Have you ever been SO FRUSTRATED by your team’s email communication that you just want to hit “delete all”? Too many words. Gobs of attachments. Data with no explanation.

If you’re frustrated with the emails you’re getting from your team (particularly if they’re seasoned senior leaders), it’s easy to think, “They should know better.”

But even if they SHOULD know, if you’re not getting what you need, ask for it.

In today’s Asking for a Friend I share 4 questions to help you communicate clear expectations, reduce frustration, and save time.

How Do I Get My Team to Send Me Better Email? (Asking for a Friend)

4 Vital Questions to Ask Before Sending That Email

One way to ensure your team sends you better email communication is to give them screening questions to use BEFORE they hit send. 

1- Have I articulated a clear purpose in the headline and opening sentence?

First, be sure you have a clear headline and opening sentence. This well-defined purpose immediately communicates the email’s intent,  reduces confusion, and saves time. For more guidelines on how to write a good headline see: Email Best Practices: How to Send a Better, More Effective Email.

2- Is my recommendation and rationale clearly expressed in concise bullet points?

Second, have you provided a clear and concise recommendation and rationale (in bulleted points)? Bullet points make the email easier to read and force you to streamline your message. One of the biggest frustrations we hear from executives is that the emails are just too long. Nobody has time for that. 

3- Have I provided a meaningful interpretation of any data I’ve included or attached?

Third, if you’ve included data, be sure you’ve included a meaningful interpretation. And please DON’T attach a bunch of spreadsheets without explanation. When attaching data, always include the “so what.”

4- Clear Next Steps

End by scheduling the finish with a clear call to action.  What do you want the person to do next? Make a decision? Weigh in? Attend a meeting? Congratulate your team?

If you’re a senior leader frustrated by too many bad emails, start by setting clear expectations with your team. If you’re the one sending the email, be everyone’s favorite communicator by asking these four questions BEFORE you hit send.

The post How to Get Your Team to Stop Sending You Frustrating Email Communication appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

With so many people working from anywhere, effective remote team communication has never been more critical. But with so many digital distractions and competing priorities, how can you ensure that your team is paying attention to what matters most?

In our leadership development programs, we help managers get better at remote team communication by tapping into four key principles of memory: recency, repetition, recall, and emotion. By understanding and leveraging these principles, you too can become a master in the art of remote team communication.

Recency

Recency is all about sparking memory through recent experiences. By ensuring that your messages are timely and relevant, you increase the likelihood that your team will remember them.

Marketers know the “rule of the 7”  which states that people need to see a message at least seven times before they’re going to remember it. This is why you’ll see the same billboard for ice cream going in both directions on your commute to the grocery store.

Once to inspire you to remember that rocky road, and once to get the kids reminding you about what you “forgot” – an emotional tug that might make you more likely to cave the next time.

What this means for your remote team communication, is if something is important, it’s going to take more than covering it in your Monday morning team huddle, you need to keep those important messages in front of them. If your message is truly important make sure they’ve heard you talk about it recently.

Repetition

The close cousin of recency, repetition is another powerful memory enhancer. The more often you communicate key messages, the more likely they are to stick in your team’s minds. Like a catchy song, hearing the same information repeatedly can make it impossible to forget.

Plus, by repeating an important message you’re differentiating it from the rest of the noise. Your team thinks, “Gosh this must be important if they keep talking about it. I’d better pay attention.

Of course, repeating the same message the same way will get annoying, and your team will tune out. Effective remote team communication mixes it up, more on that later.

Recall

Recall is all about accessing information. When your team members have to recall information to answer questions or do their work, they are more likely to retain it. So, make sure to give them opportunities to use the information you’ve shared.

If you’re familiar with our foundational leadership concepts, you’ll know we’re big fans of a check for understanding. One of the many reasons a “check for understanding” is so powerful is that it requires your team to recall what they heard. You don’t leave understanding to chance.

Emotion

Finally, emotion is a powerful memory trigger. When we experience strong emotions, we tend to remember more about our surroundings. By tapping into your team’s emotions, you can make your messages more memorable.

Emotion is one of the elements missing from most boring remote team communication. And, a message doesn’t need to be emotional to be delivered in an emotional way.

For example, recording a funny video or writing a haiku about a strategic priority is memorable because it contains the element of surprise, and silliness, all of which trigger emotional memories in your team’s brains.

