Did you know we spend nearly 90% of our time on communication? It’s true! Crafting that perfect email, deciding on just the right presentation type, and creating open dialogue face-to-face are all strong interpersonal skills that take up a ton of your valuable time.
Communication is the glue that connects stakeholders. So, what can you do when you are leading without a title? Well, for starters you can spice up the way you deliver information.
Overall, your goal should be to ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval, and disposition of information. Simple, right? We’re about to break it all down for you!
In this article, we will reference a fictitious organization called Ready Corp. This is an example to demonstrate effective ways of using communication to influence others. Let’s get started!
At Ready Corp, we have accelerated product management to a place where our managers manage more than one product at a time with limited formal power and authority. To get results without a title, every strategic communicator needs two things:
- Communicating with a call to action in mind
- Right-sizing the communication for the audience
Communicating with a Call to Action in Mind
When juggling multiple priorities without formal authority, your time becomes even more limited. The solution is becoming a strategic communicator focused on crafting communications with a call to action in mind. We hear the words “call to action” and immediately think it’s a marketing trick. The bottom line is marketing. A perfect example is street signs.
Picture yourself driving at 25 mph around a curvy country road. You approach a sign that says “Railroad Crossing.” Sure enough, railroad tracks soon follow the sign and you proceed with caution. Universally, street signs have mastered the art of communication in a short period. Within 5 seconds we come to a red octagon and know immediately to stop even without reading it. This is the key when communicating.
Our communications should focus on empowering and equipping our teams to act. Tailor the communications to your audience. Write in a way that consistently moves them to a planned action through the use of images, bullets, clichés or stories.
By keeping the result in mind, we can change our communication style to influence the standard narrative prose to something quick and influential, even when you have limited power and authority over them. Let’s look at an example story from an employee of Ready Corp., Sarah.
Sarah has tried for many months to get her delivery teams to store all their documents in SharePoint. As Sarah shares, “I felt ignored. No matter how many times I asked my team to post all their documents in SharePoint, they didn’t. And my emails, well, they went unread.”
Then she sent the following final email:
Tired of looking for that project file? Not sure where your teammate stored it?
Move everything to SharePoint and let its built-in search feature do the work for you…
“After that went out, everyone started moving their project files to SharePoint. It was as if I finally got my message across,” Sarah recants.
Sarah learned that by focusing on the call to action first, she was able to creatively come up with communication that touched her team’s needs and would motivate them to store documents in SharePoint.
While not every email will be a picture or a marketing ad, focusing on the desired result will help you align your message to the audience in a crisp, unambiguous fashion. It will also motivate them when you have very little positional power and authority over them.
Right-Sizing Communication for the Audience
While cute images are great, they won’t work in every situation (like meetings). Thus, the strategic communicator focuses on clearly presenting facts and right-sizing the details of those facts for the audience.
For example, recently I went into an executive meeting to discuss product delivery delays. I had 20 minutes to:
- Explain what happened
- Dissect our options
- Get a decision
I walked in with a one-page four-quadrant slide with the sections of “situation,” “background,” “analysis,” and “recommendations.” The content wasn’t too detailed. It was tailored for executives focusing on the bigger picture, impacts, and how we got into the situation. It was informative enough to show I had done my homework.
I started with the first quadrant: why I was there and what the situation entailed. I quickly moved on to how we ended up here (the background), which included a summary of the analysis and options we looked at with their pros and cons. I then closed with our recommendation. Covering the slide took me five minutes. With the remaining time, I focused on answering questions and getting a decision.
This same conversation completely changed when I discussed the topic with the team members to gain agreement on the recommendation. What started as a one-page slide at a macro-level for leadership became a 4-page slide deck at a micro-level for the team.
Thus, the strategic communicator focuses on tailoring their conversations to the audience, preparing content for the information level of the audience, and bringing supplemental materials to center and align the conversation.
In conclusion
While communicating to influence with limited power and authority can be hard, it can be much easier if we become strategic communicators who focus on communicating with a call to action in mind and right-sizing the communication details for the audience.
Want to put these strategies to work inside your organization? Let’s talk.
