Conversations With #AskAsh

All this talk about communication might have you thinking– what is the true cost of poor communication?

If you’ve got that question in your head, you’re in the right place! This episode is largely my rant on how to spot and improve poor communication. 

We’ve got some hard statistics on the almost unimaginable expense to productivity and profitability that poor communication causes. Once I paint that picture for you I won’t leave you hanging– I’ve got a ton of approaches and exercises that you can implement to start improving your communication today!

• What constitutes poor communication and why it exists
• How ineffective communication accounted for over $1.2 Trillion in annual losses among businesses in 2022
• The specific elements that make up the culture of communication in your organization and teams
• Strategies you can use to develop better communication amongst your team
• The differences between internal and external communication and how to improve each

• “Leaders estimate teams lose the equivalent of an entire workday– 7.47 hours each week– to poor communication. Approximately $12,506 per employee.”
• “You want to begin to understand as individuals, how should we communicate?  This goes to knowing yourself as well as the other person.”
• “We have tools that will help us become efficient. Will you let technology help you?”
• “You want to be vocal, you want to discuss with one another. How are we going to communicate? How will we collaborate, what tools will we use– what is our process?”
• “Where do I stand in terms of how I communicate? What could be better?  What could improve? What’s going well? Evaluate what’s working and what’s not.”

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Alright entrepreneurs! Well, not just entrepreneurs, but for anyone that works with clients on a daily basis, this one’s for you! 

Today we’re joined again by Qwantel Mosley, a great friend of mine who left her job to become an online business manager. For those of you thinking of going out on your own to coach, consult, freelance or anything else having to do with clients– Qwantel is your girl to help answer those inevitable first-timer questions.

So sit back and take notes as I guide us through Qwantel’s journey to becoming a successful and efficient business owner. There's a ton to learn and apply directly to your own business in this one!

• Managing client relationships in a way that's healthy for all parties involved
• How to specialize, grow your business, and provide enough value with hard ROI to justify a higher retainer
• The importance of having contracts in place when managing multiple projects
• How to handle a situation where things DON'T go as planned within client work, and how bad communication is often at the root of the problem
• Knowing when to walk away from a project that just isn't the right fit, and how to do so professionally

• "You're on retainer; you don't want to get comfortable. It's like if you're in a relationship and stop going on dates. If you let it go stale, it will."
• "It's important that you know when to walk away, and understand that every project is not the best project. You have to be careful with getting caught in your feelings."
• "Communication is so huge in just the discovery call itself. When you start asking these deep questions and they answer them in ways that give you 'uh-oh' feelings; pay attention to your internal understanding."
• "There could be a thousand things, but what is the thing you feel is hindering your funds from coming through when it comes to your actual marketing? So, that's the first thing I ask whenever I ask someone to prioritize.”
• "If the things that you present to me within your goals tell me that you have no time to dissect all the ideas that are within your head, we probably should not be on retainer."

Connect with Qwantel: https://qwantellatay.com/  

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Who’s still working from home? The world was forever changed when COVID forced us all out of the office and into the home office. But every company, team and manager is different when it comes to ongoing work-from-home policy.

For today’s show, I invited Juan Alvarado back on the podcast to discuss what’s really driving the decisions around working from home. We get into all the details about how work from home is working, the considerations of managers and employees, and much more.

• What Juan has seen in the day and age of “return to the office, or not?”
• How remote teams are built and managed
• The root causes behind the “quiet quitting” trend
• How to truly get to know your staff and team members
• Creating and maintaining a true bond with you team remotely

• “Staff will go to work for a paycheck because it pays their bills, but they’ll stay because of the relationships that they have there.”
• “It’s OK to mess up. We need to make sure that we have the right people around you so that if you’re stuck, you feel comfortable enough to ask for assistance.”
• “Less than a third of people say that in the last 6 months they have been recognized, and for a majority of those people that have been recognized; it’s been from a co-worker”
• “In a world today where a lot of people get offended for every little thing, people are really careful about what they say. Sometimes when you’re too careful you’re going to screw up your message. Just come out and say what you need and what you want, but do it professionally.”
• “Connect with remote workers I would say 2-3 times a week, one of those times being about anything but work.”

