How Better Communication Turns Into Better Team Numbers

Great communicators repeatedly outperform good and bad communicators by a factor of up to 7x.

In our last Leadership Mastermind, we shared some tools to help leaders communicate more effectively when it matters most. We all agreed that communication is a challenge and even more so when you are under pressure, have lots of priorities, and still need to come to work and be at your best. In order to understand this more fully, let’s take a look at how communication works before we work out how to do it better with some hacks shared from the session.

Communication involves both a sender and receiver. Therefore as the leader, you need to factor in both before you communicate, and also work out what feedback you are looking for as a result of your communication.

We often talk about “leaders bringing the weather” which means the mood and tone with which you enter the room, affects the room. Your communications are the same. The mood and tone you consciously or unconsciously inject into your communications – written or verbal, impacts the way the recipients interpret what you sent. Overlay that with whatever they have going on too and you magnify the potential obstacles in the way of your message landing as intended. The lightning bolts on the diagram show the things which can interrupt the success of a message going through. If we want to reduce those lightning bolts, we can use a really simple tool that usefully has the initials ABC to make it easy to remember.

When adopted ABC can significantly boost your results and as a knock-on effect, the performance of your team. Immediate gains can be up to 3x the results. If we think about the concept as a mental checklist to assess your message before you hit send, it can really help.

A = Accurate

Accuracy in leadership communications means sharing the facts, not conjecture, and ensuring that the points you are putting in your message are true, in sufficient detail to be understood (don’t confuse detail with length) and assist the recipient in truly grasping your key points.

In 1983 an Air Canada flight reportedly ran out of fuel mid-flight because the crew confused pounds and kilograms while fueling the aircraft. You have probably also heard stories of patients being given the dosage of drugs due to a misplaced decimal point.

The other advantage of double-checking your accuracy is that it builds trust when you don’t have to resend or keep changing details because the initial information wasn’t correct.

B = Brief

Brevity is an often overlooked component in communications. You might feel that you need to share more context. Or perhaps that if you tell people everything, there is no way that they can miss your point. In fact, the opposite tends to occur – hence TLDRs becoming increasingly popular.

The average email is given 3-6 seconds of reading time, so your multiple-page missive might not hit the mark. Aim to restrict your messages to the key points with signposts to “more information” to be able to dig deeper.

Where you are presenting data, do so with a summary of what is being looked at. This also helps to reinforce the next point.

C = Clear

Focus on making your message clear and easy to understand and act upon. If people know what you expect, where you and they stand, and how they might achieve it, thanks to your message, you have communicated clearly.

Highlight key points so they are obvious to readers and you navigate through the message efficiently. It can also be really useful to share your message with someone you trust before you distribute it widely. If they are able to understand and share back to you what you intended to get across, then the message has a high chance of being clear.

Read your message out loud (if written) or practice saying it out loud (like a rehearsal) if to see if you can articulate your key points clearly. If you are trying to communicate both verbally and in writing, try a transcription tool like Otter.ai to capture what you say and put it into writing more quickly.

Whilst you might think working through ABC could be time-consuming when you are time-poor, the results speak for themselves. An immediate upside of up to 3x and if you keep at it, up to 7x improved results from your team really start to make sense.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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