What Got You Here

Why internal communication breaks down as a business grows or changes

Part two of four: Internal Communications for Engagement and Growth

In most small businesses, internal communication works because it goes through the owner or the manager. You are in every conversation. You see everything. At eight people that is fast and it works.

But that model has a ceiling.

Add people, a second site, a manager in between you and the people doing the work. Suddenly you are the bottleneck. Information gets stuck at the top and people stop acting without checking, because they have learned to wait to be told.

The question worth sitting with is this: where is the bottleneck in my business, and is it me?

And if your business is steady in size rather than growing, don’t assume this doesn’t apply. The same thing happens with any change: a key person leaves, someone new joins, the busy season hits. No business is immune.

The strengths that start to work against you

You may be familiar with the phrase: what got you here won’t get you there. In my experience the strengths don’t stop being strengths. What happens is subtler. Under pressure, and without awareness, each one tips over into its own shadow.

Speed, decisiveness and being the one with the answers are real strengths in the early years of a business. They are often the reason it survived.

Under pressure, speed becomes impatience. Decisiveness becomes rigidity. And when you are always the one with the answer, people learn that you have already decided, so they stop offering their input.

Now look at it from the other side of the desk. On the receiving end, those things feel like being rushed, being unheard, and not being trusted.

Ask yourself honestly: do any of those feelings invite engagement? That is how a growing business goes quiet at exactly the moment it needs more voices.

The cost of the thing nobody said

I worked with a leader some years ago who was highly regarded, and who had all the qualities we traditionally admire in leaders. He was fast, decisive, charismatic and he had the answers. People genuinely enjoyed working with him.

His team were tasked with outsourcing part of the operation, and he decided on a particular location. Some members of his team had concerns about that choice. Nobody said so.

About six months after the operation was up and running, for exactly the reasons his team had privately worried about, it wasn’t working. The whole thing had to be shut down and moved somewhere else.

When we looked back at it together, what became clear was that the knowledge needed to make the right decision had been in the room all along. What was missing was the time, the space and the safety for anyone to say it out loud. People thought: he knows what he’s doing, I’ll stay quiet.

The financial cost was significant. So was the human one.

Amy Edmondson, the Harvard researcher, calls what was missing there psychological safety: a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In plain terms, it means I can speak up without being embarrassed, shamed or dismissed. I might be disagreed with, but I will be listened to, and the focus will be on what we can learn rather than on who is at fault. It is not a soft extra. It is the thing that decides whether the knowledge in your business ever reaches the decision.

“We told them” is not the same as “they understood”

The other thing that breaks as a business grows is the assumption that saying something is the same as landing it.

When something goes wrong, most leaders will say, quite genuinely, “but I told them”. And they did. Telling says nothing about how the message was understood, or how it felt.

You may remember the weeks of Ryanair flight cancellations in September 2017. At the root of it was a change to the pilots’ leave year. The change had been made, but it hadn’t been communicated in a way people understood in time to plan around it, and by the time the consequences became clear it was too late to fix. The disruption landed on employees and on customers alike.

It had been communicated, it hadn’t been understood and that gap had both financial and human consequences.

The fix is not to tell more, or to tell it louder. It is to change the balance between telling and asking which is where the next article goes.

Three questions to sit with

• Where is the bottleneck? Look at what decisions and actions wait for your involvement. That is usually where the business has outgrown the way you communicate.
• Which of my strengths is tipping over? Speed into impatience, decisiveness into rigidity, having the answers into nobody offering theirs.
• When did someone last disagree with me out loud? If you can’t remember, that is information, and it is not about them.

If you would like to go further into this, I have written elsewhere about the leadership qualities that take a business to the next level. You will find it in the resources section of koiconsulting.ie.

This series is based on a session delivered for the Dungarvan & West Waterford Chamber Communications Series, sponsored by Local Enterprise Office Waterford.