How to Improve Team Communication Like an Expert

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Leadership Strategy and Tactics" by Jocko Willink. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Want to know how to improve team communication? How do the greatest leaders communicate with their teams?

According to leadership expert and author Jocko Willink, the key to being a good leader is putting others before yourself. In Leadership Strategies and Tactics, he explains how to improve team communication by building quality relationships, trust, and taking radical responsibility for problems.

Keep reading to learn how to improve team communication, according to Willink’s advice.

Improving Team Communication

In Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Jocko Willink says if communication is poor or lacking altogether, teams don’t understand the big picture or how their individual roles relate to the team’s mission. As a result, your team’s morale drops and the group risks falling apart. As a leader, it’s important to know how to improve team communication when it’s lacking because regular, quality communication is necessary to keep a team synced, healthy, and strong. In this article, we’ll explain Willink’s advice for improving team communication, based on the descriptions from his book Leadership Strategy and Tactics.

Have Conversations With Your Team

It sounds simple but is often overlooked: By regularly talking to your team members, you’ll get to know their perspectives better. Understanding each other’s points of view will not only improve team communication but will further strengthen trust among your team. Here are a few tips for connecting with people on your team through conversation:

Get to know your team’s roles and responsibilities. Have them take you through their tasks. Ask them what does and doesn’t work for them so you can understand their daily life and improve any flaws in your team’s operation.

(Shortform note: It can also be beneficial to have your team members teach you something unrelated to their professional role. Connecting over a more casual subject can be a great way to bond. Additionally, you could arrange occasional workshops (in-person or virtual) where someone on your team hosts a meeting to teach something they’re passionate about. This way, you not only bond with that one team individual, but your whole team gets to know each other better.)

Validate other team members’ emotions and opinions. If you’re talking with someone who’s emotional about something, match their emotion first, then bring the intensity down as you ask questions and try to solve the problem. Matching their emotion will make the other person feel like you’re on their side. When people have opinions that don’t align with the team’s mission, empathize with their idea, then ask questions to understand the reason for their opinion. By understanding their ideas, Willink claims you’ll be able to counter and convince them to support your team’s goals more effectively.

(Shortform note: If someone’s negative thoughts or emotions are wearing on you or taking a lot of your time, experts say it’s important to set boundaries. This could mean establishing times during the day when you’re available to talk or limiting the majority of your interactions to email exchanges.)

Make Your Instructions Simple and Clear

To improve team communication, remember to use simple language that everyone on the team can understand. Willink says that a good way to ensure your message was clearly understood is to ask your team members to explain to you in their own words what you told them. Finally, communicate to your team in more than one format because different people absorb information best in different ways. For example, if you deliver news or instructions in person, follow up with an email that summarizes your message.

(Shortform note: Miscommunications can be sussed out and cleared up if you give your team many opportunities to discuss the plan and ask questions. As we mentioned earlier, Willink promotes the idea of welcoming criticism and suggestions from your team, but you can encourage any questions that people might be hesitant to ask by hosting open forums or arranging anonymous surveys. You can also optimize the variety of communication channels you use by asking the people on your team which mediums they prefer.)

Tell Your Team the Truth

Another way to maintain good relationships with your team is to always tell the truth. While it’s easy to deliver positive truths to your team, if you don’t communicate harsh truths, problems that might be easily solved with the support of your team will be harder to correct. If your team’s not aware of a problem, they can’t help you overcome it.

(Shortform note: Telling the truth isn’t just beneficial for improving team communication and the success of your team; it also supports good health. One study found that when participants consciously tried not to lie for 10 weeks, they reported significantly fewer negative mental and physical health symptoms than those who didn’t avoid lying.)

Additionally, if you try to hide the negative side of a situation, your team will eventually find out on their own, which can cause them to lose their trust in you or even spread harmful rumors about why it’s happening. When people aren’t told what’s going on, they speculate about why bad things are occurring. Willink says that speculations made in the dark are always worse than the reality. These negative ideas are harmful because they can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, if your team believes your company is going to fail, they might start working carelessly because they believe the company is going under anyway. As a result, the company suffers even more and eventually fails.

(Shortform note: Although transparency can prevent many problems, there are certain cases where transparency could do more harm than good. In Principles, Ray Dalio argues that information is best kept quiet when it involves personal issues, when it could put the long-term interests of your team or your clients at risk, or when sharing information is likely to be more distracting than beneficial to their performance.)

Willink says when a problem occurs, address it with your team as soon as possible. The longer you wait to break bad news, the harder it will be to tell your team and the more time there is for problems and rumors to develop. Rip off the Band-Aid and tell your team what’s going on.

Organize Your Problems, Then Address Them

An important step in improving team communication is learning how to break bad news. Willink recommends breaking bad news to your team as soon as you can, but what do you do if the issue isn’t extremely severe or urgent? In Traction, Gino Wickman argues that problems should be categorized into three different lists depending on their severity:

1. A list of issues for quarterly meetings: These issues aren’t time-pressing and can wait to be dealt with when it’s convenient. For example, if a company-wide norm is being changed by HR.

2. A list of issues for weekly meetings: These are strategic issues that need to be addressed with more urgency. For example, the company’s priorities need to be discussed.

3. A list of urgent, departmental issues: This list contains issues that should be brought to the attention of the department head at a weekly departmental meeting. For example, this could be a meeting to address an unexpected drop in sales or an upcoming presentation that was scheduled last minute.

Benefits of Radical Responsibility

Willink coined the phrase “extreme ownership” and even titled a book after it. Radical responsibility means taking responsibility for all of the problems related to your team and mission. A mindset of radical responsibility not only puts you in a position to solve whatever problems are at hand, but it also helps prevent future issues. If you know that you’ll bear the weight of responsibility for any of your team’s potential missteps, you’ll take preemptive actions to avoid mistakes.

How to Improve Team Communication Like an Expert