Effective communication

Lots of people struggle with communication at the workplace.1 It’s an important skill that is more critical as we get more senior, whether on the engineering or management track.2 To some it may be well defined with a clear improvement roadmap; for others, it may seem foreign, a concept that is often echoed but hard to tackle. I think that’s because of 3 reasons:

  1. There are many resources to address communication activities but not communication as a whole
  2. Feedback on communication may be contradictory
  3. Advice may be time consuming and difficult to internalize3

There are many ways to map out communication - mode is one, written versus spoken. Some forms in each mode include documentation, correspondence in the former and discussions, speeches in the latter. Some forms such as presentation span both; they have a written component and a conversational component, and not doing well in one component may take away from the overall message.

Sometimes a person is clearly better in one mode as compared to another, and we attribute it to some innate quality like personality. For example someone who identifies with being a deep thinker may feel challenged in spontaneous discussions. Highlighting such differences may be helpful for awareness, but isn’t really specific enough to be actionable. When attributed to personality, we also wonder how much we should adapt or change to an ‘ideal’. Practicing such aspects helps I think; for example, trying to be more spontaneous by overcoming overthinking tendencies. But up to a certain point it’s not necessary to focus on it; it doesn’t define whether we are effective or not in the bigger picture.

We can be more specific when applying our efforts, by including the activity and purpose - Is the presentation a tech talk, a client proposal, a strategic analysis? Is the documentation about architecture, onboarding or an engineering process? More specific forms carry clearer structure and objectives, and you can often find resources that directly address such situations. Here are some of them:

Public speaking, angled towards conference talks
Practical public speaking for Nerds
Towards a better talk
(Multi-post series) Public Speaking - Dealing with nerves
Public speaking, angled towards teaching
How to Speak: Lecture Tips from Patrick Winston

Writing, for tech documentation
Let’s talk about docs
Writing, for code reviews
How to Improve Your Communication Skills on Code Reviews in 8 Bullets
Writing, for email
How I write group emails at work.

Another facet to add is the audience. Communication is two way after all, whether the audience is a listener, a reader, or an active participant; it’s clear that the audience also determines how effective our communication is. Will Larson talks about presenting to executives in these 2 articles:
Presenting to executives, Present to executives

Any given executive is almost always uncannily good at one way of consuming information. They feel most comfortable consuming data in that particular way, and the communication systems surrounding them are optimized to communicate with them in that one way. I think of this as preprocessing reality, and preprocessing information the wrong way for a given executive will frequently create miscommunication that neither participant can quite explain.

For example, some executives have an extraordinary talent for pattern matching. Their first instinct in any presentation is to ask a series of detailed, seemingly random questions until they can pattern match against their previous experience. If you try to give a structured, academic presentation to that executive, they will be bored, and you will waste most of your time presenting information they won’t consume. Other executives will disregard anything you say that you don’t connect to a specific piece of data or dataset. You’ll be presenting with confidence, knowing that your data is in the appendix, and they’ll be increasingly discrediting your proposal as unsupported.

Eventbrite talks about communication in customer facing teams: 8 Simple Tips for better Communication with Customer-Facing Teams

Reusing documentation for many stakeholders is practical. Keep in mind that customer-facing teams may not be familiar with the same jargon. Those teams also have different areas of concern. Documentation that a development team prepares for product and engineering is unlikely to be as helpful for the sales team.

Write documentation in a way that serves more than one stakeholder. If that doesn’t make sense, create more than one document. Preparing communications explicitly for customer-facing teams enables them to support your user better. This is more work up front. Yet, in the long run, this may even reduce the time and cost of cross-functional communication.

Doordash talks about communication from the perspective of a data science team: How to Drive Effective Data Science Communication with Cross-Functional Teams

Ensuring that analytics insights improve the business means actually sharing the insights with key stakeholders who can enact a recommendation. While sharing insights with influencers may seem helpful, sharing insights with audiences that can’t enact recommendations will not directly ensure insights translate into business improvements. Being laser-focused on speaking to the right audience can increase the pace of execution significantly since working directly with decision makers speeds up the pace of making business decisions.

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For example, if your insight is related to API latency and the audience is the engineering team that is in charge of that API, it would be wise to use relevant domain metrics or terminology since the audience already has the technical context needed to deeply understand the analysis. Similarly, if the audience is a finance decision maker, it would be preferable to frame the insight in the context of potential EBITDA impact, a financial metric, making the insight more clearly relevant and easily understood.

