5 Leadership Communication Skills to Quiet Chaos, Decrease Overwhelm, and Keep Teams Moving Forward

If you're not careful, last-minute fire drills, interruptions, and genuine emergencies can become a permanent way of life. In this episode, you'll get the tools to keep your team on track without letting those distractions drive you crazy. Welcome to Leadership Without Losing Your Soul, a podcast. Master communication to accelerate your team's performance, rejoice. And build a career. I'm your host, David Dye.

Hey welcome to the show. Today you'll get five specific communication tools you can use to deal with those crazy making interruptions and disruptions that can all too easily become a way of life. And when you use these tools, you will help your team stay focused on what matters most. And ultimately you'll save time, energy, and keep moving forward even when other teams and parts of your organization bog down.

And we hear this all the time. We'll be working with clients to help them build a performance culture. And a manager will say something like, It is so crazy around here. We never know what's gonna happen. There's so many priorities. We'll be working on something, then that gets blown up, and now we have to focus on the new emergency, the crisis of the day. And those distractions and interruptions are driving them crazy and they feel like they can't focus and they're just bogged down.

and being very reactive in all these disruptions. Now the reality is distractions and interruptions, they're a part of life. They're not going to go away. But you do have control and ownership of whether or not they're going to make you crazy or prevent you and your team from achieving the things that really matter the most.

If you are in a situation where your days seem to be a series of distractions and your team can't make progress on the strategic priorities that matter most, here are five steps that will help you get your team back on track. So number one,

If you've listened to the show for a while, you know our four dimensions of team performance. We've got connection, clarity, cu curiosity, and commitment. We're gonna start with clarity here. The first thing is you gotta clarify what matters most. Does your team know your most important thing? What strategic priorities matter most? What are the daily and weekly behaviors

that directly contribute to that? What are the ways that your team contributes to that strategic outcome specifically? And then what for each individual, what are the two, three, four specific things they do every day or every week that directly lead to that success? Without that North Star of clearly defined MIT's most important things, your team's always going to be reactive and distracted by the unexpected and the urgent.

So the first step to get your team back on track happens really before the distractions come, and that is clearly define what on track looks like to begin with. What matters most, how does your team contribute to that, and how does each person in a team directly contribute to that team outcome every day, every week? Okay, number two, expect the unexpected. And what this means is that you probably know more about your emergencies, fire drills, and interruptions than you might think.

We've worked with so many leaders who feel out of control, but when you sit down and talk through the distractions, there are usually just a few that are causing the majority of the problems. So your communication skill here is take 15 minutes with your team. And you can quickly figure out how to expect the unexpected.

Start by listing out your most common distractions. Just you know, groups, crowdsource them from the team, from the department. Once you have the list, then map them out on a graph. You can do a two-axis graph here. How commonly does this happen and how disruptive is it? So you want frequency and level of disruption.

So quadrant one, these are going to be the distractions that you want to address first. These are your most common distractions that are also the most disruptive. You know they're going to happen. You know that they're going to cost you the most time, money, and energy.

Then if you've got more time and effort to devote, you can move to quadrant two, which is your most disruptive, but they're less common. You want to have a game plan for those. And then quadrant three, which is your most common but least disruptive. So these are happening frequently, they don't cause as much disruption, but if you can take care of those in some way, that can be helpful. And most of the time you can safely ignore that fourth quadrant, which are your least common least disruptors.

doesn't happen very often and it doesn't mean much disruption when it does happen. We'll ignore those. Okay, so you've started before any disruptions, you've clarified what matters most.

Now, number two, you've sat down and and addressed what are the common disruptions. You've mapped them out around how how frequently they happen. um and how disruptive they are. So we've kinda quantified what are these things, which are the priorities for us to respond and address. And then step three here is to plan your response.

Now that you know the interruptions and emergencies that cause you the most trouble, it's time to plan how specifically you will respond to those different disruptions. You've got ways of doing your core work, processes that you know work. Well, you want to build the same kind of processes to handle distractions and get yourselves back to focus on what matters most. This will shorten the time it takes to get your team back on track.

