Lara Hogan is a leadership coach and the founder of Wherewithall.
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When I worked as an engineering leader, I would routinely publish a “Week in Review” document for my organization. Instead of describing what the team had been working on that week, I would use this piece of communication to contextualize one big, sticky topic that was cropping up at the company.
Sometimes the fraught topic was specific to my group: There was confusion about conflicting priorities, an impending reorg or distrust bubbling up about another part of the company. But often the topic was a change that was happening at a higher level: The organization was changing its travel expense policy, executive turnover was startling folks or something in the outside world was directly impacting the lives of our co-workers (like when immigration and visa laws were being rapidly changed in the United States).
There are a number of pitfalls leaders can fall into when organizational changes or world events start impacting our teams. We might try to avoid or ignore our employee’s concerns with the hopes they’ll forget or move on. We might repeat the party line or get defensive when pressed. But by responding in these ways, leaders create even more of an issue. The friction never goes away, as much as we might want it to, and our employees will see us as cavalierly not taking them — and their concerns — seriously.
So, when a fraught issue arises, how can we help our organization move forward in a way that actually builds rather than breaks trust? Over time, and after many communication mistakes, I honed a four-part template, covering the following:
• Here’s the stated company line on this topic.
• Here are some facts about what this means, in practice — what’s changing, what’s not changing, how this relates to our group, etc. Just the facts.
• Here’s my personal take on this thing.
• Here’s when you will hear from me next.
This template allowed me to address employees’ fears (and unspoken assumptions) while grounding the sticky topic in specifics and shifting to a forward-facing view.
Here’s an example of the template with more hypothetical details:
As you heard in the all-hands meeting this week, starting next month, we are changing how we do performance reviews. This change is to help everyone receive specific, actionable feedback with more routine.
(Include details about the changes, and a list of what’s not changing to get ahead of potential employee concerns.)
In an ideal world, we would already have a culture of routine feedback, where everyone delivers solid, actionable feedback to each other both when things are working great and when there’s an opportunity for improvement.
To get there, I know that we also need more training on how to give excellent, helpful feedback. I’m working with the leadership and development team to build a budget for routine training and support on these skills throughout the year.
You probably have questions, concerns and some level of uncertainty about these changes! You’ll hear more details about how we’ll do self-evaluations and gather peer feedback from human resources on Thursday’s all-hands meeting. I also plan on answering questions about this during the open Q&A at our next team meeting so that everybody can hear my answers. Bring your questions then! If, for whatever reason, you’d prefer to ask your question privately, send me a message on Slack and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
This approach to routinely addressing "spicy" issues didn’t prevent hard conversations from happening, nor did it make my co-workers say, “Oh, OK, got it. No more questions then.” But it did go a long way to building a foundation of trust so that we could talk about hard things more easily.
By building a routine around internal communications, the things you need to tell your teams will always have a place. You won’t need to startle them by sending an out of nowhere email. They will trust you to be in tune with the impact that changes have and come to rely on you as a place of support and much-needed clarity in these tough moments.
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