Leaders: Intentionally build your communication infrastructure

As leaders, we’re tasked with planning on broader time horizons, considering more complex variables, and working with more incomplete information that our reports in our organization. It’s our job to steer them in a direction that we think is most likely to be successful based on all of this, while building and maintaining trusted relationships with everyone who works for us and with us. As teams grow, this gets increasingly difficult to do. It can be easier to let communication and trust building fall off your priorities list as you’re needed on the next fire.

It’s so important to find ways to build that trust into your own leadership and strategic processes. Your whole organization will be better for it. Experiment to see what might fit in with your current style.

You need communication to move to and from you and each layer of your organization. You should have a way to make sure that feedback can come to you directly as well as make it’s way up the chain, especially for when the feedback might be about the chain itself. Sketch out your org chart, and see if you can identify how each layer or group has an opportunity to understand your thought process and how to get you feedback in a way they’re comfortable with giving it and you’re comfortable with receiving it. More often than not, this exercise will help you find gaps. Let’s talk about how you might fill some of them.

What channels do you have available for feedback?

It’s not enough to just say “my door is always open” or “please give me feedback any time.” This isn’t something you can just tell, you have to show. That means giving plenty of opportunities at first, and when someone does seize the opportunity, make it a good experience and keep it visible.

Ask Me Anything Sessions

Regularly give some open floor to just come ask you questions in a group setting. Collect questions ahead of time if you can. It’ll let folks edit themselves and more introverted folks might prefer to not have the spotlight on them in the moment. You’ll get better and more thoughtful questions this way, with the added bonus that you then have time to prepare for them and gathering information that will help you answer those questions.

I recommend taking live questions as well. The back and forth of conversation and getting to ask follow-up questions means you’ll have a deeper conversation and build a deeper trust. We’re going for authenticity and relationship-building here, and that requires the vulnerability you might feel from answering a question on the spot. If you’re truly uncertain of how to answer something, ask for the person’s contact information so you can follow up with them directly or promise to email out an answer to everyone later.

You might have to give these a few tries before you make a call on whether or not they’re working. Don’t be surprised if the first time or two you’re getting crickets. You’ll probably have to teach your organization how to engage with this or give them some examples of questions they can ask. If you have folks coming to you in 1:1 meetings with these questions, see if you can encourage them to ask it in front of the wider audience so you can answer there. You really just need one person to be a brave first penguin for the rest see it’s safe to jump in.

A quick note: sometimes leaders call these fireside chats, because they imagine that the idea of holding them next to a fireplace makes them more inviting. While that can be a nice picture, it’s good to know that the history of fireside chats in the US comes from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressing the nation in a fireside chat after the banking crisis in 1933. As a result, this means some people will interpret what might be meant as your friendly invitation to actually be a signal that there’s a crisis leadership is going to address. FDR’s fireside chats were hugely effective at increasing confidence, but you still might be raising alarms about a crisis when one doesn’t exist, so just be mindful. Hey, language is tough and ever-evolving.

Anonymous Feedback Forms

Anonymous feedback channels I think serve as an important psychological safety tool, when used well. A past organizational leader I worked for had all of the managers that he worked with set up a Google form to accept anonymous feedback submissions that would then email them when they received a new message. They linked to it in their email signatures and on their work profiles so it was easy to find.

Mine was only ever used a handful of times, and only ever once for some severely critical feedback. I think its existence was still an important signal to folks that I genuinely welcomed the feedback. However, it also meant that some feedback was not delivered kindly.

When the message hit my inbox, I was taken aback. It assumed massive levels of incompetence and malice from me. It was a rant: multiple paragraphs that was clearly someone getting their anger out. I strongly suspected I knew who this was coming from, but it didn’t matter. I was able to address the larger themes to the group, and the report later understood what I was getting at. I might have been the wrong target for their anger, but the feedback behind the feedback was that there was an expectation that I needed to address to the team.

Getting that message stung, but I was able to sit with it, look past the delivery, and figure out how to communicate in ways that corrected the underlying (false) assumptions. We all moved on, and I was grateful that someone blew up in email rather than in a team meeting where they might have later been embarrassed or the feelings might have been more contagious.

If you’re seeing people asking anonymous questions set to win or destroy you rather than help you understand some feedback, that needs a measured response. Depending on the topic, you can engage with it with more good faith than it deserves, give a half-answer that allows you to move on, or you can break down why the question isn’t in good faith (before you answer the good faith version).

I think the form makes it a little less personal for an email, which can help people get over the hesitation of the power dynamic, though it seems to also drop their empathy. The anonymous part can compound both of those.

If you’re seeing innocuous questions that are anonymous, it’s worth chatting a bit about that in front of people. “Hey, this is a really great question, because I can see this person thinking about X, Y, and Z. I want the person who wrote it to know that I’d like to hear from you more, and putting your name on questions like this helps me identify who is thinking about these kinds of topics with a lot of care. That’s who I want to hear more from.” Over time, people see will see that you’re genuine in wanting people to come to you.

That was the use every other time the form got a response, and I was so glad I had the mechanism to make sure we got the issue surfaced so that I could address it, even for minor things that people might have been otherwise embarrassed to bring up.

Awards, Spotlights, and Thank Yous

Praise is a form of communication and a form of feedback; it’s one of the more popular forms of both. At the heart of it, folks just want to know that their work is being seen and appreciated by the people who set the direction. Part of your job as a leader is setting clear values for the organization that are genuinely upheld. It’s how you create a company culture and how you build a team that you can trust to make the right calls based on how you’d personally act if you had to.

