The Dumbest Mistake Leaders Make in Communication

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.

Did you know what most managers do with all this information?

They act like messengers. They pass the ball around.

Leaders are NOT messengers

You are not a 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 the world of information overload, of ever exploding data, and of growing mistrust with 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 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, create a summary — essentially, add their own color and perspective to it before communicating it.

You need to own it up.

You are not the messenger.

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 all 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 in the other extreme and share sparingly.

Neither is a good idea.

So what should you — the manager — communicate up?

• 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?
• 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, and the implication of those. 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 — the manager — communicate?

Here are a few that I think are most critical:

• Regularly 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 new product line, change in strategy, pausing a project, etc.) along with rationale and how that impacts the team. Again, invite questions from the team.

Be Relevant and Authentic

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? How do you filter the information, or summarize it?

My magic formula is:

Be relevant and authentic.

Be relevant. You should be communicating to your boss only what is relevant to them, things they can use or act on, or that you need input on. You should be communicating down to your teams information that is relevant to them: what impacts them, what they are curious about, what they care about.

Don’t be a robot. Be a human.

Be authentic. Authenticity is about being genuine. As a manager your team looks up to you, and you need to do justice to the information you are passing to them. Be authentic when you share information. Don’t be a robot who just dumps information on your team. If there is negative news, share it with empathy, and with a human heart. Invite questions, and a discussion.

Be transparent. 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.

Yes, this is hard

Who said a leader’s job is easy, especially when it comes to effective communication. Leaders need to own up to their team’s errors, they need to be accountable to failures, they need to stand up in front of their teams and share negative news, they need to face difficult questions. That’s their role, and great leaders know how to handle that communication by being relevant and authentic.

I hope you found these insights useful. How about you? I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences about effective communication for leaders in the comments below!

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