Control through communication
We are used to complaining about endless meetings and chats, about the fact that there is not enough time for the main thing, everything is busy with routine. And we even take it for granted, as a necessary evil, a cost of the profession. Is it so? Let's see how much communication actually costs. The team as a whole, and the managers personally. What tools can you use to reduce these costs and what gains can you get?
About the authors:
Yuri Stroganov. Presenter of master classes in Skolkovo, National Research University Higher School of Economics, RANEPA, etc. Trainer and consultant for large Russian companies.
Dmitry Gordeev. Team lead of the development team, coach, ex-Yandex, ex-Tinkoff. Conference speaker, author of the TG channel Fortune Hunting.
Artyom Ukharov, Teacher and psychologist. 5F Team Competencies Trainer. Head of Performance Marketing (Russia and Brazil). CTO at EdTech
Team Leader Introduction or Objectives
I have seen many definitions of the goals and objectives of a team leader. This is what responds to me.
Goals:
Provide business results on time and with the required quality
Make sure that next time you can provide the result faster and/or with better quality.
Tasks – classical planning, delegation, control.
Planning – involves understanding what the team needs to do and when, and turning it into a plan
Delegation – in a broad sense, including the usual setting of tasks
Control – it seems clear here.
And by and large, a leader has only two tools: thinking and communication.
And many of us can make good plans, especially if we're armed with cool technology. Systems thinking to understand what to pay attention to when creating a product. What is most important is not how it will be structured, but how it fits into the overall context – in short, how exactly it will make money for the company in interaction with its other products. The theory of restrictions – so as not to try to optimize just anything, creating harmful local optima, but to look for a bottleneck.
In short, most former engineers have no problems with thinking. The difficulty is that there is usually not enough time for this. Everything is occupied by communication. After all, a manager's job is to participate in meetings, as I was told in one interview. Yeah, endless and meaningless, I thought. Of course not. That’s not the case at all, at least from the point of view of achieving the goal.
Let's look at the entire process of team management through the prism of communication. With whom, when and what should you negotiate, why is it usually painful and how to significantly reduce your communication costs and free up time and energy for something useful and/or inspiring. For example, for thinking 😉
With whom and what does the team leader need to agree on?
By and large, the work of a team can be described in three stages – goal setting, implementation, presentation of the result. By the way, the latter is often forgotten, but it is very important – without a competent presentation of the result to management/customers, we will not receive rewards – promotions, etc. for yourself and the team.
This scheme is generally obvious and there is nothing new in it. Let's now take a closer look at communications.
When setting a goal
So, first you need to figure out what should be the result of the command:
Find out the needs of the external environment. Who are the customers/stakeholders and what do they want.
Maybe imbue them with some of your ideas.
Protect yourself and your team from obviously impossible demands.
Get the necessary resources from them.
Negotiations with stakeholders do not end here. Here are other topics:
How to make your progress and great results obvious to them.
Get the necessary resources from them.
Once the needs of the stakeholders are identified, the team needs to set a goal. In a good way, the leader does this not alone, but together with the team. So that everyone feels this goal is theirs and not imposed.
Important! A goal is not a set of requirements from the customer. The goal must satisfy several criteria:
Contrastingly exceed the expectations of the external environment, i.e. stakeholders. And don't just do it.
Be aligned with the personal goals of all team members. (Do you know the personal goals of your team members?)
This idea is taken from the 5F team management model, which will be discussed in a future article.
Setting goals in this format is possible if you are already an experienced team leader, and not a beginner who simply went to meetings, wrote down what was required of him, and is now trying to somehow force the team to do what was asked “from above.”
During runtime
In the process of achieving a goal, you have to communicate and negotiate:
With external people and teams – subcontractors, guilds, etc.
To get related teams to do something for your team. And at least they didn’t put a spoke in the wheels.
Find out the reasons for decisions “from above” that affect you. If possible, influence them and at least minimize the damage to you and your team.
Make sure that answering all kinds of requests to you does not take up 90% of your time.
With your team
Make sure people do what needs to be done. And to do that, they trust and understand you, themselves, and each other. And not you doing everything for them.
Find out from people an accurate picture of what is happening in the team in order to respond in a timely manner.
Listen to people's needs and ensure their development and motivation.
