PART 02: READY? AIM! // ASSOCIATES

01 Associates: Your Team

When we communicate, we do so with other people. Obviously. What is less obvious is that the people we communicate with must be carefully selected. We cannot talk about effective communication and, at the same time, ignore the identity of the people we interact with and the role they play in achieving our goal. We might plan the perfect meeting or write the best email, but if we don’t bring the right people on board, we won’t be able to make much progress, and communication without progress is never effective. 

We already know how important it is to define the mission and the initiative before we trigger a communication flow. The third part of the equation is assembling the team that will work with us to realize the initiative. These are our associates, and just like the mission and the initiative, they are a crucial component in Generative Communication. If we fail to pick the right people to interact with or if we communicate with too many or too few of them, we won’t be able to get closer to our destination. The associates we take with us on this journey must be able to help us make progress actively. Effective communication does not need an audience; it requires a team. 

Your mission and initiative are meaningless if you end up speaking to yourself. 

As with defining the mission and the initiative, identifying your associates requires a bit of processing. The worst thing you can do is run on autopilot. Whether you are about to share a document, write an email, or set up a meeting, you must intentfully pick the smallest effective group to communicate with. If you use a generic distribution list or associatively add people to the discussion, you will not get it right. The only way to identify the right associates is by asking yourself who can contribute to promoting the concrete initiative in the context of the mission. 

As you read this, many people are sitting in meetings asking themselves, “Why was I invited to this discussion?” Numerous conference rooms are crowded with people staring at their phones while two or three colleagues are engaged in a heated discussion. Your inbox is likely to have dozens, if not hundreds, of unread emails you received only because someone used a generic distribution list or “replied-all” without considering who is at the other end. We all know it takes time to write an email or set up a meeting, but we mostly disregard the cost for the people on the To and CC list. When we fail to pick the right associates to communicate with, the cost accumulates rapidly. 

A common mistake in picking our team for the discussion is focusing on the mission and ignoring the initiative (or failing to define an initiative to begin with). Generally speaking, more people can affect (and are affected by) the mission than are relevant when discussing a particular initiative. When you consider the mission “to achieve the project targets,” dozens of people might be relevant. When you set up a meeting with the concrete initiative to mitigate the top risk, only a handful of them can actively help you. Only people who deal with the domain where the risk is, with relevant knowledge and the authority to affect the solution, should be in this discussion. Dozens of other people will appreciate the time saved by not being called to this meeting. Having a focused and deep discussion without these people is much more likely. Picking the right associates is no less important than crafting a razor-sharp initiative before we communicate. Ensuring the team size is manageable and suits the nature of the discussion is also critical. 

That is another reason why focusing on one initiative at a time is highly advisable. When we aim to assemble the fewest people relevant to a discussion, adding more initiatives to the agenda will be counter-productive. Chances are, each initiative requires a different subset of associates. If that is the case, triggering multiple smaller interactions is more effective than a massive discussion in which most people wander off most of the time. 

Picking the right people for a discussion is absolutely critical for communicating effectively. There is a delicate balance between having enough people representing different aspects of the problem or the solution space and turning the conversation into a cacophony of irrelevant statements and opinions. But assembling the right team to interact with is just the first step in working effectively as a group. While your associates can contribute to promoting the initiative, each has a unique perspective. That is the reason for having them in the discussion in the first place — this is how you pick your associates. At the same time, this diversity of perspectives must be considered when designing the communication flow. If we ignore it, we will quickly find ourselves in an ineffective discourse.

No matter how trivial the interaction seems, we won’t be able to promote the initiative without getting to know the people on our team. When we fail to see the people we interact with as different from us, with different aspirations, motivations, constraints, experiences, knowledge, and thoughts, we are setting a direct course to broken communication. Much of the frustration, waste of energy, and often devastating mistakes we make when communicating have a common source. They could be traced back to failing to understand the different needs and points of view of the people we communicate with. When you feel you are not seen and your unique perspective dissolves with all the rest, you become less engaged and unmotivated to contribute to the discussion. When communicating to create things together, we must communicate on equal terms, regardless of rank and role. To accomplish that, we must proactively try to understand who our associates are. 

Effective communication starts with understanding the people we communicate with. This is true for any communication in any context, from communicating with your spouse and children to writing an article or giving a talk. In workplace communication, we often ignore this essential step because we are blindsided by the fact we are all working in the same organization. We believe, sometimes unconsciously, that our associates and we are on the same page even before the interaction starts. This is rarely the case. Each of us has a different perspective, starting point, and sometimes a different mission altogether. Some interactions are intended to bridge these gaps. Other discussions are designed to leverage these differences to develop innovative ideas. Without acknowledging the diversity of perspectives and planning how to approach it, we won’t be able to make the most out of the interaction. So, once we have picked our associates, we must get to know them. We must ask ourselves (or them) a couple of questions. 

The first thing to consider is the mission of each of our associates. The best-case scenario — the rare scenario we nevertheless keep relying on — is that the mission we have defined is the exact same mission each of our associates sees in front of them. Actually, we hope for more than that: we assume the mission we have defined is the only mission our associates have, so we are not just aligned on it — we are all 100% invested in it. This is rarely the case. Our associates’ perspectives might be derived from an entirely different mission or a different interpretation of the mission. They might have other constraints or goals that compete with or contradict our mission. How to bridge this gap, and to what extent we need to, is an important question we already addressed in a previous chapter. However, the precondition to considering that is acknowledging that we are teaming up with people who might have other destinations they aim to reach.

The second difference to consider concerns the language we speak. When people from different disciplines communicate, misunderstandings are common, and they waste a lot of energy. It is more than just a matter of using different terms. People from different disciplines might have a completely different approach to analyzing a problem (or even agreeing if it is a problem). If you bring them on board as associates, you acknowledge the value of these different perspectives. At the same time, if we all speak different languages without common ground, the discussion will soon become futile. Again, acknowledging this gap and intentfully creating the setup to overcome it are essential to Generative Communication. 

Different Associates are also likely to have diverse knowledge. Their starting point in the discussion might be very different than yours. What you take for granted might sound like voodoo from their perspective. If you skip some logical steps that you consider obvious, your associates can quickly lose track or lose faith in the information you present and the conclusions you draw. And while a knowledge gap might be easier to overcome, it can create substantial damage when we ignore it. 

Finally, our associates might need different things to engage with the initiative. They might need other data, additional processing time, or a different communication flow altogether. Not everyone can run at the same speed, even when they are fully invested in the discussion, and often, there is a perfectly valid reason for this difference. If your team handles multiple tasks, for example, any initiative that involves a change of priority might have a ripple effect on other activities. Processing these implications will require more time and probably some side discussions before making a decision. 

All this is to say that we need to thoroughly design the communication flow once we identify our associates. As we will see, in some cases, we will begin the communication flow by asking these questions to fine-tune the rest of the discussion. We are not trying to align everyone to the extent we all think and speak the same way. Apart from not being realistic, this will make the discussion unnecessary. We don’t have much to discuss if we all share the same perspective. However, identifying these differences, articulating them, and addressing them in the discussion are absolutely essential for effective communication. 

Knowing your associates is not a tactical move to get their support. It is a way to build trust, find win-win solutions, and construct the discussion to enable co-creation.