When your organization or team communicates effectively, you’re nimble. You can respond to change quickly. But if your organization doesn’t invest in effective workplace communication, you’ll face a constant series of misunderstandings that waste time, create conflict, and drag down everyone’s performance. One easy-to-use workplace communication tool will eliminate most of these frustrations, save you time, and improve performance and morale.

Stop Asking “Do You Understand?”

Every moment of communication with your team or customer is precious. Especially in hybrid, remote, or fast-moving organizations, you’ve got to make every interaction count.

But one of the worst ways to waste these precious moments is by asking, “Do you understand?”

If the person answers “yes”—well, you know nothing more than you did before you asked. They said “yes,” but what does that “yes” actually mean?

Maybe they think they understand (and whether they do or not, you don’t know). Or maybe they just told you yes because that’s what they think you expect to hear.

Perhaps they just want to move on and get to their next task, so they say “yes” hoping to leave the conversation.

Regardless of the person’s intent, when someone tells you, “yes, I understand,” you know nothing more than you did before you asked. And you rarely learn about problems in understanding until later when things go wrong.

Now, if they tell you “no, I don’t understand,” that is better in the sense that now you have new information. But you still don’t know where the confusion happened or what to do about it. And it required the person you asked to have the courage to admit they didn’t understand (which shouldn’t take courage, but often does).

Maximize Your Workplace Communication ROI: Check for Understanding

You can make the most of every conversation and eliminate hours, days, even months of frustration, headache, and heartache by shifting away from “do you understand?” Instead, ask an open-ended question that helps both of you immediately figure out how well you grasp what one another has said. We call this a “check for understanding.”

Check for Their Understanding

When you check for understanding, ask the other person what they understand (not if they understand). There are many ways you can do this. Here are a few examples:

• “Let’s check for understanding here, what are the next steps we will take?”
• “I’d like to make sure we’re on the same page. What’s happening now?”
• “What’s your understanding of our agreement?”

All of these questions are open ended – the person answering will share what they know. There is no yes/no pressure to be right. It’s about sharing their perspective so we can move forward efficiently.

As you hear them summarize in their words, you’ll know what they know and where they are missing critical information. Now you can clarify and ensure everyone has what they need.

Check for Your Understanding

When you are on the receiving end of communication from a colleague, team member, supervisor, board member, spouse, child, friend – or anyone else, you can use the check for understanding to make sure you’ve got it.

This time, you’ll repeat back what you understand and ask for clarification. For example:

• “I’m hearing that we need to move this project up to deliver this Friday and that we should postpone our work on the marketing effort until next week. Do I have that right?”
• “It sounds like we’ve agreed to add a full-time person to this team. If that’s right, I’ll talk to HR to get it posted.”
• “It seems like this task will take about five hours, is that what you had in mind?”
• “I’m hearing that competing data requests from other teams are keeping you from getting what you need to complete this on time. Is that right?”

In all these examples, you don’t allow yourself to assume you understand. You double check. Sometimes you’ll extend that check for understanding to add more clarity. For example:

• “Thanks for confirming. So, what I see happening next is that the product team will be worried. How will we communicate the change with them?”
• “Okay, so not five hours. You want a 30 minute estimation. Are you comfortable with a range then as opposed to a specific number?”

Whether you check for their understanding or yours, now everyone has the same information.

Organizational Check for Understanding

One of the most frustrating parts of life in organizations that grow beyond one level of organization is cascading communication. We constantly hear the workplace communication frustration of senior leaders who don’t understand why everyone isn’t on the same page.

The problem usually stems from a lack of – you guessed it, checking for understanding. But there are usually two or even three checks that need to happen.

If you’re a senior leader who has information to cascade through the organization (and it’s not passive information – people need to do something with it), you need to ensure that everyone’s got it and acts on it. Here’s how you do it:

1. Start with your direct report team.

In addition to the key message, clarify with the team that part of their responsibility is to ensure that their team understands and acts on the message. Check for understanding with your direct reports. For example, “Okay, if there aren’t any more questions, let’s check for understanding. What needs to happen next? By when?” Make sure they’ve got cascading and ensuring understanding as part of their next steps.