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Knowledge is power! But your knowledge is only as powerful as it is accessible and appropriately distributed throughout an organization. Thankfully, in this episode we are tackling the topic of knowledge management from top to bottom!

You may or may not have heard of knowledge management before, but as a concept, it’s been around for quite a while! We explore some of the more well-known and proven definitions of it and talk about the reality of how to manage knowledge within your teams and life.

This is a hefty one to cover, so notetaking is strongly encouraged! Don’t be shy– break out those notepads and journals and follow me as we dive into this transformational topic.

• What is knowledge management? We explore and evaluate different definitions from key industry players.
• How does knowledge management work? What does it do?
• The three types of knowledge– explicit, tacit, and implicit– and how to manage them each differently.
• The foundational components of making a knowledge management database.
• What a knowledge base is and how to create your own.

• “How can we make sure that we’re utilizing past projects, initiatives and programs in such a way that we can really look at the progression of it, take from the different components of it, build upon, learn from it, and create something fantastic?”
• “Knowledge management is about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time.”
• “People need information; it needs to be in a place in space where people can act on it and make decisions, get the work done, get back to clients, help other team members and people in their communities.”
• “This is not about replicating a particular person’s swag and how they’re able to go about doing this– there’s no way that you can duplicate that. But, if we’re talking about knowing just the right words to use within copy to attract and engage your audience, that is tacit knowledge.”
• “A knowledge base improves communication because you’re not trying to remember what needs to be said or recall information.”

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Let me paint this picture for you– it’s 9 AM Monday morning, and you’re scrambling to pull your calendar up to join the team's meeting to prep for the executive meeting where you’ll prepare for that big client meeting coming up next week. What fun!

Most people don’t love meetings they feel are unnecessary. There’s a variety of reasons why your teammates may feel like that, and we’re going to break them down in this episode.

The more efficient you can make your meetings by planning, executing, and including the right people, the more your team will thank you for valuing their time inside and outside of the meeting itself!

• What is a meeting to begin with? What differentiates meetings from regular conversations or interactions?
• The specific reasons why people hate meetings, so that we can understand and hopefully constructively change them.
• The different types of meetings that there are, how long they typically take, and what’s typically covered in each.
• How to effectively organize and execute meetings so that people feel their time is valued and the meeting itself was successful and productive.
• The ways that you can actually hold meetings, whether it be remote or in person.

• “Video conferences increase productivity by 89%.”
• “The top 5 reasons why people hate meetings: 

1. There’s no focus

2. There’s too many people in the meeting

3. People are arriving late or leaving early

4. There are no action items or next steps 

5. There are no notes being taken”

• “Who is facilitating the meeting? You want to make sure that there is a time limit for each topic, so that you’re not running over, people are not getting bored, and you have the right people speaking at the right time.”
• “You want to leave room for creativity and questions. I think it’s really important that you leave room for people to create solutions, and also think outside the box and ask questions. How are you actually going to create an environment that facilitates creativity and questions?”
• “Reaching consensus doesn’t mean that everybody likes the decision. You may say at the beginning of the meeting, ‘Hey, we need to make a decision on these three things.’ That’s just getting people ready and setting their expectations.”

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Now that we’ve laid out some of the important pillars behind communication throughout the earlier episodes of this series– let’s get down to business! How does one actually apply these learnings to create a communications plan?

You might think creating guidelines for the way your organization and its components communicate is overkill, or may even make things awkward or inefficient. Rather than forcing unrealistic guidelines and processes on your team, to create a proper communications plan is to consider the most efficient and therefore comfortable ways of getting information to the right places at the right times.

Framed that way, it’s actually about eliminating that awkwardness and inefficiency before it arises, and adapting between what works and does not work overtime! Now you might ask yourself, “how does one go about doing that?”

