Leading a technical team, being the voice of technology in the C-suite, and communicating with your company’s business groups about their IT needs and hazards is a job that requires a deep understanding of technology. But more and more, it also requires the skills of an expert negotiator, speech writer, and public relations expert. In a single day, perhaps even in a single hour, you might go from explaining a technical decision to a financial executive to listening to an acronym-laden description of the hiccups in an AI deployment.
As business communication expands across channels and technology evolves into the beating heart of the business, the role of the technical leader has become one that requires strong communications skills. More than that, it requires a big-picture communication strategy that is clear and effective.
I asked CIOs and other leaders what they do. This is the advice they offered on developing an effective communication strategy for IT leadership.
Speak in the vernacular of your audience
When discussing the details of a technical implementation with your team, your language might be littered with acronyms, jargon, and highly technical language. But when you speak to other business groups, company leaders, and less technical people, you will miss the mark if you speak in the vernacular of the nerd.
“Talking to the engineering team is a very different conversation than talking to the executive team,” says Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty. “Technical speak is the kiss of death for a CIO.”
For a less technical audience, shift to storytelling. Adopt the dialect of the business units, focus on the business problem the technology solves, and leave the specs and speeds out of it altogether.
“Think about your audience,” says Guillermo Carreras, AVP of delivery at BairesDev. “Do you need to get into the detailed technical execution or is the overall vision enough? Is the result more important than the implementation? Should you use simple language instead of technical jargon?”
The channel you use to discuss topics is part of this equation. Some people want to read specs, some conversations should be done face to face, and there are times when email is the best way to deliver news. With so many channels for communicating your message, the lingua franca you choose is as much about the forum as it is about the words you use.
Use every communication channel you have
“You cannot communicate enough, and you must use every method available: Slack channels, all-hands meetings, blogs, internal web pages, sharing mission, publishing roadmaps, etc.,” says Ann Funai, CIO and VP of business platform transformation at IBM.
You might have a personal preference for email, Slack, or the phone. You might prefer never to receive a work text. But you have to meet your team and the C-suite where they are.
“People are going to communicate with you in whichever way is more natural and effective for them and you have to be able to manage that communication,” PagerDuty’s Johnson says. “Some folks like content coming through Slack, others absorb it better visually in a town hall, and some want office hours. As a CIO, you have to be proficient in all of those things.”
Keep in mind, though, that these channels can spin out of control without guardrails, rules about engagement, and protocols. As the technical lead, establishing these rules will likely fall to you.
Define how best to use each channel
Many people and companies allow personal preferences to define the forum they communicate in. But personal preference is not the only — or even the best — way to define how you use channels.
For Energy Solutions CIO David Weisong’s teams, the channel is governed by the urgency and type of message. Email is reserved for conveying announcements that aren’t pressing, while certain Slack channels and SMS messages are akin to red alerts.
The company doesn’t use email for urgent messages because there is an agreement that emails can be dealt with anytime in, say, 24 hours. But when the message arrives via an urgent channel, you drop everything and pay attention. This, of course, includes an agreement that the emergency channels will never be used for frivolous or non-urgent messages.
For Sudhakar Velamoor, CTO of Kalderos, the channel is often governed by the technical level of the topic.
“We go to Slack when we are trying to be specific,” he says. “You can convey an idea in a meeting or video call. But there is more precision in a Slack conversation.” The asynchronous nature of Slack also allows time to form a precise answer.
Keep context front of mind
Whatever channel you use, it is important to keep the high-level message clear.
“Make sure people understand where the conversation is coming from,” says Velamoor, “especially for technology teams communicating specifications. Set up the context so people understand what they’re reading and why they’re reading it.”
Without this high-level clarity, it is easy for communication to slide away from the goal and deliver an unintended message.
“We start with how we are doing against our OKRs,” says Cameron van Orman, chief strategy officer at Planview, referring to the objectives and key results (OKR) goal-setting framework. “We have all-hands meetings, a company kickoff,” he says, along with all the usual channels of communication. Everyone makes sure these objectives are front and center in those. “But what’s more interesting is that they live and are visible in our tooling, in our agile planning software.”
