69% of Managers Won’t Communicate With Their Team?

I’ve been reading The Song of Significance by Seth Godin. The book is organized into 144 very short chapters. He writes so well and offers such thought provoking material.

Chapter 92 is titled Work to Be Done where Godin quotes Lou Solomon from a Harvard Business Review study that indicates 69% of managers are uncomfortable with the essential need of communicating with their employees. Godin writes that he believes many of the other 31% are lying.

My Early Experience Leading Teams

My memory of early experiences leading teams is imperfect, but I do recall being particularly uncomfortable getting started with team communication. How should one organize an initial meeting?

I found, or created, a simple model that I’ve used ever since for beginning team meetings. It’s effective for grounding teams on shared goals, and promoting behaviors and habits we want to see repeated.  The model focuses on Goals-Progress-Behaviors (GPB).

After pleasantries and recognizing significant personal achievements or circumstances, I always start meetings with this model;

1.  Goals and Why

a.  These are the team goals and why they were selected or assigned

2.  Progress

a.  This is the team’s progress toward these goals.  This usually involves looking at a scorecard of some sort

3.  Behaviors

a.  These are actions or behaviors that specific team members are taking and are contributing to goal achievement. The not too subtle message is that this is the sort of effort that will be recognized, and we’d like to see team members do more of this type of activity.

4.  Next steps

a.  A discussion of what actions and behaviors will help the team reach the scorecard goals

5.  Anything and everything else

 

I’ve been invited to speak on this topic several times. Once after presenting I decided to document the process further in a book. I wrote and made available an e-book available here on Amazon sites worldwide including at this link https://a.co/d/6szUOEt

I also wrote a blog post on recognizing the opportunity to write the book https://gycz.blogspot.com/2022/05/listening-paying-attention-opportunity.html

 

Conclusion

The estimate that 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their team members seems high to me. But Godin has written 78 books and sold million of copies, many more than me.

As in most situations, some simple, repeatable models and approaches can make this task easier for developing managers.