Full Spectrum Messaging and how to Handle the Inevitability of Team Change
Hey McFly, anybody home??
Twitter has been ablaze with commentary about Twitter’s own organisational carnage, and how people have been getting fired for disagreeing publically with their boss.
As a general rule, it's bad form to get into work arguments on internal work messaging systems (Slack, Teams, emails etc). I’ve suffered this many times in my career. As per all text-based communication, everyone tends to read it in Biff's "Hey, butthead!" voice. Minor disagreements become major arguments and everything falls apart. This is the enemy of good decision-making.
When you see the warning signs, take it offline!
A word from the sponsor - Product People
If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
New podcast episode: Team Change is Inevitable - What's Important is How we Respond to It
I recently had the chance to catch up with Heidi Helfand, author of Dynamic Reteaming (check it out on Amazon or the book website). Heidi has seen numerous team changes across the years and wanted to provide an actionable framework to help people through uncertain times and, most importantly, treat people fairly and with respect. Elon Musk could do with reading this book!
Check out the podcast episode on your favourite podcast app, or check the episode link on the podcast website.
Team change is inevitable but what's important is how you deal with it
Even if you're going for long-lived mission-based teams, they're still going to change through attrition, company growth, lay-offs or mergers. It's important to manage this change effectively.
The Importance of Full Spectrum Messaging
I did a talk recently at Product Elevation (check it out if you have access to the recorded sessions) about “Cross-Functional Memes”. I was very proud of the dad joke pun and loved the chance to show off a few of my more popular memes. But it was also a chance to try to tell a serious point - the idea that communication is hard and we should try to hit people’s brains in different ways to make sure they remember what we’re saying. I’m not saying that all your stakeholder updates should be memes! But, there are lots of ways to try to get your message to stick.
We’ve all heard the same old story. The product team are getting flak from the sales team, the marketing team, the executive team or the development team. No one knows anything! Why is it so hard to find out what’s going on? Why can’t we just be aligned?
It’s also fair to say that this isn’t just a big company problem. I’ve spoken to people from companies that are surprisingly small to have the communication problems they have, yet they still have them. We’ve all heard the old cliche about having to tell people stuff 7, 17 or 70 times before they remember it. There’s definitely something to that - repeat it till you’re bored etc, but the problem there is in the repetition. Repeating stuff time and time again to people is an invitation to tune it out. There’s also a balance to be struck; PMs have to communicate to do their job, but they can’t spend all their time communicating otherwise they won’t have time to do their job!
Here are some tips for effective communication:
1. Tailor your Message
It's common for people to write an update that is either too technical, too “business-y”, too high-level or too detailed. It’s almost impossible to write something that resonates deeply with every single type of stakeholder. Everyone has a different base-level understanding and not everyone has a shared vocabulary.
So, don't just copy and paste an update you wrote for the developers into an update to the sales team. Think of your audience!
2. Adapt the medium
Personally, big walls of text really put me off. I find it hard to concentrate, especially if it looks exactly the same as every update I’ve ever had or the text is poorly formatted or ultra-dense. On the other hand, I really enjoy audio and video content. But other people hate that. Everyone has different communication & learning styles.
Mix it up! Try to use a combination of long text, short text, Loom videos, audio clips, or whatever works for you and your audience. You might be ticking a box to send a big, wordy text update in Slack once a week but they’re easily missed. You have to stick out.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat
Repetition is important. There's an old cliche that if you aren't bored saying it, you haven't said it enough. As per above, you have to say stuff again and again. We exist in a sea of content and there’s always more coming. Slack message upon Slack message. Email after email. Remote-first meetings are fine, but they also invite multitasking and interruptions. It's important to keep saying stuff in a wide variety of styles, repeating yourself until you're bored.
4. Bonus tip
In business, it’s really easy for everything to look the same. Breaking people’s mental models, disrupting their patterns and making them stand up and take notice is hard but it’s important. Try going for that record-scratch moment. Injecting a bit of humour, some kind of non-sequitur or odd juxtaposition can help people take notice.
You need to be professional, but you don't need to be boring or identikit.
I like to refer to this as “Full-Spectrum Messaging”, hitting various parts of people’s cerebral cortexes (cortices?) to give you the best chance of getting stuff to stick.
Also, there are clear parallels here with product messaging as well. There are so many products, there’s so much marketing content. You’re never going to stick out by being exactly the same.
Thanks for reading!
This stuff is hard, but give it a go. I’d love to hear your tips for helping to get messages to stick. Let’s make a noise!
Thanks for reading, do please send feedback and let me know if there are any topics you’d like me to cover. And remember to share the newsletter with your friends!
If you want to buy me a coffee, you can buy me a coffee.