Leah's Leadership Guide - Part 3: Communicate, often
When enough is just not enough
Hi, my name is Leah Tharin, and this is my Substack: hot takes on product-led growth/sales and organizational scaling.
I advise companies on how to not burn everything down in the process. I run cohorts on PLG every two months; join me!
I wrote an article on the topic of why Alignment is at the heart of every great leader; it was one of my most-read articles to date:
Leadership is about leading people in a given direction, not necessarily managing them. At the heart of it is the art of creating alignment and inspiring people to move.
While I think that every manager is, to some degree, a leader, not every leader has direct reports, and IC Leadership (leading without managing people) has been a huge unlock in my career to understand that you lead more people than you manage.
In this 5 part series, I’ll dive into each one of these critical components:
Communicating often (This article)
Experimentation skill to learn, not succeed (coming soon)
Part 3: Communicate Often
In the first part of this Leadership guide, we looked at why Great Storytelling is so crucial: it is the conversion rate of whatever you are saying in a given setting between you and the listener.
Thorough Market knowledge is the second part, whether the information is rooted in reality or pure guesswork.
The first two parts of this guide dealt with how to get the basics right when you open your mouth or put your pencil on the proverbial paper. We dealt with the “how” (storytelling) of delivery and the “what” (truth) that drives us and the people we lead hopefully in the right direction.
In this third part, I want to focus on the bigger picture. How often should we communicate with our peers? The principles stay the same in an intimate 1on1 leadership setting or bigger context: You probably have to do it more often than you think or do.
Let’s map it out:
Cognition and Learning
As a UX researcher and (visually awful) designer at the beginning of my career, I devoured everything I could regarding human interaction design. How humans interface with websites and other complex products became an obsession.
One core part of HID (Human Interaction Design) is rooted in how we consume and process information. The amount of fields that play into this is not the topic of this article save for one:
Cognitive Learning:
“Cognition is the mental process of gaining knowledge and understanding through the senses, experience and thought.”
The learning part is how we save and retain information over a longer period. Or rather, how people who listen to us are retaining that information.
The connection to Leadership is simple: Leadership is only necessary if its absence would make others do something less effective. Teams, audiences, and companies require alignment. New insights and knowledge that were not present before to go into a new direction aligned, together.
The consistency in which people around us are moving in this direction is a major factor in determining whether leadership is effective or not.
As humans, we are of such a complex nature that we constantly require realignment. Ignoring the obvious misunderstandings, even around basic information, that happen in communicating with each other, there is another factor that we need to be aware of when talking to each other: how forgetful we naturally are.
The forgetting curve
Indegene.com has a great article on understanding the science behind learning and how prevalent it is that we forget things:
“The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first to hypothesize and study (in 1885) the now-famous forgetting curve – often referred to as Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve. He noticed that at the time of learning or taking in new information, a learner "knows" 100% of the material. However, the memory of what one learned starts to diminish immediately and rather rapidly.
His studies have been replicated much more recently and have come to the same conclusion – memory loss is exponential immediately after a learning event. As you get further away from the learning event in time, more and more of the information you learned is lost.2” Source: Indegene
I learned this in a similar context through the SIR system, which I adopted from Justin Sung (A fantastic learning coach) from ICanStudy, someone I came across when I tried to deal with my own learning difficulties:
The science is pretty clear that there are three major factors when it comes to how well we are retaining information:
Spacing
Interleaving
Retrieval
Spacing
Spacing is simply how often and when we recall information. It matters, obviously, whether you hear something multiple times a day or just once a year. The more often, the higher the chance of retention.
Interleaving
Interleaving can be explained by presenting the same information in different forms. In the following picture, you can see an example of how I take notes from Books that I think are important.
It helps me to draw the same information after some time in a different form. It forces me to think about the same in a different context.
If I wrote the same info down as it was on the left page, I would probably zone out and copy it without engaging with the meaning of it.
Retrieval
Retrieval is the process of “how” we force ourselves to recall information. By taking the notes into my hand and reading them back, I could recall the information I learned from the book by using the notes easier. But…
By intently leaving the notes away, I would have to recall everything from memory and first principles, which is more cumbersome but, at the same time, more effective in creating long-term memory.
The more “uncomfortable” memory recall is, the more likely there seems to be a long-lasting learning effect.
It’s never “clear” to everyone or anyone.
Great leaders understand naturally that what’s obvious to them may not be obvious to their peers. This often feels counterintuitive. Because we talk as leaders, for instance, about our company strategy every day to all kinds of people, we retain probably everything about it naturally.
It’s “clear” to us.
It might even be clear to most people you are talking to, at least initially, but over time, knowledge deteriorates, and misalignment creeps back in. This is not a lack of competence on the side of your listeners; it’s often simply a case of them not hearing the information enough or varied.
Chinese Whispers, or “the telephone game,” are children’s games that highlight another part of this. Even if there is no problem recalling information, just by passing it on to someone else, there is already a ton of accuracy and alignment lost.
Generally, assume misalignment with everyone after some time.
Bringing it all together
How do we deal with this now in practice as leaders?
We can take a simple approach by not only repeating information more often than we think is comfortable but also by changing the method of how we talk about it:
Instead of repeating the same thing the same way, we can use different visuals, or rephrased forms to talk about the exact same thing.
Communicating, for instance, a company strategy in two different forms might sound counterintuitive, but it forces those who have seen it already to reprocess actively in their brain to bring both versions together.
On the retrieval side, it’s good practice to ask someone to repeat back to you what you just talked about. This is not just to ensure that things were received as intended but also helps them to rephrase in their own words what you just said to help with longer-term retention of the information.
This is especially powerful in intimate 1-on-1 settings, where we often deal with interpersonal problems that are hard to define objectively.
Again, “What are you taking away from this conversation?” is not just to check someone but also to retain that information for longer → the purpose is that we are aligned.
I sometimes also ask people to not consult their notes when doing that, specifically to challenge them from memory and not just reading back notes.
Direct, broad communication in organizations
There is a lure as you become a manager to communicate through your managers to your teams. While this is unavoidable at scale, be careful who you exclude from listening to important information.
Specifically, strategic alignment and decisions that have to be communicated to teams are oftentimes in older tech companies delivered through product & engineering managers instead of directly to everyone involved in the team.
And then people wonder why their engineers and designers are not that business-savvy. It’s because someone relied on the telephone game too much.
The more important the information you want to align on, the more likely you are to involve more people to listen to you directly.
Another problem with relaying strategic decisions through other people is that they oftentimes do not know the underlying reasons for them, and an important opportunity to challenge directly is lost.
Summary
Alignment needs to happen more often than we think. The two factors that play tricks on us are:
our own subjective assumption that things are clearer than they actually are
knowledge deteriorates incredibly fast without repetition, interleaving, or recall
We can counteract the most obvious problems by talking often, differently and actively recalling with our peers about things that matter.
Inspiration, alignment, and leadership are qualities that hinge on consistency, not a one-off thing to check off a checklist.
What’s next?
That’s it for the third part of this 5 part series on this Leadership guide; stay subscribed if you want to be notified about the next one in the series.
In our next article, we talk about accountability to yourself and others around you.
Communicating often (This article)
Experimentation skill to learn, not succeed (coming soon)
This is such a great read and reminder to what we know but all too often set aside.