How to make your business communication with managers more streamlined

Communication is the bread and butter of human interaction, at home as well as at work.

Just as you would experience trouble at home with your family or partner if you communicated improperly or just not enough, the exact same result would happen to companies.

The major difference being that for companies the format, players and channels of communication are different. At work you are usually dealing with a lot more diverse individuals whose mutual link and bond with you starts and ends with the work itself and nothing else.

To be clear, the term communication referred to by this article both covers verbal and written ones. And i aim to propose a few things on how to streamline the rough edges we encounter while doing our job reporting to managers on issues and progress.

Odds are you currently have a manager or two at work you report to, and strangely enough odds are also that one day you yourself will become a manager as well, whether you wish for it or not. So our discussion here of improving the communication workflow with your manager would apply for all parties down the line.

For me, when I first started out working in companies of different sizes, I noticed something peculiar about managers in general. Engineers engineered, designers got creative, sales sold, but managers.. those were a different lot. Some seemed to be knowledgeable, but many others seemed to be totally redundant and out of touch. I still vividly remember a manager of mine in a multi-national company that shall remain unnamed who excitedly offered to get me prostitutes to keep me at my work and not tend my resignation for lack of other alternatives in his head. His cuteness wanted to keep me around after he had effectively forced me to work 40 days straight without a single weekend off while he additionally burned away money from the budget and asked me, with little success, to sign off on paper his unjustified purchases. Regardless, i will leave you in suspense as to whether or not I accepted that offer of his. To his credit, he haggled and offered more down the line, i supposed he was creative in that department at least.

Others weren’t so endearing in their management, as I still recall fondly, another manager who welcomed me warmly to the team the first day of work which was also the last time I saw him for a year or so as I worked alone in the dark. Another great example of management in my life was a manager that i was transferred to as my R&D department was being shutdown after it successfully delivered the tasks it was assigned to work on. That one welcomed me to his new web department by threatening me with draconian regulations and rules to firmly impose his ‘presence’ on me, to which I warmly thanked him and kindly told him that I will not be renewing my contract that was to end in a few months. I informed him that I signed up to work in the R&D department and delivered everything but that i didn’t sign up to ‘auto-join’ his department neither to get welcomed and thanked by being threatened like that. That one was at a loss of words afterwards for some reason.

By now you get my point, some managers avoid communication, some don’t know how to handle it, some abuse it. But not all, I had good communicator managers as well. A senior manager in another firm talked to me in private many times and offered to help and told me to put my health before any work even though they were happy with my performance. Another tried his best to manage things on short notice and provide me needed resources. Another always kept me in the loop and not in the dark. Finally another gave me opportunities, while he provided consultancy and lead from the back.

No need to guess here which managers i stuck around with and which ones i did not.

The key point to take here is that, regardless of some outliers and statistical performance curves, the profession of management has a clear-cut and useful purpose of facilitating your work and that of everyone else on the team. If done properly this is a great boon to everyone, oil to the gears of the machine if you would excuse this archaic old comparison of the workspace.

But for this to happen more often than not, this requires more than one party to be on board.

Both the manager and the team, each one on the team, has a responsibility to do their best to improve their communications, both with their teammates and with their managers.

For the purpose of this article I will list the preferable good practices that could improve the flow of communication between you and managers to keep things better aligned for everyone:

-Honesty. Depending on different work/regional cultures, the value of this point differs, but in my opinion this is integral to the successful operations of a healthy company to build trust and integrity. This is translated by owning up to what is happening even if it reflects badly on you temporarily. Don’t sweep things under the rug, report them clearly, a good manager will appreciate this character type more than he would appreciate someone who tries to hid things from him/her or mislead him. If you have concerns or are unhappy about work or some tasks, ask for a private meeting to discuss them directly. Same if you don’t know how to perform some task. If you honestly ask you will be directed in the direction where to find help. Good managers and team leads will teach you how to fish.

-Raise Red Flags. This is important. You are the front line scouts, you are able to see on the horizon some things more quickly than upper management. It is of great value if you understand when to raise red flags promptly in work. If done properly it will give management more time to react to this and rectify them. This could be anything from a client that might be thinking of leaving, a colleague causing you issues at work, or street news you heard of a competitor making a move on you or some other event that might disrupt the supply chain. Yes some might be false flags and red herrings, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

-Report. This one sounds obvious, but from my experience it is the most neglected point. By reporting you are giving your managers a summarized view of what is happening. This might seem like a waste of your time or a slight at your honesty and integrity. It is not. Imagine if your manager had to ask everyone on your team for updates or constant meetings, it’s a nightmare.