Gaining the authority of the team means speaking so that “they hear me,” but at the same time being “one of our own.”
All these seemingly obvious things are sometimes very difficult to achieve if you do not use contact communication in your work.
To present the result
It would be nice not only to complete the task of the stakeholders, but also to receive a reward for yourself and the team – money, promotions, special conditions, etc.
This needs to be discussed before starting work, and then present the result so that it is obvious to customers that you did a good job.
Control cycle through communication
It turns out this cycle: a request, an impulse from stakeholders goes through the team lead to the team, and the result from the team through the team lead is returned to the customer. And the team leader’s task is to ensure the optimal functioning of this cycle with minimal losses.
I understand that processes and structure in a company can be very different. The team lead does not always communicate directly with stakeholders, but often through some other roles, through the product manager, for example. But this does not change the essence of the matter, you are still responsible for the team, and you do not have the option to say: oh, the product set the wrong tasks, so the team did not do what was expected of it for six months.
Additional roles only complicate the mechanism by adding transmission links to it, but the responsibility still lies with the team leader.
Price of communication
Since most team leads are not financially responsible persons, I suggest measuring the price in time – time is certainly relevant for everyone. Moreover, it is worth considering separately the time spent by the team as a whole and the manager’s personal time.
There are often losses in communication, otherwise this article would not be needed. The cost of communication consists of the cost of loss and the costs of communication itself.
Losses from ineffective communication at each of the stages described above will cost the team. From a few days and hours in the case of a current small issue, to months or years if you and the stakeholder misunderstood each other when setting a goal. A leader's personal losses can be measured over the years as your career languishes.
Depending on the processes in the team, communication costs can reach 15 hours per week per person (in fact, the developer showed me his calendar and then it dawned on me that I, as a team lead, was doing something wrong). And this does not include chats! That is, 20% of resources or more may be spent on discussions.
Well, there’s nothing to say about the leaders. “Meetings for 6 hours a day”, “we discussed something for an hour and a half, and came to nothing” – sound familiar?
We took the idea of such calculations from conflictonomics – the economics of conflict, we will write about it in more detail later.
Why so expensive?
Here are some reasons why communication costs and risks of loss are so high:
We do not set ourselves a specific task of what we want to achieve in this communication. And that’s why she goes as she goes. By the way, this skill is one of the criteria that distinguishes managers of different levels.
We do not know how to work with our condition during communication. And when emotions carry us away, it is much more difficult to hear the interlocutor and convey something to him.
We do not know how to listen to another person and clearly state our position, taking into account his intention.
People's resistance. In a corporate environment, they can rarely directly send us away, but they are very good at evading responsibility in all sorts of ways. That is, to manipulate you. I won’t even give examples – you yourself encounter this every day.
And this leads to the following reason: when faced with this resistance, we are often afraid to enter into conflict and slowly let the situation slide, creating managerial debt. I know the difficult feeling when it seems even clear that you should answer, but you
once againhaven't decided?Would you like to add to the list?
All this leads to the fact that we have to discuss the same thing several times, for hours, days and weeks. And in the worst case, a few months after the start of the project it turns out that it needs to be redone, because… we didn’t agree on the most important thing.
Potential for improvement
We all love to complain about too many meetings and chats, but we are used to taking it for granted, as a necessary evil. And if you estimate how much it costs the team and us personally, as managers, then you can just go crazy your eyes will roll out of your head.
But in this situation there is a great opportunity. If you learn to communicate effectively, without the problems described above, then the costs of communication and the risks of losses will be reduced several times.
And from here come pleasant bonuses:
Good reputation, work relationships and career prospects. Including the opportunity to get into really cool teams that have high demands on the quality of communication.
Saving time and effort (up to 20 hours per week), which can be invested in a career, starting a business, family, health, recreation, etc.
Improved well-being and health – a large amount of unnecessary stress will go away
Would this be of fundamental interest to you?
And what do you propose to do?
First, what I suggest not to do. This means picking up various life hacks and frameworks, of which there are a lot on the Internet, and trying to apply them without understanding the essence.
It is better to look at communication systematically. Don’t throw up more crutches, but build a good solution.
To do this, let's start with the foundation of communication.
