life. As a leader, this is a concern. In meetings how much are you hearing what is NOT working? What has failed? What could have gone better? So many meetings are wall to wall successes and little mention of issues. This is across every culture, country, company, it is everywhere from the very junior levels right up to senior management levels.

Jeff Bezos talks consistently about being one of the biggest failures on the planet. That is easy to do when you are now a gazillionaire, but not easy to do when you are a mid-manager, with two kids, a mortgage, in a pandemic and your leader doesn’t make you feel safe. So share your mistakes, praise your team when they are open with issues and failures they have had. This theme is getting bigger and bigger so be aware of it.

3. When checking in on your people, are you actively listening?

“Are you OK?” — “Yes / I’m fine/ Not really/ I’m struggling/ I’m overloaded”

Actively listen and give your team space to talk. Are they admitting that they are struggling and you’re moving the conversation on too quickly because it’s an awkward conversation? Who are you not giving 1 on 1 time because they are not asking for it, but actually deep down you know they need it? Is anyone more withdrawn than usual? Are they sending emails at 2am?

If you have a new or quiet team member who clams up, an exercise I do is ask them to (privately, not sharing) rate four topics on a scale of 1 to 10;

1. Sleep

2. Nutrition

3. Exercise and movement

4. Mental well-being

If they rate themselves a 5 or below on any of these areas, get them to ask themselves “what is the specific plan to address that NOW?” and if they don’t know the answer to that, let them know that you’d welcome a conversation to see if you can help.

Make sure to do this exercise yourself — leaders are often like the cobbler’s children who don’t get the shoes… it’s like the oxygen masks on aeroplanes (remember those!?) you’re not much use to your team if you’re out of oxygen yourself.

A media client has a close knit team and they have coloured cards based on how they are feeling that they show every day in zoom. This is not going to work in every industry, the important thing is to have an approach that works for your own culture and dynamic while we ride out this pandemic.

Sophie previously shared tips for the work environment on communicating in covid times as well as communication pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Other insights for enterprise software business leaders can be found on the Insights section of Illuminate Financial’s website.