Often, van Orman says, objectives — financial goals and product goals, for example — are looked at only occasionally. “OKRs are often in a performance management system or parked in a finance tool,” he says. Keeping these OKRs front and center flips the focus from the project to the outcome. It changes the mindset. “It is subtle,” he says. “But it’s impactful to start by asking if we are doing the right things.”
Velamoor agrees. “Connect your work to the overall business goal,” he says. “This can make priorities change, especially in a dynamic environment. Set the context and the business goal you are marching toward.”
Use face-to-face meetings to strengthen other channels
Communicating with a remote team brings its own challenges. If all communication happens through email, video calls, and messaging, some of the connective tissue of human interaction gets lost.
Energy Solutions discovered this in exit interviews, Weisong says. People were leaving, especially those relatively new to the workforce, because they didn’t feel connected to the job or company. To answer this, the company now invests in regular, company-wide, in-person meetings and asks new hires to work at one of the company’s offices. This has helped provide a foundation for new people to attach to.
“It’s like when you plant a tree, you put a stake next to it to keep it growing up and not get blown over. So, it can take root,” he says. The effort has been very effective at providing new team members with cohorts, colleagues, and a sense of belonging.
The connection these in-person meetings create bolsters the communication among everyone in the company, too. When you know someone, even only slightly, their messages come with a more accurate flavor of their personality and style. “It makes interactions through other mediums easier,” says Weisong. “You have a basis for understanding that person.”
Train people to communicate
Communication is complicated. Not everyone is good at it. Because of this, most leaders I spoke to make it a part of their communications strategy to teach this skill. This might include the specific rules around communicating — what’s private, what channels should be used, what content is contractually sensitive — but some of it is more general, such as when to escalate a chat to a meeting, what sort of topics should be discussed in person or at least on video, how to be respectful, what is rude, when behavior crosses over into harassment.
“We have a big initiative around confidential and proprietary information,” says Energy Solutions’ Weisong. “We’ve trained for that as a company. And then things like security, compliance, and risk are woven in. We also teach what can and cannot be shared in Slack channels.”
The company’s communication training also covers basic guidelines about how to avoid and handle conflict, when to escalate a conversation to a phone call or Zoom meeting, and how to be sure your message was received.
Learn to listen
When you are communicating, you have to do more than look for effective ways to convey your message. Real communication is like a telephone: It works in both directions. If you are speaking but not listening, you aren’t communicating.
“Learn to listen and invest time in doing so,” says Carreras. “Your team has valuable input. Make time to connect with them and actively listen to their concerns, suggestions, and ideas. This will elevate your communication skills and help you build a great relationship with them.”
Be sure you aren’t only listening to people who agree with you or tell you what you want to hear, though. This has been the downfall of many great leaders. When you listen only to messages that are easy to hear, you become isolated and disconnected.
“Create space for perspectives that differ from your own,” IBM’s Funai says. “We must be willing to evaluate and weigh different viewpoints so that we can come to a solution that benefits key stakeholders and the business overall.”
Develop a communication cadence
Daily Slack conversations, stand-up meetings, and emails are usually focused on the work at hand and leave little room to connect with your teams, colleagues, or other business leaders about the big picture or the personal. Connecting around these things, though, is the fabric of communication. It holds everything else together.
“I have found it to be incredibly helpful to force a regular cadence into conversations with key business partners,” PagerDuty’s Johnson says. “There’s so much information flying around and things happen quickly. If you don’t have regular check-ins, where you review the status of shared priorities and consider anything new, things get out of alignment.”
This is true in every relationship you have in your organization — from the leadership team to the people who look to you for guidance.
“I meet with every single person in my department,” says Weisong. “I see some of these people every other day in meetings. But that is all about the agenda. I need to make sure I understand how they are doing on a personal level, what’s going on at the project level, and to have discussions that are not scripted or focused on an agenda.”
Adding this layer of cadenced check-in to an already busy schedule can feel like a burden. But it is worth the effort.
“Effective communication improves culture,” says Velamoor. “When you improve the culture and the collaboration, it provides a lot of dividends to both you and your customers.”
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Source: News