Activity and audience together are clear ways to define communication. They provide you with the situational framing to find insightful, valuable resources that sketch out what it looks like to be effective. For many of these situations, it’s a standard learning approach - here’s a structure or format template, here’s some techniques, tips, and mindsets to apply, now get out there and practice!

Outside of the situation framing however, the effectiveness can differ. This can lead to feedback such as “He is a good speaker” from one person and a lukewarm response like “I think he can express himself better” from another. Sometimes it’s just unspecific feedback, sometimes it’s different impact on different people, and sometimes throughout all communication aspects of our role we perform differently. Can we look at all possible activities and make a guideline?
I think enumerating all communication activities in different roles is difficult, and focusing on one communication style is probably not the most effective. It does help to think about the possible different activities, for example here’s a list that Camille Fournier shared; we can introspect our responses to hairy, messy circumstances. But I don’t think we need to have an exhaustive, activity pattern matching approach to analyzing and improving on our communication.

When we talk about general communication it sometimes gets mixed up in other dimensions, for example leadership. In this article by Fred Wilson:
Loyalists vs Mercenaries

Leading is not managing. Although it is impossible to lead if there is no management. But leading is that special thing. It is charisma, it is strength, it is communication, it is vision, it is listening, it is being there, it is calm, it is connecting, it is trust, faith, and belief.

A person’s communication style may be attributed to his leadership style and discussed in the same context. All these areas are important, but it is also important to address communication on its own; it has its own area of influence and if refined separately can produce cumulative impact in other areas.

My idea of communicating effectively is to ensure your approach answers these questions:

  1. Is there a pressing need? Is there something that we really need to communicate?
  2. How can we address this? What quality of communication needs to shine through the most? For example:
    • If clear understanding of content is the greatest need, then focus on being concise and unambiguous
    • If clear understanding of delivery is the greatest need, then focus on being structured and presenting a cohesive plan
    • If gaining information is the greatest need, then being comprehensive and detailed is the most important
    • If engaging, seeking opinion is the greatest need, then we need to be open and proactive
  3. If there isn’t a pressing need, we don’t need to overthink it too much, we can follow our natural approach (in leadership, personality) or work on general flaws like tendencies in language, gestures, etc.

Isn’t this just a creative reframing of activity and audience? The key contrasts are:

How can we get better at this? Both identifying the need and using the right quality to address it are very difficult; the best way is to watch someone in person do it well and try to replicate it. Management support or mentorship is also very important, to provide the feedback loop for improvement. Absent the above, my suggestion is to rely on peers or people who have had similar experiences, and discuss in-depth about these experiences. What were the expectations that people had? What were their observations? What was your intention? Strip down to the thoughts of the people involved to really understand the context, and practice approaches to those contexts.

From a feedback perspective the framework also helps in clarifying external perspectives. In what way was my writing good in one area and not so good in another? What should be done well in this case? What was the impact my presentation had on you? Maybe I was too direct in this discussion, where being direct didn’t help the people involved?

Being an effective communicator is rare, because it extends beyond specific types of communication, audiences, and styles. By paying extra attention to the situational need and the quality we are trying to convey, and working it into our daily practice, we can be more effective across all interactions in our role.


Thanks to Andrea for your comments and feedback.




Footnotes:

  1. As someone working from South-East Asia, there are a wide variety of spoken languages and basic language ability is a huge barrier by itself. I don’t focus on this in this article since it’s not the key point I want to bring across; also I think it doesn’t determine effectiveness beyond a certain point. It is possible for a non native speaker to be an effective communicator, and conversely for a native speaker to be not as effective.
  2. I think this isn’t a surprising statement, you can find various quotes online like “In their first few years on the job, engineers spend roughly 30% of their workday writing, while engineers in middle management write for 50% to 70% of their day; those in senior management reportedly spend over 70% and as much as 95% of their day writing.” – Jon Leydens, The Writing Engineer. I’m not sure how quantifiable the difference between levels is but it’s definitely an aspect that is evaluated in greater depth as you progress up the career ladder, explicitly or implicitly, and across a wide variety of communication forms.
  3. For example book recommendations, I find it’s difficult for most people to improve from reading books alone; there is too much untargeted content, it takes a long time to finish (especially for those who are weaker in communication in the first place), and it requires a lot of discussion and sharing to internalize. Sometimes the advice feels disconnected as well, in a way that it’s hard to relate it to what happens in the workplace. It’s ironic in a meta way since all the above can apply to this post, but hopefully that’s not the case :)