2. Skip-level check for understanding.

Once the cascading timeline passes, have some conversations with people who report to your team. Ask then, “What is your understanding of [topic / key message]?”

Listen to what they say. If they have it wrong, don’t chastise them. Instead, gently correct: “Oh, actually, here’s what’s happening… What questions are coming up for you?”  Then you can wrap up with another check for understanding: “Just to make sure I’m communicating as clearly as I hope to, what are you hearing me say here?”

3. Coach the managers whose people don’t have it.

This is a critical step if you want a nimble, responsive, accountable organization. You’ve got to hold your team member responsible for their team’s understanding of the message. If their team doesn’t have it, that’s your team member’s responsibility.

Check in with your team member. Let them know they had some folks struggling with the message. Check with them about how they’re communicating. How are they checking for understanding themselves? Are they? (Or are they falling back on “do you understand” and failing to learn what people actually know?)

If the manager continues to struggle, it may help to attend a meeting where they will be communicating and observe how they do it and then coach them after the meeting. This rarely takes more than once or twice before they figure it out and ensure clear communication.

Eliminate Common Workplace Communication Barriers

Once leaders learn how to check for understanding, there are four common obstacles that get in the way of clear communication.

1. Concern that it takes too long

We get it—when time is short, every second feels precious.

But the investment in clear understanding gives you back so much time later that you won’t spend cleaning up misunderstandings, re-doing work, and solving unnecessary conflict.

2. Feeling like people should be “better than this”

“These are professionals. They should get this the first time.” We hear this one quite a bit.

Frankly, it’s nonsense. Human communication is challenging at the best of times and no one gets it right every time. Heck, we teach these concepts nearly every day, and we still have frequent misunderstandings where we’ll use the same word, but interpret it differently.

One of your most critical leadership responsibilities is communication. You can’t inspire, motivate, or take a group of people anywhere if you can’t communicate. And you haven’t communicated until everyone has shared understanding.

3. Intentional misunderstanding

When you hold everyone on your team responsible for their communication, you may discover a few folks who have been hiding behind intentional misunderstanding. After all, “if I leave it vague, I don’t have to follow through or disappoint anyone. I can’t be accountable for that.”

You and your team will coach some of these folks to greater accountability that will help their performance and relationships. Others may not want it and you’ll ultimately coach them out of the organization.

4. Avoiding negative emotions

Managers who struggle to check for understanding often want to avoid dealing with negative emotions.

If that key message is going to irritate or concern some of their team, they may deliver it without force. They might share the message, but not check for understanding because doing so opens the door for how people feel about the issue.

The person could say, “Yeah, I get it. Here’s what you’re saying. I just don’t like it.” Now what?

Help your managers learn to listen deeply, reflect what they hear—check for understanding about the team member’s concern and how they feel, and go from there. (And model this yourself.)

The next step might be to relay the employee’s concern to you. It might be to acknowledge how they feel and then ask for enrollment: “I hear that this is disappointing for you. I’m not asking you to feel differently. Is it something you can still do?”

Help your managers learn to listen and acknowledge without having to solve every problem or complaint and you’ll improve their ability to communicate.

Your Turn

In our leadership development programs, participants consistently rank the check for understanding as one of their most valuable tools. When you master this powerful workplace communication tool and infuse it throughout your team, you’ll be on your way to a nimble, responsive, and productive organization.

We’d love to hear from you—how have you used the check for understanding in your leadership? Do you have a story of a time people weren’t on the same page? Let’s hear your story!

The post Workplace Communication: Stop Asking “Do You Understand?” (and do this instead) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

What is a Check for Understanding?

All communication involves a send and a receive. A check for understanding is a simple confirmation that the message you intended to send is what the receiver heard.

In other words, is your team picking up what you’re putting down?

You ask your team to repeat back what they heard you say in a friendly, non-confrontational way. When you check for understanding, you are taking ownership for the effectiveness of your communication.

For example, “Thanks so much for your time today. I just want to ensure we’re all on the same page for what we’re each going to do next. What are the three follow-up items we agreed to?”