• What is a communications plan? What’s included in it and why is it important?
• Why does my team need a communications plan? Can’t we just figure it out as we get to know each other and form a workflow? (Spoiler alert: Bad idea!) 
• The importance of selecting communications channels and how to set specific guidelines for each.
• What are the benefits? What will the return on investment be from my time spent creating this plan?
• How does one build a communications plan? How do you craft guidelines that are easily followable for team members and relevant stakeholders?

• “Your communications plan should really be your one-stop shop for your project communication strategy. What communication channels should we use, and how should we use these channels?”
• “This is definitely not a PR Strategy. This is not about social media, identifying your target audience, or key messages. This is where we are documenting guidance on how we communicate with the project team on certain details and project status updates to stakeholders like our clients, customers, and contractors.”
• “This is about communicating the right information, to the right stakeholders, at the right time. Not everyone has to be notified of all the details. So you have to decide, depending on the scenario, who needs to be on the conference call and who doesn’t.”
• “All of this has three central components: the people, the process and the technology.”
• “Even if you’re a new team and you’re just getting to know each other– I think just putting out the do’s and dont’s of communication is great. This is a perfect opportunity because you’re just learning about each other.”

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I wanted to cover a subject that I feel is a bit underrepresented, especially in the dynamic of a professional setting– and that is the subject of conflict! 

There’s an art to fighting, and I’m not referring to Martial Arts when I say that. I’m talking about the art of arguing with grace when conflict does arise. Even when conflict makes us uncomfortable (as it should!), there may be valuable information and resolution that we leave on the table when we don’t know how to argue with grace.

In no way am I advocating for arguing, any behavior that crosses boundaries or hurts people. Conflict is a natural part of life, and in this episode I work on outlining the healthiest practices and approaches to making it far more constructive than it is destructive.

• Why Organizational Silence is one of the biggest threats to the workplace and how it functions.
• What the Harvard Business Review has to say about relationships and how silence is one of the leading indicators of a serious rift. 
• How to speak up in a way that promotes innovation and growth, without being disrespectful of others.
• How to remain humble in conflict to avoid getting triggered and turning the conflict towards the more unproductive side of things.
• Specific steps to take that will improve the healthiness of the conflicts that do arise in your life.

• “I love the aspect of having impassioned opinions about things because what it does is it sparks more curiosity, more thoughts, and more ideas, which can be turned into action.”
• “Now more than ever, people’ve got a boldness. Because we’ve been stripped of some of the distractions and some of the structure in how we’re working.”
• “If you’re one of those leaders of a project, it’s so very important that the vision is clear. I say this often– but I feel there’s wasted time when we’re not clear on what we’re building.”
• “No yelling or raising of voices. That doesn’t really help anybody. As a leader, you want to make sure everyone has a cool head.”
• “I believe in whiteboarding the conflict. Write out what the issue is, and what the scenario is. That addresses what the problem or issue is rather than blaming the person.”

How a Culture of Silence Eats Away at Your Company

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When it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, I feel that there’s often a more nuanced conversation to be had. So to create that conversation, I invited Jesse Ross on the show! 

Jesse is a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, executive coach, and international speaker who has delivered over 400 speaking engagements at colleges, conferences, corporate and nonprofit companies, with a large number of Fortune 500 companies.

We dig right into Jesse’s work and the specific strategies that he’s used to help create real DEI momentum. You’ll hear about his story, and how he’s working in  real time to change the way we think about DEI.

• What actually builds Diversity, Equity and Inclusion! Less performative actions and theorizing, and more of the reality of what really works.
• How to understand yourself so that you can better get to know and understand others.
• The importance of communication in promoting and enabling DEI.
• A fuller, more inclusive definition of what DEI really means and what it covers beyond the most frequently discussed aspects of it.
• How to appropriately understand and handle conflict regarding DEI.