It’s often said that culture is what you reward and what you punish. As your organization grows, it gets harder to see those rewards and punishments have clear cause and effects. You’ll get further with rewards, but I do think visible punishments are part of closing the loop and upholding your values. More on that later.

One of the best programs during my time at Google was their employee peer bonus program. Every quarter, I could recognize 5 coworkers with a message of gratitude and a small cash bonus, usually enough for a nice dinner out, for going above and beyond in their job. Leaders also had budgets for slightly larger awards that they could deliver on the spot. It was such a great way to give recognition for otherwise unsung heroes and for teams that made use of it, it was a great tool to have to re-enforce the culture they wanted to see.

You’d be shocked how far a detailed thank you goes. When I left Google, I downloaded every bonus I’d ever received. I can’t always tell you what I spent the bonus money on but I saved every meaningful write-up. I read them on a rainy day when I’m doubting my own abilities and it absolutely contributed to me feeling appreciated in my role. It was so great to have leadership and my peers have ways to recognize me in a small way and learn what kind of work people valued.

Do they hear from you authentically?

No one wants to be told the sun is shining while they have wet socks, so don’t pretend everything is fine when it’s not. People will have an easier time being honest with you when they see you’re honest with them.

There’s been a trend in recent years in referring to this kind of corporate handwaving as gaslighting. I think that gives a lot of poor leaders too much credit. Gaslighting requires intentional malice and a systemic deception that makes you question your sanity, and quite frankly, the leaders who I see being accused of gaslighting don’t have the organizational expertise to coordinate that. More often than not, it’s poor communication at scale and leaders doubling down on defensiveness. If they disagree with something, they go into denial and think that’s where it stops as a leader, rather than recognizing there’s a reason why you got to that miscommunication. They might truly believe what they’re denying even if you have facts to the contrary. It still sucks to be on the receiving end of, but I think the distinction here makes a difference in getting those situations fixed. True gaslighting is a toxic work culture you should parachute out of. Poor communication has a chance to be repaired. Hanlon’s razor is a much more likely culprit.

If you’re a leader being accused of gaslighting, what your reports are probably trying to say is that they feel like they’re getting half-truths or full lies, and if you are genuinely surprised and want it to stop, you need to figure out where the communication breakdown is happening. Is feedback not getting the whole way up to you? Is it being misinterpreted? Is there a disagreement in what the team mission is?

Don’t shy away from the conversation, as tough as it may be. These things tend to fester, and they often sow dissent.

Give people multiple opportunities and formats to connect with you.

When I was a brand new SRE, my team’s director was visiting our office for the first time since I had joined the team. He offered up office hours, and I signed up for them. I hadn’t yet met him in person or 1:1, but I’d heard a mix of things about him and I wanted to see what he had to say. I was working on a project with frustrating partners, and so I figured I’d use office hours to 1) make sure he knew it was frustrating (he did) and 2) get his advice on how to make it less so (he gave a ton).

This was back before distributed and hybrid teams were the controversial hotness. I didn’t get the benefit of the geographical proximity to this director; he was in Dublin, while I was in Seattle. From an org chart standpoint, there was no proximity either: he was my boss’s boss’s boss. I got emails from him, but only the broad announcements he sent to the whole organization. While he seemed friendly enough, I had made 0 prior efforts to get to know him at all, and I was too junior enough to know why I would want to.

To my surprise, no one else signed up for office hours, so he did something weird: he gave me the full two hours of his time. What started as a junior SRE trying to be a little brave that day wound up shaping the next two years of my career. We never once had laptops out. We mostly worked on a notepad and a dry erase board. I walked out of that room feeling like my leadership understood what I was working on, where the challenges were, and just gave me about a dozen new things to go try. Not all of the advice panned out, but a heck of a lot of it did, and even when Colm was no longer my director, I often sought out his opinion when I was at a crossroads in my career. He was someone I could trust, even when I disagreed with him. Those leaders are rarer than they should be.

Tell them what’s helpful for you to know.

The people who report up to you, sometimes separated by layers of middle management, have likely never had your role. It can be easy to forget over time that they don’t think like you do simply because… that’s not their job! If you’re asking someone to come present to you to inform your own decision making, build trust by setting them up for success.

I would see this in leadership presentations all of the time: engineers talking about implementation details to directors. It wasn’t that the directors weren’t technical enough to understand (they often were far more experienced) or that they didn’t care what you used to get the job done (they want a performant and cost-effective project); it was that it was missing the whole point of the conversation. Most of these reviews were about strategic direction and progress and providing the necessary information input for higher level leaders to make decisions. What were we doing and was it working? Were things easier or harder than we thought they’d be? What was at risk? What problems were we uncovering? Of these three options, which should we do next?

The directors that held the most successful conversations set their presenters up for success. They gave outlines on what they wanted answer at minimum, with the freedom for teams to add on additionally. This was a great way to gain trust. No one wants to show up in front of their boss’s boss and fall flat on their face giving them all of the wrong information. There also isn’t a set recipe for success here, and autonomy to account for nuance can be empowering. However, it gets less intimidating to present to someone with more power than you if everyone is aligned on expectations and what they want to get out of the interaction.

Templates can be a great way to do this. Sharing examples of past presentations that drove the right conversations, not just those that shared the most positive results. Show that you want to be challenged, told bad news so that you can head it off, and forced to think through approaches in new ways. Your people will respect and appreciate you for it.

Remember, these are just playbooks. You’ll know your organization best. Try out an AMA or a praise program or a feedback form. Sometimes even just by mixing up what you’ve been doing in order to collect feedback, you’ll get people’s fresh attention and perspectives again. Good luck and keep talking.