Communicate Five Times, Five Different Ways in your Remote Team Communication

So, how do you put these principles into action?

Using one of our 6 concepts you can’t lead without, five-by-five communication. If something is critically important, you don’t want to communicate it once or twice.

Mix it up using the principles of recency, recall, repetition, and emotion, and communicate five times, five different ways. By using a variety of remote team communication channels and getting creative, you can keep your team engaged and enhance their memory of important information.

5 x 5 in Practice

Let’s say you’re a sales leader and you want your team to remember to pitch a new product to every customer. Sending five emails isn’t that much more effective than sending one.

Way 1

But imagine you start with a big town hall where you bring everyone together in person, with balloons, and tell a few strategic stories about how this new product has helped the customers in your pilot roll-out (that’s way one). This has a bit of emotion because it’s not every day that you ask people to come to the office and dig out the helium tanks.

Ways 2 & 3

Next, you might mix up your remote team communication, by making this the first topic in your virtual one-on-ones. Way two, you change this week’s one-on-one calendar invite to “Bring Your Ideas for Product Launch.” This triggers recall, as they think back and review their notes from the town hall, and then when you actually have your one-on-one, you’re talking about it again.

Way 4

Your fourth communication might be to roll out a recognition program, for the first month’s highest sellers of the new product, which you celebrate with a running leaders board on your intranet.

Way 5

And your fifth way could be another way to ignite emotion like you dressing in a costume and visiting each of your remote locations.  Before you laugh and say, “Who would do that?” Karin did. This is her dressed as Leia along with her direct reports, visiting 110 stores across a nine-hour radius, to get them excited about selling Android phones back in her Verizon days.

As a remote leader, mastering team communication requires a deliberate and consistent effort. By focusing on recency, repetition, recall, and emotion, you can ensure that your messages are heard, understood, and remembered.

Your turn. What are your best practices for helping your remote team pay attention to, and remember important messages?

The post Remote Team Communication: How to Send Memorable Messages appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Middle managers lead in a precarious situation. They don’t set the strategic priorities, but they’re accountable for getting it done—often without the influence to ensure they have all the resources they need.

And, every day, their teams look to them for support, which they may or may not be able to give. There’s one vital middle management skill that most middle managers struggle to learn, particularly as they are learning to scale their leadership. 

Why Communication is So Tricky for Middle Managers

You know your boss cares deeply about customers, employees, and doing the right thing for your business. And, you’ve built a passionate team of customer advocates, who want their work to matter.

And yet here you are, precariously squashed in the middle of all this passion and good intentions. You’re doing the best you can to empathize with, and support, both the senior team and the frontline.

The cacophony of misunderstanding and misinterpretation can be deafening.

• “Why don’t THEY understand why this is so important?”
• “Why would she do THAT if she really cared about employees?”
• “How can THEY be so out of touch with reality?”
• “These executives DON’T HAVE A CLUE about how annoyed our customers are about this decision.”
• “This is JUST ANOTHER SIGN that the frontline is disengaged.”

As a middle manager, chances are no one put “translator” on your job description—and yet, if you can master this skill, you will be on your way to increasing performance, influence, and engagement.

How to Be a Better Translator

If you want to be a better translator, start with a focus on understanding and translating these five topics:

1. Translate industry dynamics into pragmatic straight talk.

Pay close attention to what is happening in the world around you and what it means to your industry, your company, and your team. Work to understand the competition and what they’re up to. Build genuine strategic partnerships with your suppliers and know what matters to them—and how this crazy time impacts them as well.

When you have the chance, ask informed questions of your senior team to gain additional perspective and deeper understanding.

The more you understand the strategic context, the better you can explain the “why” behind the “what.” All of this knowledge makes it easier to keep your team informed in easy-to-digest sound-bites that leave them both optimistic and about the future, and grounded in what they can do next to help.

2. Translate EBITDA into “What I need from ya.”

You’ve attended the kick-offs, heard the vision, and have a good sense of strategic priorities. That’s all great context to help your team feel like they’re part of something important. What matters next is that your team understands the “So what?” for them. Work to translate strategy into tangible behaviors.

