Strategic Communication with Your Team: A Guide for Success
In today's fast-paced business environment, communicating strategic plans clearly and effectively is crucial for maintaining team alignment, especially during uncertain times. Here are some key practices that can help leaders achieve this goal.
Matt Bertram, a notable figure, emphasises the importance of creating a framework to ensure constant updates, engagement, and valuing of team members. Visual aids, such as mind maps and timelines, can make communication more effective by grouping ideas, visualising relationships, and breaking down abstract concepts.
Three common barriers to effective communication are physical barriers, emotional barriers, and communication styles. Physical barriers can be overcome through video conference calls, written messages, and process documentation. Emotional barriers, caused by stress, lack of direction, or disengagement, can be addressed by understanding the root cause and providing support.
Communication styles can vary, and it's important to learn how to communicate effectively despite differences in preferences. Being honest and direct, showing empathy, taking the time to verify understanding, building processes around communication, and repetition are essential for effective communication.
Deborah Sweeney and Paige Arnof-Fenn, both advocates for strong communication, believe in regular communication with employees, focusing on the direction of the company, goals, engagement with partners, and opportunities. They suggest setting up regular emails, video/conference calls, and pivoting to online meetings/webinars to continue conversations that educate, build relationships, and move forward during a crisis.
Some leaders take the time to ask comprehensive checking questions and use different platforms to cater to different learning styles. Virtual coffee meetings online have been helpful for small groups to talk through specific issues.
The guide provides templates for various visual aids, including timelines, mind maps, flow charts, project and business plans, crisis communication plans, and visual roadmaps. Breaking down strategy into inputs can help ground the abstract vision in real, actionable steps. Communicating the team's progress often can help team members feel connected to the project.
Repetition is key when keeping the team aligned on the goals. A concise one-page plan can summarise the main points of a longer document. Identifying leading and lagging indicators, outlining clear milestones, and keeping messages simple and direct are other effective strategies for communicating strategy.
In conclusion, to effectively communicate strategic plans during uncertain times and maintain team alignment, leaders should focus on clear, transparent, and repeated communication using simple language and structured methods while encouraging two-way feedback. This approach helps maintain clarity, trust, and alignment within teams, ensuring everyone is informed, engaged, and working towards shared objectives. A crisis communication plan template is also provided for communicating escalation frameworks and key roles and responsibilities for responding to a crisis.
An entrepreneur like Matt Bertram advocates establishing a communication framework that includes regular updates, team engagement, and valuing team members, employing visual aids such as mind maps and timelines for effective strategic plan communication in business.
Effective leadership requires learning to communicate despite differences in communication styles, employing strategies like being honest and direct, showing empathy, repetition, and building processes around communication to ensure clarity, trust, and alignment among team members during uncertain times, as suggested by Deborah Sweeney and Paige Arnof-Fenn.
