First, let’s establish the importance of sharing your work style and your communication preferences. Wouldn’t it be helpful if we understood ourselves well enough and we felt confident enough to share with others our quirks and hot buttons in order to help them communicate more effectively with us? And wouldn’t it be awesome if others shared their quirks and preferences in return? It would help us work better with each other.
Sharing these means taking a proactive, intentional approach versus a reactive throw-something-out-there-and-see-what-works approach, which takes up a lot more energy. In addition, the reactive approach doesn’t usually include a personal reflective debrief in an effort to assess what is/isn’t working followed by putting in effort to try to make changes; instead, we are usually left frustrated and venting over misaligned communication or styles.
Personal story: I had a boss one time who wouldn’t respond to emails. He required a lot of babysitting when it came to him providing answers or direction. Often, many of us took the time to succinctly and clearly spell out the issue and questions in an email, which would go unanswered and then we would need to tell him in person that we needed his input to move forward and he would beckon us into his office when it was convenient for him and ask us to “walk him through” the email. Then, he would get constant email notifications that would pop up or phone calls and make us sit there while he chose the interruptions (non-emergencies). Lots of ineffective leadership in this example! I would think: “what is this ‘walk me through’ the email nonsense?” Just because you are too lazy or don’t have the attention span to read it? Then why did I bother sending it? I felt very misaligned with his style.
Sharing your style/preferences:
Who do you share them with? Everyone internally! Bosses, peers, subordinates. Encourage them to share theirs with you as well.
What should you share?
This will take some self-reflection time to get clear on.
✔️ Identify your quirks, unique traits, hot buttons. What grinds your gears? How do you like to work?
✔️ What do you do that annoys others?
✔️ How do you prefer that people respond to your quirks, hot buttons, style?
✔️ What are your preferences for how people communicate with you: by email, by instant message, by phone, in person, by scheduling a meeting (what is appropriate for a meeting in your eyes)?
✔️ How do you want to receive information updates, routine requests, urgent items, feedback, ideas, recognition, venting, problem solving, training questions?
✔️ What items should be sent via email? By instant message? By phone? By in-person interruption? What should wait for 1:1s or meetings?
✔️ What can people expect your response time to be for each item? How do you follow-up?
Setting realistic expectations:
I’ve come across plenty of people who refuse to check/respond to emails or claim they are “bad” at emails. I’ve also witnessed firsthand when people refuse to use the company-wide instant messaging program. This is where senior leadership comes in. At what point is it acceptable behavior to not utilize certain communication methods? What are you willing to tolerate and at what cost? (i.e.: disengaging other employees by tolerating bad ones). It’s their job to clearly state what expectations are and to enforce them. What are you allowing people to do without any consequences? How do you want to run your organization? You’re only as strong as your weakest link. Once one person gets away with something, that’s all it takes to set an example and frustrate everyone.
What happens after you share:
After you share your quirks/preferences and learn what others’ quirks/preferences are and then you can start to work together to flex and adapt your styles in order to have the most effective, productive relationship possible. I believe that both parties should work together on this; it’s a joint effort. The leader can initiate and lead by example and the other person can “manage up” and flex their style as well.
Want to try this out? Let me know what happens!
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