- In another video I talk about how most
organizations are designed so that communication
flows down the chain of command
and unless you are deliberate about this
you're not gonna get good upward communication.
So we're gonna talk about three ways
that you can gather high quality, upward communication.
Let's unpack the details.
(soft music)
Hello again friends Alex Lyon here
and this channel Communication Coach is here
to help you increase your impact
so you can lead all the people around you
to higher levels of excellence
and I believe that communication and leadership
are two sides of the same coin.
If you wanna become a better leader
you've gotta work at your communication.
Especially how to gather good upward communication
because gathering upward communication is the key
to making better decisions.
You need good intel
if you want your decisions to resinate
with the people who have to follow through on them.
One of the big problems that I talk about
in my book however is that often times when communication
gets passed up the chain of command it gets distorted.
So, at each level the person passing the information up
tends to leave off negative information
and emphasize anything that makes
themselves look good.
Even if they don't realize they're doing this
what ends up happening is by the time
that message gets to you, the decision maker,
it's often way off and no longer represents reality.
So what you want to do is develop a process
to make sure you get high quality intel,
or high quality upper communication that's not distorted.
So the three tips we're gonna talk about today do that.
The first way to do this is through a very simple survey.
And when I'm talking about simple
I'm saying one, two, maybe three or four questions.
A survey that you put out on a specific issue
and the data, the results, go directly to you.
They don't need a lot of interpretation.
What ends up happening a lot of times
is academics or consultants like me get involved
and sometimes we ask surveys that are like
30, 40, 50 questions and the results are overwhelming,
they need a lot of interpretation.
There's too much wiggle room for how you might
understand what you're looking at.
So if you ask a really simple survey you get those results
and you can take action on them immediately.
There are many free services that you can use
to do this like Survey Monkey online.
If your organization is big enough you might
already have data that's online on something
like Glassdoor.com, you can take a look at that.
But those are two simple ways that you can get
a survey out and get information back really quickly.
The second way is skip-level meetings.
When you skip one or more levels of your organization
you're getting information that's more pure.
So maybe you're meeting with people one-to-one,
or maybe you have a group of people meeting with you.
You can ask them questions directly
and draw them out a little bit
and then you're gonna get pure information
that hasn't been distorted at each level.
Now this takes a little guts
and it takes a little getting used to
but these skip-level meetings are an invaluable
source of high quality intel.
You want to make better decisions.
Start skipping people in the middle.
You're probably gonna get push back
from some of the middle management folk
who don't understand why they're not involved
but you have to work on this.
It's really important to your leadership.
And the third way is anytime you're meeting
with your people one-to-one.
Let's say you supervise six or seven
or maybe 10 people directly,
they report directly to you.
You want to dedicate every so many
meetings to upper communication only.
So lets say you're meeting with everybody
individually about once every couple of weeks.
Maybe every third meeting, or every forth meeting.
Dedicate that meeting entirely to asking them questions.
Draw them out.
So you're mentoring them and you're helping them
in those other meetings but every third or fourth meeting,
hey how are things going,
what needs to be changed around here,
how can I be a better leader, and like skip-level meeting
this takes some guts but the more you do it,
the more you get used to it and the more
those lines of communication are open
and you're more likely to get higher quality intel
that has not been distorted.
So all these ways are just about free to do.
They only take a little bit of time,
a little bit of attention
and a little bit of creativity in terms
of drawing this information out.
But those are three ways that you can
establish dedicated channels for upward communication.
Question of the day.
What are your favorite ways to gather upward communication?
I would love to hear your comments in that section below.
So thanks, God bless and I will see you in the next video.