Success hinges on quality communication. Many technology managers stumble when responding to questions. Learn new ways to think about and respond to queries in a corporate environment.
Introduction
The wider an area one is responsible for, the more one will be called on to provide updates, answer questions, and generally represent varied work. These questions come from peers and the layers above.
Those of us who were previously engineers are often not good at responding to these questions. Depending on the circumstances and who is asking, it is common for explanations to devolve into discussions of minute details, burying the answer in a sea of irrelevant or confusing technicalities, often missing the point entirely.
Failing to adequately and concisely respond to a query doesn’t feel good. It can cause the requester to be frustrated, waste time with clarifying questions, and reduce the chances they’ll come to you with these questions next time.
This is not good for career advancement and does not help the organisation win.
Why We Do This: Our Happy Place
Diving deep into a subject and exploring every angle was the secret to success when dealing with technical problems. It is often the “happy place” we return to when uncertain, stressed, or under time pressure.
A helpful model to consider why we fall back on this is the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. Diving deep is intuitive or absorbing, while communicating at the level required to succeed as a manager is difficult and requires conscious focus.
A Strategy to Improve
Identifying maladaptive behaviours is the first and most difficult step to becoming better - if you’ve just reached this milestone: congratulations! The rest is fairly easy though time-consuming.
I’ve approached retraining myself to respond more usefully in situations where I’m liable to fall back into my deep-dive happy place by creating a structured approach I can force myself to follow. Eventually, it’ll become second nature.
Improving your communication is as simple as looping through these actions: Read, Think, Write, Review, Repeat, Send.
Read
Carefully and with focus, read the request. Don’t press reply or start thinking about your response immediately.
Think
Depending on the combination of seniority, surrounding context, and potential outcomes of the answer, you’ll want to spend anywhere from a few minutes to much longer on this step. Knee-jerk responses to high-level management entail a level of risk that is seldom worth taking.
Think about the request from the perspective of the one asking, and try to understand what’s going on around the question.
- What context do they have or lack that might be relevant?
- Is there anything between the words you might have missed?
- What are the drivers behind this question?
- Why are they asking about this now?
The less context someone has, the more possible answers might exist for their questions. Ambiguity like this is tough. Try to reduce this uncertainty by consider the situation with the questions above.
When considering how to respond, also consider whether something has happened recently (e.g. an outage, a particularly fiery review meeting, something good) that may have triggered this question? How might this influence the response they expect?
Write
Draft a response. Fewer words is better.
Review
Read the question again. Read your response:
- Have you answered the question?
- Have you included anything extraneous?
- Have you included context where relevant?
Nobody likes to read 10 pages where a paragraph will do. Make sure you’ve been parsimonious with your words but don’t be a Spartan. Just as nobody likes reading an essay, they also don’t like to ask 10 clarifying questions. There is a balance, try to find it.
Repeat, Send
If you’re not 80-90% confident you’ve answered it well, start the process again. If you are, or you’ve run out of time, send off your response.
Lean on senior colleagues or your manager for advice. It’s our job to help each other out in these situations and people will understand the struggle to learn this skill. Honesty and a humble demeanour seldom goes badly.
As you respond in this way, keep an ear out for any reactions or responses. These can come directly as replies, from requests you make for feedback or hearsay. Use this information to inform changes in your approach.
Realise even the most well-formed reply may result in follow-up questions - these aren’t inherently bad. What we want to avoid are follow-up questions that could have been avoided by a more appropriate message. The goal is to help your audience understand what they were missing in the shortest possible time. Alignment is key to success in a large organisation. Everything you say or write either helps align teams or confuses them.
Principle of Simplicity
Communication is hard and large organisations are complicated. Keep your communication simple, to the point, and unambiguous.
Craft your reply to suit the audience and be ready to field follow-ups. Each interaction is an opportunity to help push the organisation forward, keep this in mind and put the appropriate amount of thought into your words.