Around here, our mission is to “rid the world of cynical dehumanizing leadership,” which is inspiring, but not all that useful unless we help every member of our team understand how they contribute to that mission by the work they do every single day, from how we engage with clients, the curriculum we choose to build, who we work with, and how to prioritize our time.

3. Translate executive urgency into tangible action.

As a middle manager, one of your most important jobs is to communicate a sense of urgency without creating unproductive stress. When an executive stumbles across something stupid happening on your team, it’s natural for them to worry about what else is wrong. Being a great translator means buffering some of that stress, helping everyone keep perspective, and (1) doing what must be done as efficiently as possible, and (2) keeping anyone who needs to know informed.

4. Translate employee angst into reasonable requests.

You’ve worked hard to translate executive strategies into tangible actions, connected what-to-why, and buffered your team from unnecessary stress and angst. Now it’s time to focus on translating in the other direction.

Your people have anxieties and real needs and are looking to you to be their advocate. One of the best strategies to translate people’s concerns is to frame them in terms of the strategic objectives that matter most and attach a specific, do-able request.

That way, you avoid looking as if you’re complaining or shuttling along an issue you can’t address. Instead, you’re coming with commitment and concern for what matters most and a specific way to help everyone get there. A clear, actionable request with strategic benefits will help you translate your people’s concerns in a way that gets results.

5. Translate deep questions into dialogue.

Great middle managers are the masters of great dialogue.

Once you’ve worked to translate concerns in both directions, take responsibility, and lead, you can take it a level further and work to foster meaningful dialogue.

To create dialogue, you position yourself as a facilitator for well-intentioned parties who are committed to success and have good ideas that will benefit everyone to hear and discuss. This sounds like, “There’s an opportunity here for us to build something together—or to find a deeper solution. That’s why I suggested we meet.”

Sometimes there’s no substitute for people hearing from one another and talking together. Save this skill for those moments where nothing less will do.

Your Turn

Mastering a middle manager‘s translation skills will help you deepen your reputation as a strategic and capable leader. What communication and translation skills would you add?

We’d love to hear from you: leave us a comment and share your best suggestion to help middle managers navigate these communication challenges.

Communication Help for Middle Managers

Translate…

1. Industry dynamics into pragmatic straight talk.
2. EBITDA to “What I need from ya.”
3. Executive urgency to tangible actions.
4. Employee angst into reasonable requests.
5. Deep questions into dialogue.

See Also:

Communicating With Executives When Your World Is On Fire

Harvard Business Review: Why Being a Middle Manager is So Exhausting

The post One Crucial Skill the Best Middle Managers Master appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

If you’re like most managers we talk with, you face the perfect trifecta of remote team communication challenges.

First, you’ve got A LOT to communicate.  With so much change, keeping your team informed can feel like a full-time job.

Second, your employee’s heads and hearts are full. The fast pivot, the emotional strain, and concerns for the future all create distractions that compete with your messaging.

Third,  Zoom fatigue is real. People are tired of all the meetings and are looking for a way to mix it up.

So how do you find more creative ways to improve your remote team communication?

Communicate What’s Important Five Times, Five Different Ways

Let’s start here.  If a message is really important, communicating once on a Zoom call is not enough. To get past the distraction, you want to communicate five times, five different ways.

When we work with managers to build their strategic communication plans, we always start by asking, “What do you want your people to think, feel or do as a result of this communication?”

For example, suppose a key message for your team right now is, “Work-life synergy matters. We need to find a sustainable pace that keeps us all emotionally and physically healthy.”

Note: We chose this example because it’s emerging as a theme in almost every organization we work with (including our own company.)

Message: Work-life synergy is important. I care about you as a person. I don’t want you to work all the time.

What I want my team to think: That I’m serious about this and will put actions behind my words. I am a role model for this.

What I want them to feel: Valued and supported. I want them to feel they can exhale.

What I want them to do:  Talk to me about finding a workable schedule based on their unique needs. Schedule some white space on their calendar between meetings so they have time to think. Find a routine that gives them the renewal they need.

Five-by-Five Communication Plan 

1. Virtual town hall
2. Video message
3. Discuss each person’s approach in their one-on-one.
4. Yard signs (yes, one of our clients actually did this.)
5. Care packages sent to each employee’s home with a note from you reinforcing key messages.

click image to download tool

Help Your Team Find More Creative Solutions: Five By Five, in Five With Five

We’ve been doing a quick exercise in our live-online leadership training to help managers get more creative with their communications. We call it  5×5 with 5 in 5. We break the group into breakout rooms of five people and invite them to spend five minutes to come up with as many “realistic and creative” ways to communicate with their teams.