• “Are you answering the question that nobody’s asking? If I’m answering the question that nobody’s asking, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing– but maybe I should focus on what people are asking first.”
• “The systemic outcome can’t pre-determine success based on numbers. We can’t say because I have five of these and six of these and seven of those, now we get equity. It just doesn’t work out like that.”
• “It comes through spending time, having exposure to people that are different from us, building that vocabulary, doing the trainings and experiencing things together.”
• “People don’t actually realize how much time it takes to build that trust. We hear companies say ‘This is a safe space’ and I always tell people, ‘just because you say it’s a safe space, it doesn’t make it safe.’”
• “I do think it’s best when it comes from the top, but I do think there’s some spaces where it doesn’t have to, or it doesn’t have to start there.”

More From Jesse Ross

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What is an async world? In this episode, we breakdown asynchronous communication and how to make it work for you and your team!

Asynchronous communication has been around in some degree for quite a while, but our circumstances with the pandemic and remote work have drastically increased the amount of async communication that we have in our teams on a day to day basis.

Since none of us were handed a playbook on how to communicate in this new world, I decided to share some of the practices that have been helping me navigate communication with my team. These are the actions that I take to balance between the necessary asynchronous communication I have on a day-to-day basis as well as the more traditionally present communication that we’re all familiar with.

• How to create a communication plan– taking into consideration people, the process, and technology
• Different tools to help successfully execute that communication plan. Hint: we’re going to go DEEP on Slack and why it’s so great for this!
• The benefits of asynchronous communication, including but not limited to the flexibility, as well as the increased honesty that async communication usually creates
• How to communicate your preferred communication style! They won’t know if you don’t tell them!

• “One person is providing information. There’s a lag of time before a recipient takes that information and provides a response.”
• “Asynchronous communication allows us to filter out the communication that is urgent, filter out the communication that doesn’t require an immediate response, and it allows for team members to collaborate effectively.”
• “You’re not hiding! With asynchronous communication and the way that we’re working now, there’s no hiding in silos with your communication. It’s for everyone to see.”
• “Not all communication channels are made equal. Communication as we know is a necessary skill, and something that constantly needs to be worked on.”
• “What we’ve been experiencing in these past two and a half years is, ‘How do I properly communicate my ideas, my thoughts, actions items, my vision– how do I communicate that in such a way where my team members understand what I’m saying.’”

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Welcome to the season of communication breakdown! After a brief hiatus and period of reflection where I consumed different information from expert podcasters and business professionals, had open conversations with podcast producers, and prayed for creative inspiration, I had an epiphany that led to the theme of this season.

Communication is the lifeblood of your organization, and needless to say, it’s been completely upended by the pandemic with the advent of remote work. Managers were faced with the task of restructuring their teams and workflows to satisfy new needs in a changing work environment. 

But since not every person, team, and organization has adapted in the same way, in this episode we delve into the details of the top of mind actions you can take to preserve and improve upon communication at work. 

By now you’re asking “Great Ash, how can I become a better communicator and leader of communication at work?”

• Communication 101: A crash course in how communication worked before the pandemic vs. now
• How we go about managing, organizing, creating, and executing our work
• Living in an asynchronous world, how to balance asynchronous vs synchronous communication and what they both mean
• How to vision board and execute what the communication workflow looks like for your team on a day-to-day basis
• The way to use communication tools, determining which are best for which application, and how to set and maintain effective boundaries

• “We go from the in-person experience to the remote experience, and for some that shift was easier, for others it was very difficult. So now we have to think of people, process and technology in a different way.”
• “Asynchronous communication means I don’t have to respond to a message right away… Asynchronous communication allows for space in between the sender and the receiver.”
• “What is time sensitive information? Not all communication is urgent, and not all communication needs to be acted upon. You must decide what constitutes that urgent or time sensitive communication.”
• “It may be that not everyone needs to know particular information at the time that it’s being communicated or relayed. The decision that needs to be made; you need some strategists involved before you get the operations and the implementers in.”
• “Going from synchronous communication in person– hopping in Ubers, flying in person to meetings– we went from that to literally shutting that down, and going straight remote. So we had to figure out how we were going to structure communication.”

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