Or…

“We covered a lot today. I just want to be sure my communication was clear so you can explain this new strategy to your teams. Who can recap WHY we’re changing direction here?”

Why is a Check for Understanding a Powerful Leadership Communication Best Practice?

Of all the leadership communication techniques we share in our leadership programs, the check for understanding always rises to the top as one of the easiest to do, while having the fastest impact. It’s why we include it as one of the 6 leadership competencies you can’t lead without in all of our foundational programs.

Why? Because we always make sense to ourselves (if we haven’t been drinking 😉 But it’s surprising how often the meaning of a message can get lost in translation.  When you can check for understanding, you ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Not Just For Leaders

The check for understanding is not just for leaders. Communication is a team sport. We encourage the leaders we work with to teach this technique to everyone on their team and empower them to use it.  It’s even more powerful when everyone in the organization uses this as a common language and technique. It creates clarity and saves A LOT of time.

How to Check for Understanding

There are two ways to check for understanding: actions and emotions.

Check for Understanding #1:

The action-focused check for understanding ensures a mutually shared understanding of the activity. It looks like this:

“Let’s do a quick check for understanding—what are we doing after lunch?” “Yes—we’re all taking out the trash.” “And why are we taking it out?” “No, it’s not because we’ve done anything wrong—it’s because we’ve got another group in here after us and it’s going to smell awful if we leave it in the trash—and that’s what we’d want them to do for us.”

Check for Understanding #2:

I learned the importance of this technique from one of my favorite bosses early in my career, Ray Davidson. 

I was such an enthusiastic gung-ho leader I would end my meetings with such a flurry of gratitude and excitement that it made it really hard for anyone to challenge me or express their concerns. “Oh my gosh, thanks so much everyone this project is going to be fantastic. I’m so excited. Let’s go do it!!”

He taught me that I could build greater psychological safety if I calmly checked in with what people were really feeling.

The emotion-focused check for understanding gives your team a chance to process what’s happening and surfaces any issues that might arise. It looks like this:

Leader: “Great meeting. I’m super excited about this strategy. Before we end, I’d like to ask, how is everyone feeling?”

Team member 1: “Well, I’m excited about it too, but I’m also worried about how we will do this considering our other priorities?”

Team member 2: “I’m feeling overwhelmed. These are wonderful ideas and I really want to do them, but I don’t know where to begin.”

Once you know these issues exist, you can help your team move through them, adjust expectations, or remove roadblocks.

Your turn.

What are some of your favorite leadership communication best practices?

See Also: Failure to Communicate: What to Do When Your Team Doesn’t Get It

The post Check for Understanding: A Leadership Communication Best Practice (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

I was sitting in the car outside our house, waiting for our son to join me on a trip to the grocery store.

After waiting for a while, I called his cell phone. “Are you coming?”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In the car, waiting for you,” I said. “Where are YOU?”

“I’m at the desk,” he replied. “I thought we’re working on our creative writing project?”

We’d both been in the same conversation, but somehow, each of us had come away with two very different understandings of what was happening.

I thought we were going shopping. Our son thought we were working on a creative writing project.

How could we have interpreted the same words so differently?

What Causes Those Frustrating Misunderstandings

Communication is a funny thing. You’re never as clear as you think you are because several problems get in the way.

Your words make sense to you, but those words can mean something entirely different to another person. You each bring a lifetime of experiences and interpretations to every conversation. Those filters color our understanding – and cause a host of frustrating misunderstandings.

For example, take something as simple as “Let’s take out the trash.” Depending on your team’s experience and interpretation, they could hear:

• I will take out the trash.
• You will take out the trash.
• We’re both going to take out the trash.
• We’re showing that we’re all in this together.
• We’re doing work that’s beneath us.
• No work is beneath anyone.
• We can’t afford a cleaning service.
• We’re scrappy and efficient.
• You don’t value the important work I could be doing instead of taking out the trash.
• We’ll take the trash to the front door.
• We’ll take the trash to the dumpster.

And that’s assuming they heard your words correctly. You can imagine how comedies would have someone hear “Let’s check out that rash.”

