Founder Superpower #13: Good Communication Skills
Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.
Communication can be seen as a way for you to get results, connect with your team, and make sure everyone is one the same page and rowing in the same direction. Good communication skills are critical to a startup; those who cannot communicate quickly, clearly, simply, and effectively will be at a massive disadvantage. A lot of companies are starting to realize that good communication skills, especially written (which is very important in the age of digital and remote communication), is one of the top indicators of an employee’s success. I believe good communication skills are even more important for founders.
Why is communication important? You might have the clearest vision, solution, expectations, or insight in the world, but if you can’t communicate that to others (customers, employees, vendors, bankers, etc.) then you can’t persuade them to follow you, to understand your point, or why they’re even showing up for work everyday.
Also, as your company adds people, the complexity of communication explodes exponentially. The book Scaling Up by Verne Harnish discusses this:
“Think back to when your company was just the founder and an assistant with a plan on the back of a napkin. This start-up situation represents two channels of communication (degrees of complexity), and anyone in a relationship knows that is hard enough. Add a third person (or customer or location or product), and the degree of complexity triples from two to six. Add a fourth, and it quadruples to 24.
Expanding from three to four people grows the team only 33%, yet complexity may increase 400%. And the complexity just keeps growing exponentially. It’s why many business owners often long for the day when the company was just them and an assistant selling a single service.”
If there’s one thing you can expect from a successful CEO (and his or her managers) it’s that they focus on a very few things and tend to say the same things over and over. This is not because they’re boring or close-minded, it’s because they know that they need to repeat these things over and over so they become part of the culture of the company and gets everyone rowing in the same direction, especially as communication gets more complex.
Communicating things like the company vision and goals, the company values, and the best practices over and over is how you get these things in the DNA of everyone working with you, and it’s effective. It’s why your parents likely said the same things over and over as well and why you can probably quote many of those from memory.
Finally, a good founder will detect when communications are bad or are going badly (perhaps in a confrontation among your team) and step in to improve the situation or call a time-out for consideration at a later time when things are calmer.
Writing Skills
Communication skills, especially reading and writing, are becoming more and more valuable for many reasons. Most of our communication is written, more now than ever, even in text messages and chats. It’s also expensive and a huge time waste to have to repeat or clarify yourself and to answer the same questions over and over. If you’ve ever been on an email thread, chat, or text with someone who just “doesn’t get it,” you know how frustrating and wasteful this can be.
While it solves many quick issues, try to avoid your instinct to pick up the phone so you can develop your written skills. Improving your writing is usually a simple matter of increasing the volume of your writing. Tell your team to put things in writing so they can clarify their ideas and thinking. Writing is so powerful that writing this book actually greatly clarified and simplified many systems I already had in place. Read that again. I’ll provide some helpful information on this in the Chapter Resources.
Persuasion
There are very few founders who would deny that being persuasive is a great skill to have. Every great salesperson is persuasive, and while it’s not fair, all things being equal, if there are two people competing, the person with the best persuasion skills will get the contract, the sale, the partnership, or even the date. If you’re persuasive, you can probably sell something even before it exists. This is a big part of selling your idea to others, and we’ll revisit this in Step 4. People underestimate the power of persuasion, in my opinion.
Style and Tone
Electronic communication and social media have been both a blessing and a curse. While these new ways of quickly communicating and connecting have brought about many great things, one thing that has definitely fallen on the wayside is the subtlety of face-to-face and even phone conversations. Here’s an example from Cameron Herold in his book Double Double:
“I didn’t say you were beautiful.”
Now, I have no idea how you read that in your mind but there are many ways to interpret this text, and it usually depends on the mood of the person reading it. Now, re-read it, but put the emphasis on a different word each time. Example: “I didn’t say you were beautiful” has a much different vibe than “I didn’t say you were beautiful”.
People will read things in their mood (they may be having a terrible day) and misinterpret even simple sentences, so it’s important to review your communications for tone and how they may be perceived. It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.
It still amazes me how short or rude some people communicate these days (even employees); it’s killing your chance at getting what you want (for example, a promotion). At the very least, use basic “please” and “thank you” etiquette every time in written communication to make sure nothing is misunderstood. People have been fired or lost friends for less, believe me; style and tone are important.
