002: How Winning Organizations Communicate with EntreLeadership’s Daniel Tardy

There are three primary categories for internal communication — pre-communication, ongoing communication, and pull-push communication. 

• Pre-communication is are the standards you communicate to team members about how you operate and your expectations of them. Pre-communication typically takes place during onboarding and is outlined in the employee handbook and job description, and it’s the most important category of communication as future issues often arise due to lack of pre-communication.
• Ongoing communication is your organization’s approach to recurring and one-off meetings, specifically your cadence and policy — what meetings happen when, how often, and why. These meetings include all-hands, staff meetings for large groups, project meetings for small groups, and one-on-one meetings for check-ins. However, what’s most important is giving yourself and your employees opportunities to connect as an entire staff, as teams or departments, and one-on-one between the leader and their direct reports.
• Pull-push communication is your organization’s process for bottom-up communication. To do this well, Daniel and the EntreLeadership team recommend requiring every team member to complete a weekly report for their leader sharing what they worked on and accomplished during the week as well as high points and low points. By doing so, employees know they’ll always have an opportunity to communicate their concerns and leaders know they’ll always have visibility into their employees’ work. 

During the episode, Daniel reminded us of the key lesson in Stephen Covey’s book “The Speed of Trust” — Organizations move at the speed of trust. As leaders, the question is ‘How do we build trust?’ It’s built through relationships, and relationships are built on communication. This is why communication is so important. Strong communication precedes a strong culture, and a strong culture is what enables teams to respond quickly and more effectively to the challenges in the marketplace and the organization itself.