By reporting, you take part in a push up system of information updates instead of pull-down everyone mechanism that is both outdated and inefficient. How you report depends on your company and managers as well. It could be daily/weekly, by email or on Slack.. Whatever it is, it is best to have something in place rather than have the canvas of black holes that not reporting provides. If you have any feedback to improve reporting to make it better suit your tasks you can always share it with your manager. Real improvements should be welcomed by them.

-Be concise. This one is tricky and not immediately easy to get a handle on. But before you report, either verbally or written, try to outline the purpose of your communication with your manager. A good technique would be the start the sentence in reverse. Instead of saying, ‘I talked to Joe about the Blue Product that the client Red in downtown purchased last year and he told me the client might be having an issue and wants to discuss it with us’ you would preferably say ‘Client Red in downtown might be having problems with Blue Product, Joe just reported it’. This works for both written and verbal.

Start with the intended good/bad news or questions, get to the point immediately and then add extra details/suggestions if need be. A manager usually is handling followups with a team of tasks and people, you have to keep that in mind when talking to them. You need to avoid getting sidetracked, grab their attention in a short time span before they phase out to talk about something else more urgent if everything you are saying seems protracted, incoherent or gibberish.

-Inquire. Many a time a manager would think the team or a member understood the task/priority at hand clearly while in reality for some this simply didn’t happen. Inquire to clarify things. Don’t proceed to put your time and effort on tasks you are not 100% sure what they are supposed to be. Task tracking software like Asana/Jira help a lot. You can simply ask in the task comments and tag him/her for clarification and get a prompt response in addition to asking in person if the time and the situation permits.

-Standards. Stick to them. They are there for a reason. If there is a standard and expectation on how emails should be sent, use them, it will make everybody’s lives easier. If Slack is expected to be used in a certain way to discuss and share per product/team/channel announcements, use it. If you are in sales and you report through a CRM, don’t shoot yourself in the foot and decide not to update it. Coding teams need to stay aligned with their Kanban/Scrum boards on Jira and the like. They shouldn’t forget to update them. All these tools are tracked by managers. These are written communication standards, but there are also verbal ones. For instance, know how to talk, what language is the easiest for you if the company is multi-lingual. If your voice is too loud or too low. Not everybody might be able to hear you. Know if it is appropriate or not to throw jokes around or to be aggressive or sly with your manager. You might be wondering why I am bringing up these last points, to answer that we have to move on to our next and last point.

-Understand what a company is. This will reflect in all the aspects on your communication. Companies are not money printing machines, unless you are the Federal Bank. They are also not a concentration camp, you can just simply leave, nor are they a place to pass your time, you can go to the park or the cinema for that. A company is a work oriented community, a living micro environment, whose members are bonded together by mutual benefits in a hierarchy where each grow their carrier and make profit at different scales and responsibilities with products/services while they are in it. I know that sentence was a mouthful, no worries, you can read it again if you like i will wait here. I know HR likes to call companies families, yes they might be, though HR quaintly forgets that there are broken and functional families.

Regardless of the scale, industry or region, companies are similar to boats traveling the seas, each with its own destination/task, ecosystem, crew, ship type and cargo.. all sailing the sea. Just think of the gold age of seafaring with pirates, fleets, traders, storms, treasures, sea sickness, adventures and scurvy. If you can’t afford some shenanigans or misunderstandings at sea, you won’t be able to afford them in any organization or company as well. Once this is understood and you know why you are in such or such company, and then weigh it with your personal short and long term life goals and priorities, you will start to avoid communicating needless things at work to yourself, friends and co-workers.
For instance, instead of
‘I don’t like my work I don’t know what they want of me, they barely pay and i already got trouble at home’

you might be saying
‘I think I can grow and fit here well, it aligns with my career goal’

or alternatively
‘This place even though it pays well and has opportunities, I don’t see myself fitting happily here as there are irremediable corporate culture incompatibilities with me and what is most important to me’

I will stop the list of issues to take note of while communicating with your managers here. We are already a full four pages or so in deep.

More can be listed i suppose, but what we already went over would still be the major ones to be pondered upon and maybe, just maybe, heeded.

I won’t claim that each one is correct/appropriate for all situations, but taken as a whole they are things you have to keep in mind while communicating with management on work issues.

Regardless, all these points also have an insider’s view when it is your time to step in the slippery management boots or put on the mantle of thorns and lead teams that report back to you inquisitively.

In conclusion,

You know the old saying, it’s known by heart, one hand can’t clap alone.

Keep this in mind when you are thinking of shot-gunning your manager.
If he/she is bad material you would still be doing your part and improving him/her, and if he/she is good material you would be dancing the business tango together in tandem like star bees in no time.

PS:

This is one article from a three-parts series on corporate communication.
The follow-up articles will cover how to communicate with your team as a manager and how to communicate with suppliers/partners and contractors.