Coaching for Clarity: Creating a Communication Infrastructure

Credit: Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

An oft-unexplored area of performance coaching involves setting clear expectations with your staff around how you'd like them to write. Yes, write.

Why is this deserving of your time as a manager? If you make your expectations around writing process and product explicit, you will boost your staff's productivity and increase their sense of personal efficacy.

Too often, staff waste valuable time crafting messages for senior leaders, only to have to rewrite them because they were unaware of a key piece of information crucial to the tone or positioning of the piece.

Effective leaders know that communicating strategically doesn't happen in a vacuum; it requires a coordinated effort. It requires creating an infrastructure that supports staff in receiving feedback early on in the development of a major document, rather than once it's been finalized. It's much easier to make changes when ideas are roughly sketched, rather than fully fleshed out.

Creating this infrastructure means equipping staff with the skills and means for removing obstacles that usually stand in the way of writing productivity.

Here are some tips on how you can do just that:

• Advocate for a cultural shift away from revising "perfect" documents to one that encourages early input on raw ideas.

• Identify/facilitate the formation of strategic communication channels across the wider organization.

• Ensure your staff tap these communication channels early on for context and feedback, before too much effort has been expended exploring a particular direction.

• Articulate the department's voice and vision in plain language.

• Encourage staff to use context and input to inform structure, and use AI at the later stages of the writing process, to synthesize ideas and promote flow.