Intent to communicate. Why are you entering into dialogue? To solve some problem or because a meeting is hanging on the calendar
already the sixth one today? Or rather, what percentage of your work meetings do you go into clearly knowing what you want to see as a result?Not only that, for successful communication it is necessary to form an intention for a specific result. You also need to make sure it doesn't get lost. Otherwise, at some point you may find yourself arguing about who respects whom instead of discussing the original issue.
Why is this fundamental – if you don't have a topic or you've lost it, then no matter how great the communication goes, what good is it? So, we will henceforth call successful communication the one that resulted in the solution of the task.
It seems self-evident, but underneath this there are layers of work on oneself. So that this becomes not only an obvious necessity, but also a constant practice.
State during communication. There is a thesis that a person perceives only 7% of information verbally. He incorrect (and by the way, we are not infogypsies to burden you with pseudoscientific facts), but nevertheless it is obvious that the same words pronounced in different tones will have different effects. And in general, state is the key to successful communication. It affects both the ability to perceive the interlocutor and the ability to convey one’s position.
Therefore, it is necessary to work on the condition:
Get ready before communication
Monitor your condition during the process
Fix it when things go wrong
We'll look at how to do this in one of the following articles. Spoiler: there is no simple recipe, it takes a lot of practice. However, since such a tense and insecure person as I was able to learn to manage my condition, then you can too. And then freedom arises, like when you ski, when you know how.
Helping another person make a choice. Ultimately, we cannot force another person to do anything. And they shouldn't try. Communication is not about manipulating another person.
In the situation under discussion, we are talking about the choice that faces your interlocutor. Moreover, he may see this choice incorrectly. Moreover, you don’t want to see him.
For example, your employee regularly misses meetings and justifies it by saying that he didn’t see the reminder, overslept, or something else. And for him the situation looks like he is choosing between leaving everything as it is or making some efforts and solving the issue – setting alarm clocks for meetings, for example. And of course, he doesn’t want to put in the effort and tries to avoid it. But in reality, after several similar conversations, the choice before him is already different: to correct the situation or leave the team in the foreseeable future, because… you don’t intend to put up with this any longer; it affects the deadlines and the atmosphere in the team. That is, the “leave it as is” option doesn’t really exist. And your task is to convey this choice to him, so that he sees the situation as it is and makes his decision. It’s not a fact that it will be ideal for you, but one way or another it will be a way out of the looped conversations about the same thing and a step forward to resolve the situation.
Tools
The foundation alone is, of course, not enough. But based on it, you can already select communication tools, and their use will be meaningful.
It turns out we need tools:
Goal setting for forming intentions for communication. In many cases this is obvious, but there are non-trivial cases where something powerful like Theory of Constraints or Cognitive Modeling may be needed
To work with the condition – for example, meditation, breathing practices or games from the New NLP Code.
In order to find meaning in the stream of words pouring down on us, metamodeling is perfect. It also helps a lot against manipulation. Important bonus: and against self-manipulation Same. All sorts of “I have to”, “I can’t”, etc. Also, having mastered the meta-model, you will be able to convey your thoughts with minimal losses.
Finally, you can offer a win-win solution using the SCORE coaching technique.
How to achieve mastery in communication?
Good news: it's possible.
The bad news: it's not fast. It took me about a year to get away from the stiffness and uncertainty of saying “okay” to everything. Backend people didn't do anything during the sprint? Ok. Forgot about data analytics events again? Ok. And to come to mutually beneficial cooperation, make people responsible for their work and show them the prospects for them in this.
Therefore, you just need to move forward, the main thing is not stressful. Analyze one communication per day where you have a feeling that something went wrong. Check your intention, state, see where you were manipulated. And how would you conduct the conversation if you had the opportunity to repeat it. And gradually your communication skill will grow.
Levels of communication skill
About “unconscious incompetence”, etc. you know without me. Here are my stages from experience.
I vaguely feel like I'm getting along
I can figure out what’s wrong after the fact.
I see problems in the moment, online
I can respond online
??? I'm not there yet
What's next
You can't cover all of this in one article. And it's not interesting to just describe the tools, let alone read them. It's better to analyze specific pain points in a series of articles, taken from our practice, colleagues' and clients', and how they are solved – where the foundation needs to be strengthened and what tools to use to direct the situation in a positive direction.
