Clarity Is Key When Communicating in a Growing Business

Transcript:

Your Ability to Simplify

This one, for me, is a big reason why my team has hit a little bit of a ceiling. If there’s two of you on a team, if it’s just me and you talking every day, it’s really hard for things to get confusing. If it’s the three of us, I can talk to you and talk to you and we’re clear, but you guys talk to each other and it can get dysfunctional and dramatic. That’s three people. When you go to four people, the leader can talk to three people, but then the two people have two people to talk to. There’s only four people, but there’s six lines of communication. When you get to seven, the leader has six people to talk to, but there’s 21 lines of communication.

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Having a clear communication structure and a simple way of doing things, that even if this team tweaks the way they do something a little bit, nobody’s unclear about what happens on their team. Every day, this is what happens. You report your numbers at this time every week. Just the consistency of that because you’re trying to grow your team, even with four or five people, but this is a big deal. You may think you’re communicating to your team, but especially as team leaders, you need to communicate.

I am one of the worst communicators. Something that was so clear in my mind about what I wanted to happen, and I literally told nobody. I was ticked off it didn’t happen the way I thought about it in my mind. It happens a lot, for me anyways.

You’ve got to be able to deal with this level of complexity and it just becomes chaotic. You’ve got to dumb everything down. It’s not a smart thing, that’s not the right word for it. You’re the rock that creates all the ripples. You must be able to simplify. If you don’t have a structure in place that helps contain that, it’s gonna get really messy really quick.

So simplify the messages, the processes, the structure, the vision, the communication, and ask yourself if it is as simple as possible. For my team, we have 14 people. With just 14 people, we have 91 lines of communication. Can you imagine running a company with 1,000 employees, and the level of clarity and communication there has to be?

We still do our weekly team meetings, but with a different format. We’re doing a weekly senior leadership meeting, quarterly state of companies with the team. We’re picking rocks, reviewing those rocks, and talking about the next rocks. It’s just an open sort of clear the air meeting. 91 lines of communication with only 14 people. I don’t know what it looks like with 22 people, but it’s a lot of lines of communication. You’ve got to have a lot of clarity around the communication.