Finally, you as a founder have to set the example and make sure the communications themselves are not overwhelmingly negative to begin with. For example, if you find out your team is not following a clearly written rule or procedure, there are a couple of ways to inform them:
- You can do an in-person or phone meeting and rip their heads off. The point will be taken and perhaps will stick, but since there’s no written record of it, you can’t reference it again, and your team is probably either scared or mad now, making things worse. They were probably so terrified that most of the message was lost. It wasn’t written, so it’ll likely be forgotten in a week or two, and there’s no record to refer to later.
- You can do an in-person or phone meeting and be incredibly nice and gracious. The point will be taken and perhaps will stick, but since there’s no written record of it, you can’t reference it again. Your team may or may not change their behavior, but who cares because you heard one thing and somebody heard something else. Search online for “Yanni vs Laurel” to see what I mean about people hearing different things from the exact same sounds.
- You can write the team an email or memo that says, “Hey, geniuses, nobody’s following the XYZ procedure, and I’ve told you like ten times about this. Anyone not following procedure going forward will be terminated.” The point will be taken, and there’s now a nicely written record of you informing everyone (which is good, meaning you can reference it later if the behavior has not changed), but the tone will probably just terrify everyone and likely be counterproductive.
- You can write the team an email or memo that says, “Team, we’re having some issues with the XYZ procedure not being followed, and it’s creating problems both for us and our clients. The procedure is attached to this email, and we’ll discuss at our next team meeting. Please be prepared for questions.” This is a) in writing for accountability b) clear and short, explains why the procedure is important c) puts the responsibility on the employee for reading the procedure d) subtly warns that they had better read it and be prepared because we’re discussing it at the next meeting (but does not berate them). That’s when the in-person component will be the most well received and effective.
Now, Option 4 above doesn’t always work, and that’s when a formal written warning and perhaps even anger may be appropriate. The main point is that effective communicators have a clear, direct, but usually friendly style about them, and this seems to get better results overall.
Improving Communication Skills
Everybody has their own particular style or preferred method of communicating, and they all can be made effective. Here’s what I’ve learned are the best ways to improve your communication skills. Note that this is always a work in progress (I’ve made huge mistakes on this front), and the key is to keep improving. I know some great CEOs who can communicate in one sentence what can take others a paragraph. That’s a sign of a great communicator.
- Same picture in everyone’s head. If I’ve learned anything over many years, it’s that what you know and how you think can be completely different from what your team knows and thinks. Something might be crystal clear to you, and your employees may even say it’s clear to them, but in reality, they have a completely different vision of the concept, idea, project, or task in their head. Knowing this should reinforce how important it is that you make absolutely sure that everyone has the same picture in their head and are talking about the same thing. A good way to do this is to make someone repeat back their interpretation of what is being communicated.
- Listen more than you speak. Founders tend to be fast-moving and many have little patience for too much “conversation over action.” Try to overcome this tendency and make sure to listen carefully to people, especially your customers and team. Often, your customers or team won’t speak up unless heavily encouraged (especially introverted employees), so always ask for feedback and for any questions they might have.
- Keep it short and simple. The best communicators keep it short and simple for easy understanding by your intended audience, especially in business writing. Remove unnecessary words and information. Don’t overwhelm people with information that is not actionable right away.
- Focus on clarity. Ask yourself, “What am I trying to say?” and work from there.
- Repetition until it hurts. Your vision, one-sentence strategy, values, principles, best practices, and goals should all be so familiar to your team that they could repeat it word for word. At Amazon, they call these “Jeffisms” because CEO Jeff Bezos endlessly repeats them.
- Watch style and tone. As discussed earlier, style and tone can be massively misinterpreted and it’s important to monitor. Light and friendly is best: thanks, no problem, we’ll take care of it, thank you very much, glad to help, sorry, my fault, etc.
- Be the example and set expectations. If you’re an effective communicator and use proper style and tone, this will filter through your company. Set expectations: If you don’t expect a reply to your emails on weekends, let the team know that. I work best late at night, and everyone knows I don’t expect a reply until their working hours. I’ll call or text if something is urgent.
