5 communication strategies

As a leader do you understand the impact of how decisions are taken in your organization? Do you think of which decisions should you involve your employees?

For these questions, Bryan Smith brings an interesting framework on communication with teams, which consists of 5 strategies:

1. Telling people what to do or what is going to happen
2. Adding more context, Selling to people what needs to be done so when self-respect
3. Testing the idea and getting some people and general feedback before taking the decision
4. Consulting before taking the decision, most probably with some smaller groups or workshops, but the decision is still not shared
5. Sharing responsibility for the decision, Co-Creating things together

Topics vary in complexity. You might need to fine-tune or you might need to take a decision on how to split your teams. So for each new topic, the strategy that you should use might be different, but basically, you need to consider:

• Your strategy in the situation
• What kind of impact the decision can create
• How this will affect your employees?

Adding a couple more things to consider, especially in the context of Product Teams and nowadays in the post (for many) remote world:

• If you call a team to do something without or with very little context, how their sense of ownership is going to be?
• On the other side, where you give responsibility to a team to think or work. Does the team have enough context, is the team mature enough to lead this topic?

I created the infographic below to represent the 5 different levels of communication with teams.

What is your take on it?

Reference: Bryan J. Smith - The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook