Healthy Communication Is the Foundation for a Successful Team
All a management consultant really gets hired to do is get people in a room together, talking openly about their stuff with each other, and guide them toward the direction of their goals.
The hardest thing in the world is to get people in a room together, talking openly about their stuff with each other, and guide them toward the direction of their goals.
To do this well requires a consultant who has a point of view, shaped by both knowledge and experience. They need to give sound recommendations and good advice.
But the number one obstacle, and the number one skill a consultant needs, is the ability to foster effective communication within a team.
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You often end up as the safe intermediary when you consult with a company. Because you’re outside the organizational politics, you get the raw, unfiltered opinions of how team members feel about one another.
I’m happy to be in the loop, but when I start hearing information that is really feedback for someone else, it’s a sign that the conversation needs to move in a different direction.
My go-to response is always: “Have you said this directly to that person?”
What I usually hear is some version of no.
“No, I haven’t tried that.”
“I tried, but I wasn’t as clear as I need to be.”
“Well, not yet….”
Most personalities are naturally conflict-avoidant, so if sharing something directly might lead to interpersonal friction, we tend to avoid it like the plague.
But often we aren’t giving our teammates enough credit. Sharing directly can create far less friction than you might expect. You might give a piece of tough feedback, or ask someone to adjust their approach, and get a simple “Sounds good” in return.
You could do that, or you could spend months agonizing, complaining, and resenting that person. Who all the while was clueless you even had an issue—or sensed it but didn’t know what the real problem was, which is worse.
(As an aside, this doesn’t only apply in negative situations either! I’ve advised plenty of leaders who admire an employee from afar to go tell them what a good job they are doing. Sometimes we need a push to give positive feedback, too.)
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Challenges, problems, issues, even opportunities - they need to be surfaced quickly. That’s different from saying they need to be dealt with quickly. You might identify a problem and intentionally not deal with it for 6 months. But recognizing the problem is there, rather than burying it, allows you to make a decision about when to deal with it rather than ignoring it altogether.
Ongoing communication, in which the important stuff gets said, is critical to a healthy, well-functioning team.
That requires a few things:
The right people in the room. This is why it’s critical to map out your company’s roles: only leaders belong in a leadership meeting. Otherwise, the meeting gets dragged into operational details.
The right cadence. Strategic planning needs to happen every 90 days. That really is the Goldilocks number. Leadership needs to come together on a weekly basis to keep each other in the loop and keep their goals for the quarter on track.
The right culture. You must foster a culture where team members are comfortable saying the hard thing out loud. If it isn’t safe for them to express a difference of opinion, give critical feedback, or share how they’re feeling about a decision, they won’t do it.
Look, teams don’t do this for the most human reason possible: it’s really, really hard. If you find it difficult to be fully open and honest, you aren’t alone. Your team isn’t alone. It’s completely normal—but it’s also unproductive.
That’s the real value of stepping into a room as a consultant. When I walk in, I don’t carry the same baggage that the team does. I can recognize the patterns of communication and avoidance that I’ve seen a thousand times across a hundred teams. And I can call them out, because it’s safe for me to do so.
That’s 90% of the job. The other 10% is the good advice on exactly what to do next.
But it really is 10%. Because most of the time, most teams have most of the answers in the room with them. They just need the confidence to say so.
