Power of communication

Mark Sanborn, author of “The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary”, once said - “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly”. I am an avid believer leveraging the power of communicating, especially when working in teams. This superpower has all sorts of benefits from all angles, be in at an individual performance level, to team level, to an organization level and so on.

Can you imagine a life without language? a life without being able to express one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions to others? Why is it that following human history, and perhaps history of life for that matter, we have always had a way to communicate - a language, sign language, and so on. Even animals, and all living creatures have their own unique ways of communicating. Simply, all creatures live in their own colonies, societies etc and always needed a medium of expression.

Fundamentally, it (communication) is what defines us as humans in the context of social beings and how we collectively work and interact together to maximize our survivorship, and what defines a way of living, if you will.

I truly believe that communication is an underrated superpower that can solve, or at least aid in solving 99% of the problems we face day to day in our lives. Words have a meaning and purpose, and that meaning has power to change reality. A lot of the times, misunderstandings, confusions, missed deadlines, wasted efforts, and you can name many more unwanted situations in life can simply be mitigated by communicating. One missed piece of information, leads to another missed piece, and which leads to another missed piece, and this compounds on and before you know it, it has become a significant problem that will take x hours, days, weeks to fix.

This happens all the time in business, when expectations are not met, for instance. Lets take an example: the engineering team sets a timeline for feature x, based on which, marketing sets their tentative timeline for marketing of feature x, based on which leadership sets their timeline to deliver feature x to customers. Somewhere in this, some team misses their timeline, which is not the problem, but somewhere across the chain there is a gap in communication , which is the problem. All other pieces of the domino then fall apart, and one missed communication, led to another and now the link of communication that was built is suddenly broken, and someone somewhere has to step in and pay the price to fix it.

The situation I just described is a rather classic and obvious example, but my point with this is that due to the nature of the law of compounding, a failure in one link of communication can easily compound to a much bigger problem. But what is interesting to me is that I believe the same law applied in the opposite direction i.e communicating small details, frequently can offer massive upside to the overall achievement of the goal being sought for. These laws can be applied to almost every social setting in life.

When in doubt, communicate.

But when is the best time to communicate, one may ask. Simply put, when in doubt, communicate! This is the one mantra that I have come to realize will just work. Not to say that one should not consider the correct time to communicate, which is always as early as possible before fires start burning, but to say one should gather just enough data points to be able to communicate and gain the next level of intuition on the problem being worked on.

Be ruthless in communicating

It is easy to shy away from communicating, maybe in the thoughts of postponing for a better time, sometimes just procrastinating, sometimes thinking its not necessary, or being afraid to sound dumb. In my opinion, these are all invalid reasons to avoid communicating, and happen quite often in teams. It is detrimental to personal achievement as well as to the team. If you don’t communicate, you are simply failing yourself and others.

But how do we effectively communicate?

Async vs sync

Sync communication happens in real time, e.g in a call, while async communication happens offline, e.g on a chat, or over email. Both are very powerful in their own ways. Generally, async communication allows for delay in receiving response, while sync is more instantaneous.

Choosing between the two, is to some extent personal preference, but one may argue that one is better than the other in some situations. While this may be true, I believe great leaders would aspire to receive both forms happily. The content and the effort of relaying information matters more. Why is it that your customer can choose to send a support message, email or directly call your support line, while a team member may not be able to/or would have to think too much to pick one? Both parties have issues to address, and great leaders aspire to be of service, which brings me to the next important topic - listening.

Power of listening

To achieve effecient communication, and this is super important, we must have a listener and a speaker. It is of utmost importance that one takes the effort and time to listen to every word the speaker has to say, and understand it, without interruption for information to be effectively relayed.

I believe, it doesn’t matter how great the speaker relays the information, if we have a poor listener on the other end, the process of relaying information from one party to another is lost, and no communication takes place. The listener has a responsibility to receive the information well.

Correlated to listening, is a very dear metric I personally track and aspire to excel in - approachability. Great leaders aspire to be ever ready to receive information.

In 2012 to 2014, Google initiated an infamous project on what makes a team successful, a project called “Project Aristotle”. This study analyzed over 180 teams at Google with experts in psychology, sociology, engineering and research and they found out that “Pyscological Safety” was the most critical factor for team effectiveness. This idea of being safely vulnerable, being able to easily discuss ideas with the team, not hesitating to ask questions, having a sense of feeling that you are heard, went on to be proven to be the most profound to contributing to the success of teams compared to all other perceived factors such as experience level, intellect level, project management techniques etc.

I strongly believe, one should aspire to make themselves available at all times when possible, to give others a chance to relay information to them. This is one of the most important traits a team should aspire to have. In some sense, the art of communication and information passing starts way before one starts to speak, and that is, there should be a mutual connection and energy (one which is positive and warm) allowing the physical passage of information takes place. If we all get this right, we can change the world!