The best companies cascade understanding, not awareness. Even on our busy days, everyone wants to understand what is going on and why. It helps people put things into perspective and it helps people solve problems and make better decisions along the way.
Now the classic persecutive on building understanding is shared by Patrick Lencioni, in his book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012). As he writes,“There are three keys to cascading communication: message consistency from one leader to another, timeliness of delivery, and live, real-time communication.” And I agree 100%.
However, I think we need to understand something about communication over the last two years. For the most part, we have cascaded key information through e-mail, which was suppose to yield a greater understanding. This worked to a point and for many leaders and managers it became the primary form of communication. But upon reflection, I think we build understanding better in small groups than through e-mail communication. It is within small groups, in person or on a digital platform, that people can dialogue and explore issues and ideas
Lencioni in the aforementioned book notes that “anything over eight or nine [people] is usually problematic.” He explains that in small groups of eight to nine people, we can engage in both advocacy communication, i.e. stating your case or making your point, and inquiry communication, i.e. asking questions to seek clarity about another person’s statement of advocacy.
Many leaders and managers I have visited with focus on advocacy communication but at this point they need assistance and coaching in how to get better at inquiry communication. It is the later that builds the foundation for understanding.
The importance of this level of work reminds me of something that Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao wrote about in their book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less (Crown Business, 2014). As they explained, “Slow down to scale faster - and better - down the road…. Learn when and how to shift gears from automatic, mindless, and fast modes of thinking (“System 1”) to slow taxing, logical, deliberative, and conscious modes (“System 2”); sometimes the best advice is, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there’.” And when people gather in small groups, we come to understand that the best companies focus on growing a common mindset across the company, not just expanding the company footprint.
This is a critical point that all leaders and managers need to understand. Getting the work done is important, but it is not the whole picture. Creating a common mindset is mission critical to being successful in 2022 and beyond.
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