Mastering Communication (Part 1 of 4)
How to Deliver Value Every Time
Welcome back to Path to Staff! This month, we will cover a four-part series on Mastering Communication.
This first part covers how to deliver value to your audience when communicating. Value in this case means providing useful information or takeaways that allow a concrete action to happen. Examples include a project signoff, strategy alignment, or a ship / no-ship decision.
Why Communicate Value?
I strongly believe that:
Your reputation is silently based on how you communicate: People judge you on whether you make their time feel well-spent. They will listen if you communicate value to them. And they will talk about you.
Most technical problems masquerade as people problems. I saw this on Hacker News the other week, and highly agree. As you level up, learning how to work with others is key. Communicating the importance of your work to others is how you earn their buy-in.
Impact is directly driven by value. Clear communication drives alignment, better decisions and ultimately positive outcomes. The higher the value, the more impactful your outcome.
Communication Efficiency Ratio
The value of your communication is directly correlated with the Communication Efficiency Ratio.
The higher this ratio, the more efficient and valuable your information. Also, quick note: Treat this ratio as a guiding framework and not a formula to overly optimize. (since I know us engineers love to optimize 😉)
To improve this ratio, you either need to increase created value, or decrease the time spent for your audience.
Increase Created Value
Value created means anything that moves the work forward. This could be: clarity added, alignment created, decisions made, or momentum gained.
Increasing value created correlates with driving positive impact.
To increase created value, you must:
Think about the next message: There will be situations when your audience has to communicate your message to others, be it their teammates or managers. You want to help your audience “sound smart” when they re-communicate this message. Think ahead and understand how your message will be transformed and presented to the next audience.
How can you help your audience sound smart? For instance, you can frame a new vim command as an engineering trick to save them and their teammates hundreds of hours. Or sharing lessons that you learned while using internal tools so others don’t fall into the same traps. If you’re presenting to your manager, reframe your message in a way that showcases that their direct report has achieved something monumental, such that your manager will be cast in a good light.
Pick the right moment. There isn’t always the best time to bring something up, but there are bad times (e.g. high-stress windows or too many topics already covered). Make sure that you and your audience are in the right headspace before delivering your message.
Know your audience: People process information differently. Some want a concise summary; others want a narrative or visual. Understanding their preferences increases the chance your message actually lands.
Consider this: An engineer spends ten weeks preparing for a presentation to their directors. However, the only timeslot this week is Friday at 3pm, right before the long Christmas break. This turns out to be a poor time since most folks have mentally checked out for the holidays. if you have all the right messages lined up, but delivered at the wrong moment, that’s a grave mistake.
Decrease Time Spent
In order to decrease time spent, you should share only what the other party needs to know. Not more, not less. Be succinct. Focus on ensuring that your content is easily understandable.
Set your goals: What are you trying to achieve out of this communication piece? I spend rigorous amounts of time thinking about what I want to achieve. The most common goals are: alignment, inform or steer (get input on which direction to go towards, usually from leadership)
Refine your message: How can I shorten what I’m trying to say and save everyone time? Spend the majority of your time rewriting drafts.
Leveraging pre-reads: Can I send a pre-read of my slides or documents ahead of time so people have time to digest before the meeting happens? (This is one of my favorite tools.)
It is clear if someone understands you when you communicate. Positive signals include: good non-clarification questions, re-sharing your piece, leaving positive comments. Negative signals include: lots of clarification questions, a quick “drive-by” (opening and closing your document), and not associating your work with your reputation (e.g. questions like “what is Sidwyn even working on?”)
Here’s my step-by-step playbook: I spend a ton of time thinking about my goals before starting a communication piece.
Goals: What do I really want to get out of doing this? What are my audience’s current concerns and priorities? How do I connect my message to that?
Timing: What is the best time to share this message?
Form: If the communication is a long-form piece, I jot ideas down in a first draft. Refine draft over time.
Pre-read: Send out a pre-read few days ahead of the meeting to get early feedback and to ensure that the meeting time is well utilized.
TLDR:
Communication is valuable when it produces clarity, alignment, decisions, or momentum.
To improve your communication’s value, you must increase its created value and decrease time spent.
Increase created value by helping your audience sound smart. Frame it as a win for them.
Decrease time spent by sharing only what your audience needs to know.
That’s it! Hope you enjoyed this first part. Stay tuned for the next few in this series on Mastering Communication.
Brillaint breakdown of communication efficiency. The ratio formula really clicked for me because it quantifies something most engineers feel but can't articulate properly. I've seen so many techlead meetings where folks spend 40 minutes circling the same issue instead of delivering a crisp 5 minute update with a clear decision point. That tangent about timing is subtle but huge too, dropping a design doc right before holiday break is basically asking for it to get buried no matter how good the work is.