A spokesperson for each group then shares their ideas, and the other groups cross off anything another group said.  As facilitators, we type all the ideas into the chat box so everyone has a visual record of the ideas.

The group with the most original ideas “wins.” Of course, everyone wins, because they have new approaches to get creative in their remote team communication. And have more strategies to mix into their 5×5 communication plan.

Just a Few of the Fun and Creative Ideas That Emerged From This Process

1. Play “telephone.” Start with a key message you need everyone to pay attention to. Tell one person on your team and then ask that person to call one other person, and then that person to call the next down, etc. Challenge them to deliver the message with no distortion. People will pay extra attention because they don’t want to be the person who screws up the challenge. Then have the final person share the message they received in the next staff meeting. This “check for understanding” gives you another way to reinforce the message.
2. Send a personal note to their home (or a thank you note to their significant other, or kids.)
3. Use topic-based asynchronous communication channels for both work-related and human interest conversations (one team was really digging their “healthy recipe” channel.)
4. Leverage your virtual backdrop to visually reinforce key messages.
5. Turn your message into a song or skit.
6. Use Cameo app to send a personalized message from a celebrity.
7. Send the team a tee-shirt about the key priority.
8. Do a drive-by parade with a sign on the car.
9. Use Gifs.
10. Produce internal podcasts.
11. Conduct weekly town-halls.
12. Recognize strategic behaviors.
13. Host friendly competitions.
14. Make individual phone calls.
15. Write Sharpie messages on your arm to show on Zoom calls, conveying “This is how important it is: I’ve practically tattooed it!”
16. Have another leader share/reinforce the message.
17. Use Peer-to-peer messaging.
18. Give it a theme—brand it.
19. Throw a virtual kick-off party about the message.
20. _______________________ What would you add?

If you want more ideas to enhance your remote team communication, here are 101 ways participants have shared in our leadership programs.

Your turn.

We would love to hear your thoughts. What are your best practices for more creative remote team communication?

Executive Presence in a Virtual World: What Matters Now

Virtual One-on-One Meetings: How to Create a Better Connection

The post How to Get More Creative In Your Remote Team Communication appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

One Great Way to Encourage Your Team

I took my bike to the cycling shop for a quick repair before heading out for a beautiful Saturday afternoon ride in Breckenridge. Recognizing me from the last time, the manager asked where I’d been riding so far this summer. I shared, “Oh you know Swan Mountain Road toward Keystone? It’s gorgeous, but yikes, that’s quite a hill.”

He laughed. “Karin, it’s okay to call a mountain a mountain. And that ride is definitely a mountain. If you can do that, you can ride just about anything around here.”

I thanked him for the encouragement and headed out on my ride. About 10 minutes in I had a choice…to head straight up the steep incline or take an easier route. “Hmmm…” I thought. “This is a mountain. But I do mountains.” And up I went.

It’s Okay to Call a Mountain a Mountain

When we do keynotes for companies, we always like to talk to a few of the Senior leaders as part of the preparation. Consistently one of the insights they share is, “Our team’s job is so hard! We’re asking them to do a great deal with limited resources, in a rapidly changing environment.” Or, “They’re working so hard, this is one of the toughest times our industry has ever seen.” Or “I’m so proud of this team. What we’ve asked them to do is nearly impossible, and somehow they’re making it happen.”

So then we’ll ask, “Have you told them you know how hard it is?”

Most frequent answer, “Oh, no! I don’t want to discourage them.” Or, “If I admit it’s hard, then they may think it’s okay to not accomplish it.”

And then we’ll inquire: “Is it okay if I let them know you know? Here’s why _______.”

And then from the stage we share, “We talked with ‘John’ in preparing for our time together. And here’s what we learned. Your job is hard! You have to do ___ and ____ without ___ and ___ in the context of _____.”

And a sense of relief falls over the room. There are always big smiles and sometimes applause. Not for us, but because “John” gets it.

Don’t be afraid to call a mountain a mountain.

If your team is facing a steep climb, recognize it. And then remind them of the mountains they’ve scaled before and why you know they’ll be successful.

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