So let's start with a and I don't use these very often, but I'm gonna go with a sports analogy here. So if you ever watch American football. They are carrying the football and then it gets dropped. It's fumbled. So what do they do with a fumbled football? As soon as that football hits the ground,

Everyone nearby knows it's their job to either pick it up and run or else jump on it and wrap it up in their arms. That's the plan. That's how we're going to respond to this disruption to the normal procedure. Then once you've got possession of the ball, you get back to the normal game plan. So let's say that one of your common yet important disruptive distractions is a customer who's escalating to your executive office. It's important, needs to be handled with urgency and with care.

How can you and your team build a standard way of responding? So that you're not frenetically, re you know, reactively just responding to these things in the moment and you're gonna minimize the time spent and the disruption spent addressing the situation because you know how you deal with those things.

Without a process, it's easy for that kind of urgent situation to involve too many people, more people than are necessarily uh needing to be there. They're frantically working to address the issue, they're updating their bosses, duplicating effort. So maybe your planned response looks like something simple, maybe just four steps. Number one, the executive receives the call, sends it to a designated on-call manager who coordinates the response.

Number two, after understanding the situation, that on call manager contacts the customer, informs them they're working on it, and collects any additional information. And number three, the on call manager also informs social media team and any other customer communication channels in case the customer escalates there as well.

So all your communications coordinated. And then number four, the on-call manager coordinates the response, contacts the customer, and closes the loop with the executive office. So that might be your plan, your way of dealing with a common escalation that can be very difficult. Have you been listening to the podcast and getting value from the show? If so, I've got a small favor to ask, because over the next few months, we're going to be making some changes to better serve.

Now I could keep creating episodes based on what I think would be most important. But I would much rather get this. So instead of guessing, I want to understand where you are right now and the real challenges you, your organization, and your team are facing. That's why I've put together a very short ninety second circuit.

It'll help me better understand you and how I can serve you at a much higher level. And as a thank you, the first thirty people who complete it will receive a free signed copy of one of our books. To take part, just go to the show notes and click the link titled Leadership Survey. Or you can go directly to let's grow leaders dot com slash pod survey, P-O-D-S-U-R-V-E-Y. It'll take less than two minutes.

I really appreciate your input. It will genuinely help shape the future of the show. All right, number four. Maintain margin. One of the most overlooked ways to prevent distractions from overwhelming your day is to plan for them. So you've planned your response. But also if you plan that there are going to be distractions and disruptions, they don't have to be as disruptive if you've scheduled your team.

with margin. But on the other hand, if you've got your team scheduled every day, wall to wall meetings and deadlines that must happen today, you've got a fragile system with no margin for error. So any interruption is going to knock over that house of cards. And quite predictably ruin your results. It's fragile. It can't withstand a shock to the system.

So you've already in step two, you mapped out your interruptions and how frequently they happen. Now besides planning your response for those things, give yourself margin in your calendar to respond. You may not know what's going to come up, but you know that it's coming.

And if you have one of those magical days where there aren't any emergencies, fire drills, or interruptions, fantastic. There's more time to work on your MITs, your most important things, or build relationships with your team, invest in some of the other areas. Okay, number five, our fifth step here, eliminate causes. So finally, as you examine your most common and disruptive distractions,

Ask how you can eliminate them. Have this conversation with your team. Is there a problem in your user experience that you can fix? Maybe this is where you're going to partner with one of your peers in another t with another team or another department. Is there a new process that can prevent those errors? Is there a frequent communication breakdown you can address?

You don't have to have all the answers. Bring the right people together. Your team, their team, maybe just the two of you, if your peers. Show them what a successful idea will achieve, and then ask them for their thoughts on how to solve the issue. So that's how you get your team back on track and build a system.

It's so easy again to let exceptions become the rule and turn your days into whirlwinds of frantic reactivity. But if you'll take a few minutes to identify your most common distractions, build a routine response. That's going to save you time, energy, and help your team get back on track, stay focused on what matters most, saving all of you time and energy.

So clarify what matters most, expect the unexpected, plan your response, maintain margin, and eliminate causes. And if you want to help your organization stay focused on what matters most, collaborate better together and get more done while enjoying your work, we'd love to partner with you. So give me a shout at david.die DYE at let's grow leaders.com and let's see what we can do together.

And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of these practical communication skills to help you accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. Thank you as always to our producer and sound engineer Brooke Bradford at Sheep and Space Digital Business Services and Laura at Brook Marketing for their work. Until next time, I'm your host, David Dye, reminding you, prepare for those unexpected.

interruptions that you can totally expect.