Four Pillars for Effective Team Communication

Startups are hard.

There’s the frantic search for product/market fit and hiring the right team. Features and bug fixes are piling up in your backlog. There’s a feeling that there’s never enough time and resources to get it all done (not that it would matter, as it always seems that your to-do list grows exponentially as you add resources to your team). And finally , the urgency to get it all done before you run out of runway.

As your organization expands and chaos and madness ensue, hidden in plain sight, there’s a little speed-bump that can trip your team and derail the best laid out plans of execution: communication breakdown.

Fortunately, there are some easy and effective strategies that you can adopt and deploy with your teams to ensure that this breakdown in communication doesn’t become a chronic nuisance. When properly and timely applied, they can help your growing startup build a deep foundation for stronger communication and teamwork.

The four pillars of effective communication:

Direct

If you’re in a startup, time is of the essence. So, if you are having an issue, the sooner you can resolve it the better chance you’ll have of a positive outcome.

State the facts as you know and understand them using the simplest, most clear and basic language that you can. At the same time, focus on the issue that you are trying to address and/or resolve. This is about solving problems, not debating for debating’s sake.

Honest

A lot of people confuse being direct with being honest. They feel that as long as they are being direct, they are also being honest. As any good close up magician knows — the best card tricks are simple and direct in effect, but far from an honest method!

Putting this into business context, it means stating your intentions, needs, goals and/or motives.

This also applies to when others are expecting or needing things from you. Telling them what they want to hear, if you don’t really agree with it or believe it, does more harm than good and won’t help them meet their objectives. So be honest in your responses.

Transparent

In order for the first two pillars, identified above, to be truly effective, it is absolutely essential that you have no secret or hidden agendas — you need to default to WYSIWYG mode.

The moment that the other party gets a sense that you are being anything less than transparent in your communication, all sorts of barriers will come up. At which point the communication is as good as if it had never happened in the first place.

Present yourself as you are, and accept others as they are. That’s the best way to cultivate transparency.

Inclusive

If you need something from someone else but you never bother to engage and/or include them in a conversation, then you can not expect the results that you seek.

This also goes beyond you including those who you need something from. You must also anticipate and include those who may need something from you.

That said, this communication pillar is not an excuse to be over-inclusive, which will only help to waste someone’s time. So use it judiciously.

Finally, there are three important pre-conditions that must be in place for these pillars to have a chance of creating strong team support:

Trust

This, at least for me, is the most basic and key ingredient for the development of an effective culture.

The most important book that I’ve ever read on team culture and communication is called, The Five Dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni. In this book, the author breaks down the key components affecting good and effective teamwork, and as you’ll see in the graphic used to depict them, the foundation is TRUST. Without it, nothing else matters.

Note: I received this book as a present from my mother in 2013. I’ve read this book at least once every year since. It’s that good (and a fun and easy read as well).

Two wrongs don’t make a right

We should follow the same advice that we teach to our children.

It may not be easy to keep your cool when others get argumentative but you should remain calm and stick to the above pillars. If you can do that, and do it consistently over time — you’ll notice that others will start adopting a similar style of communication (even subconsciously).

Disagree and commit

I first learned about this technique back in 2016 when Jeff Bezos published his annual letter to Amazon’s shareholders. And, a powerful letter it is.

It would be crazy to expect everyone to agree all of the time (I even disagree with myself sometimes), and this only gets more difficult as your team expands along with the number of people that need to be included in the decision-making process. In an ideal world, we would love to make decisions by “agreement,” but in reality what we really need is “commitment.”

The saying goes — “it takes a village to raise a child,”- and although not everyone in the village would agree all of the time as to what’s best for the child, I believe it takes a unified team to build a successful product that can support a growing business. Maybe not everyone would agree with the decision being made, but it is crucial that everyone is 100% committed to implementing the decision to the fullest extent of their abilities.

Using the four pillars for effective communication discussed through this article will provide you with a strong foundation to unifying your teams in your quest for success.

May Good Communication be with You!