It turns out that when I said, “Let’s go shop” what our son heard was, “Let’s chop.” Which he interpreted to mean “chop-chop” as in, “Let’s get to it.” Since creative writing had been on his mind, he filtered the encouragement to action through the lens of what had his attention.

In organizations and teams, these kinds of misunderstandings aren’t so funny. They cause endless frustration, headaches, lost productivity, and aggravation.

Close the Loop

Effective leaders work hard to remove the chance of misunderstanding. You do this by the example you set, by understanding who you’re talking to, connecting what to why, and checking for understanding.

Your Example

It’s leadership 101—lead by example. But it’s more than a trust-building boost to your credibility. Your example clarifies your words and helps everyone understand exactly what you mean.

Understand Who You’re Talking To

Get to know your people and you can tailor your communication to reach mutual understanding quickly. For example, if you have a detail-minded person who takes things literally, understanding that will help you avoid theoretical language. They need to know what, specifically, needs to happen.

People are different. How can you give everyone the best chance of understanding and action?

Connect What to Why

In the absence of information, many people fill in their own stories—and they’re usually not pleasant. Nowhere does this happen more than in filling in the “why” behind what’s been asked.

Eg: Why are we taking out the trash? It must be [insert negative reason here] – we’re broke, the boss doesn’t like our work, they don’t know what we do, they don’t know who I am, it’s a punishment.

Eliminate misunderstanding by clarifying the why behind what you ask.

Check for Understanding

There are two ways to check for understanding: actions and emotions.

Check for Understanding #1:

The action-focused check for understanding ensures a mutually shared understanding of the activity. It looks like this:

“Let’s do a quick check for understanding—what are we doing after lunch?” “Yes—we’re all taking out the trash.” “And why are we taking it out?” “No, it’s not because we’ve done anything wrong—it’s because we’ve got another group in here after us and it’s going to smell awful if we leave it in the trash—and that’s what we’d want them to do for us.”

Check for Understanding #2:

The emotion-focused check for understanding gives your team a chance to process what’s happening and surfaces any issues that might arise. It looks like this:

Leader: “Great meeting. I’m super excited about this strategy. Before we end, I’d like to ask, how is everyone feeling?”

Team member 1: “Well, I’m excited about it too, but I’m also worried about how we will do this considering our other priorities?”

Team member 2: “I’m feeling overwhelmed. These are wonderful ideas and I really want to do them, but I don’t know where to begin.”

Once you know these issues exist, you can help your team move through them, adjust expectations, or remove roadblocks.

Your Turn

In remote work settings, closing the loop and ensuring shared understanding is even more important when we don’t have the visual cues and reinforcement we’re used. As you implement long-term crisis-related health and safety plans, these four steps will help avoid frustrating misunderstandings and keep everyone healthy and safe.

We’d love to hear from you: What are some of your best techniques to ensure you and your team communicate clearly with one another?

The post 4 Ways to Stop Frustrating Misunderstandings appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

It’s a lament we’ve heard from many leaders—usually accompanied by frustrated pacing or a discouraged slouch with their head in their hands: “I don’t know what else to do. My team just doesn’t get it.”

This is one of the most frustrating leadership experiences. You’re working hard, moving fast, and passionate about what you do, but your people seem clueless. They don’t focus on the MITs (Most Important Thing). They seem lackadaisical about the details that matter most, and they don’t seem worried at all about the strategic issues keeping you up at night.

5 Reasons Your Team Just Doesn’t Get It (and what to do about it)

1. They don’t know what you know.

You earned that insight, energy, and wisdom. You know what’s likely to happen because you’ve been there. But your people might not get it because they don’t have your experience or knowledge.

Have you ever tried to describe the taste of an orange to someone who’s never eaten one? It’s challenging. It’s so fundamental that you’ll use it as a baseline for other conversations: “It tastes like an orange, only more bitter.” But someone who’s never tasted an orange won’t get it. You’ve got to start with them tasting an orange and build from there.

If you want your people to be able to think as you do, give them the same information you used to decide. Connect what they do to the strategic reasons for their work. Help them understand how their decisions affect the customers, their team, and themselves.