- Over-communicate at first. When starting out a new company, a new job, a new idea, or simply implementing a new policy, lean toward over-communicating so you know the message or ideas are received. You can tweak things later based on feedback or intuition, but this is way better than under-communicating. The billion-dollar merchant account company Stripe requires all their employees to CC a group email address for all internal communications so communication is out in the open and searchable. Employees then learn over time which conversations should be actively monitored or reviewed later.
- Write things down. As we’ll go over later, writing things down, especially procedures, policies, and FAQs, is a great skill to acquire. There are a lot of “tele-philes” and “in-person conversation” junkies who love to talk all day or use the phone (usually as a crutch for poor written skills), but if you don’t have it written down, there’s no accountability, and you’ll have to repeat yourself over and over until the end of time. Make your team write things down for accountability, and be suspicious of those who resist this. Even an email can be referenced easily.
- Make written things discoverable. You’re not a mind-reader and neither is your team or customers. If you get asked the same question more than a few times, then it’s time to put things in writing and post them where they can be easily found. We use an intranet and Google Docs (all searchable) for teams and a thorough, searchable FAQ for our clients on our website. Tip: Have your team set their browsers to an intranet page and post memos, notices, and announcements there instead of email. This keeps announcements “front and center” and unclogs email inboxes.
- Systemize to reduce unnecessary communication. Jeff Bezos said, “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” This may sound counterintuitive, but this is an important point in the world of email, text messages, and constant chat. Too much communication and interruption can massively disrupt workflow and Real Work throughout the organization. It’s important to have clear systems and procedures to handle the never-ending flow of basic questions, clarifications, and expectations of how things work. Writing things down and making them easily discoverable will help reduce the volume of communication and is one reason why they’re critical to a well-functioning business.
- Use a daily huddle. You can write things down and be more effective at communication, but this doesn’t stop interruptions throughout the day. The daily huddle is a good solution to this problem. It’s a quick 5–10 minute team meeting (1 minute per person, do a separate meeting for each team) in the morning for everyone to report what they’re working on, and if they’re stuck, have questions on their work for the day, etc. Done properly, this should massively reduce interruptions and issues through the day.
- Use communication channel best practices. Not all communication channels are appropriate or ideal for every situation. Learn how your business functions best. Some examples:
- Chat = Urgent; should last only a few minutes, otherwise the concept is too complex and switch to phones
- Email = 2–24 hours (not weekends; use phone/text if something requires weekend interruption). If you need a reply sooner or before close of business, ping via chat.
- Phone = complex thing easier discussed live, but ping somebody or schedule the call, don’t just interrupt
- Urgent/personal to an individual = phone/in-person
- Urgent to the team = chat via the main or “general” channel
- Intranet = not urgent but important for all to see and reminders of memos and updates
- Meetings = In-person or video
- Use abbreviations and acronyms. One way to speed up communication in your organization dramatically is to abbreviate and shorten long or complex concepts and phrases (this especially helps for speeding up written communication). For example, in my company, our customer management system called “Business Entity Management Application” is just BEMA, “Ready to Process” is RTP, “Turnaround Time” is TAT, etc.
- Learn persuasion skills. I’ve never heard someone say they regret getting basic conversation and sales skills, especially a founder. Basic persuasion and sales skills will serve you well throughout life, and are incredibly easy to learn.
- Encourage good communication from your team. Coach and help your team improve their communication as well. A poor communicator is almost always a poor-performing employee. If you have to repeatedly ask them to communicate something to others or clarify why they didn’t communicate something properly, then you probably need to start planning for their replacement.
- Manage bad communication. Inevitably, there will be a fight, argument, or worse that will require your intervention. Make sure to intervene and de-escalate as quickly as possible. Try to resolve things amicably and get to the root of the problem.
- Use righteous anger when necessary. Mostly used as a last resort (and often misused by many as a first resort), and provided you’re doing most of the things above, sometimes people are just not getting the point or understanding the importance of something or are overstepping their authority and righteous anger is justified. “This is not our focus right now” may be ignored but “This is not the fucking focus right now, drop it” conveys a different level of importance. Used sparingly, it can be effective.
This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.