2. You haven’t said it so they understand it.

We are professional communicators. We speak for a living—and yet, just this week, Karin said to David, “Can you finish one of those sentences? I’m not following you.”

Later that day, David looked at Karin and said, “I understand all the words you just said, but feel like I’m missing something important.” Communication isn’t always easy—even for professionals!

You probably don’t communicate as clearly as you think you do. In fact, we can almost guarantee it.

The words in your head make sense to you, but that doesn’t mean they’ll have the same meaning for another person—if they even hear all of them. Your message winds its way through an obstacle course of competing priorities, distractions, and the filters each person has in their head.

To guarantee that people hear and receive your most critical messages, use 5×5 communication (say it five times, five different ways) and check for understanding (ask people to share what they heard, using their own words).

When you use five different ways of communicating and consistently check for understanding, you will find the communication tools that work most effectively for your people.

3. You hired the wrong person.

There are also times where someone doesn’t get it because their values don’t align with yours or they lack the skills they need to perform well.  One of the most common places this happens is in demanding, stressful jobs. Desperate for bodies, recruiters undersell the challenges and what it takes to thrive in the role.

If you’re regularly hearing exit interviews like “It was way harder than I expected” or “This isn’t what I thought it would be” then it’s time to look at your hiring process.

When a role or culture is demanding, don’t shy away from it. We have both hired for teams that asked more from people than most people would want to give. Don’t hide it; lead with it. Eg: “This role isn’t for most people. It’s demanding and hard. And it will give you an opportunity to make a real difference to our customers, clients, and your career.”

Follow up with behavior-based interview questions that help you identify if your candidates have shown this character, capacity, and values they’ll need to succeed.

4. They get it—and wish you would too.

It’s quite possible that you’re the one who doesn’t get it.

Doug is a senior leader who was frustrated by his team’s performance. He’d done an incredible job training them in the methods and processes that he’d introduced and that had fueled his company’s success over the past twenty years.

The problem was that technology had changed. His customers, and the way they consumed his product, had changed. Doug had been a victim of his own success. His people understood their customer and half-heartedly met Doug’s expectations while trying to fulfill their customer’s expectations.

His team got it. But Doug had to relearn what success looked like and how to lead a team that wanted to succeed but needed to do it differently than Doug had.

5. You don’t ask for what you really want.

Another common cause when your team just doesn’t get it is that your measurements ask for something different from what you really want. People focus on getting a score and forget the game. Common examples include:

• The target has changed recently, but you haven’t updated your 5×5 communication and measurement strategy. Everyone’s still working toward the old definition of success.
• People hit their KPIs, but focus on them exclusively and ignore the strategy or experience that the numbers represent.
• Too many measurements obscure what matters most. Eg: Your customer service checklist has 54 items and people can score well on the rubric without providing a great customer experience.
• You had a hidden benchmark that you never shared. You likely took this measurement for granted, but then realized that people with different experiences or personalities needed to know it’s important.

The key to solving the measurement problem is to ask clearly for what you want. Help everyone focus on a few meaningful metrics that paint a complete picture of success. Connect those numbers to the strategy and the specific behaviors that make the numbers meaningful.

One way to know that your team gets it is frequently to check for understanding about what truly matters most. Eg “Why do we track these referrals—what does that represent? What should it mean when the numbers are good? What do we do that gets us the numbers we want to see?”

These questions are brief micro-engagements that continually reconnect your people to the strategy and behaviors behind the numbers.

Your Turn

It’s frustrating when your team just doesn’t get it, but it’s also a huge chance to get better and improve your leadership, processes, or communication. We’d love to hear from you: What have you learned when your team just doesn’t get it that made you a better leader?

The post 5 Reasons Your Team Just Doesn’t Get It appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Have you ever left a meeting where everyone had great intentions – and then nothing happens? Don’t let that happen to you – it takes five minutes to get clarity, accountability, and results. You don’t even have to lead the meeting to make this happen.

The post How to get Clarity, Accountability, and Results in Five Minutes appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.