211: How to communicate vision so your team buys-in | Part 1 of 3

Lia (00:00)
in a time when so many of our team members are starting to question everything. Maybe we are too. Authenticity and being a nuanced communicator, this is going to be your superpower to be cultivating and coming into 2026 with. I cannot emphasize this enough. Between generative AI, creating talking points for everything that we're putting out there these days, videos that we're using AI avatars of ourselves to represent us.

where we don't have to be there anymore, to anything in between, your team members are hungry for hearing from you. Doesn't mean you can't utilize these things to help in some ways, but I wanna say there are three kinds of conversations where being a strong and direct and nuanced communicator, this is going to set you up for alignment next year, for higher engagement, for stronger attention, for stronger buy-in, for better performance.

And so I'm doing a three-part episode all around communication because communication is all we have. And I think a lot of us have heard that only 7 % of communication is about the words being said. The rest is between tone and voice and body language. That's the 93 % otherwise, right? So even if we have a beautifully written script or set of talking points that we worked through with with Gen. AI, how are we going to communicate that?

How do we bring some of our personality into that? How do we bring the right emphasis in? How do we get folks bought into the conversation? And the reason I picked these three areas, because these are three places I've seen so many leaders struggle and fall short and completely lose their team on the other end. And so the three areas I'm gonna talk about today, well, across these three episodes, actually. So the three areas today is number one, our communicating vision and strategy.

Number two is giving difficult feedback. And I've talked about that a lot on this show, but I wanna talk a lot about the nuances today. And communicating anything around pay and bonuses and things like that, okay? These three episodes, it is critical that you listen to each of them because they talk about, again, the nuances in communication. The places I am seeing leaders misstep. And a lot of times, especially with that last one.

communicating things around pay, creating expectations that they cannot sustain, right? That's really dangerous. Or getting into a place where, you know, something's changed and then you have immediate turnover after you can't commit to something that folks thought they were getting. So this is one of your biggest retention drivers is going to be what we talk about in the third episode, communication around pay. And today I wanna start with communicating about vision and strategy because that's what a lot of you will be talking about

right out of the gate, 2026. And so this three-parter, some of it's recorded over the holidays, some of it's recorded in the new year. I wanted to give you a 2026 toolkit so that you feel like, yes, I have got this. I know what I am saying. I am communicating with confidence, with clarity. This is critical at any stage as a leader because this first one, communicating vision and strategy, this is something that I actually see the most senior leaders

VPs, SVPs, and Fortune 100s get wrong. So if you're struggling with this, hey, you're not alone. Everybody struggles with this. So we're starting here, and then we're gonna build, talk about feedback, and then we're gonna talk about pay. I'm Leah Garvin, and this is the New Manager Playbook podcast where I'm on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job at any stage you're in as a leader. This is not about new managers. This is about new tools.

a new way of thinking about challenges because we are all being asked in this moment today to step up and look at the world in a very new way, especially when it comes to the workplace. Everything is changing. Everything is new. So in many respects, we are both all new managers and we're all approaching things in new ways. Okay? So again, when you say communication, I think I got this okay. Yes.

I hope so, and I hope you think about some of these things I'm gonna talk about in factoring well, is the way that I've been communicating this going to ⁓ still work when folks are afraid, when there's lot of uncertainty, when there's challenges, and then be fine tuning it. So let's dive in, communicating vision and strategy. This is a place where often as leaders, maybe us and our leadership team, we've been talking about the mission, the vision, the priorities, all of that.

until our faces are blue. And when we communicated to our team, we are like, go, come on and get on board. And the biggest mistake I see, first of all, especially in larger companies, is the executive overseeing the team has worked through getting the right language and the communication and the right sort of wordsmithing around the, really the strategy and priorities for the year. And then they communicate it in one email or one town hall.

and they expect the team members to fully absorb it and walk away and be like, yes, I'm on board. Now, obviously hearing something one time is not enough, but I think what we forget as leaders, we are so sick of hearing about it talking about it and thinking about it because we have been talking about it probably since like August, right, the year before, that we forget, what is it, how many times folks have to hear this same message to really internalize it?

I believe it used to be people having to hear a message seven times to fully internalize it. And I think that number has gone up as attention spans have gotten shorter, as people have gotten more distracted. And right now, when our nervous systems are all on high alert, it's especially more times than that because people aren't even internalizing messages, right? They're not sinking in. We're thinking about all sorts of other things. So when we communicate something once through an email,

or through one town hall and we expect people to just fall in lockstep, we're missing the fact that we might've talked about a hundred times and our team members at least need at the very minimum to hear that six different times in six different ways. It's not enough to talk about it once. Now, where do I see this breakdown? So working as a chief of staff at Microsoft, I was working with our VP to design.

the communication around the strategy, to spell everything out, to do that wordsmithing. And after we'd have a big town hall, what I would hear over and over and over is at every rung in the ladder down the chain, right from, it was at VP, so from maybe senior director to director to head up to manager to whatever, it was a game of telephone, something was being lost. And the lower down the chain you got, the more disconnected and unclear around the vision and priorities your team members are.

The further you go, the more they don't see how their role fits into the picture. They're not seeing how their day-to-day job, how does it relate to this, how they're being measured, where it fits in. It gets lost over and over and over. And the reason that's happening is because we haven't taken the time to get every level of managers down the chain.

on board and that was literally my primary job as a Chief of Staff. Not just sitting at that executive level, but going then to those senior directors, then to the directors, then to the heads of, then to the middle managers and saying, how are we translating and cascading this down the organization? And what I found was, especially at that manager level or manager of managers, the connection between the broader vision

and priorities and strategy and what our team was doing at the ground level, it felt pretty far removed and folks needed more support on making that translation and connecting those dots. And now doing consulting work a lot of the time that I spend with teams is in building in those communication moments and how are we doing that and how are we translating this and bringing this to life because the dot connecting, that's gonna be your team's biggest motivator.

And again, it's because people can't just hear it once. Now the next mistake I hear around vision and mission strategies is that the leader, the kind of figurehead, so maybe that's you listening, maybe it's your manager or someone in your leadership chain, they're the only one communicating it. And the leadership chain and definitely as you go down the rungs of the ladder and the leadership levels, nobody else is talking about it. We're all relying on the one message, the one way that person communicated. Even if that senior leader,

communicates at seven different times, we're only hearing from them. So again, we're not really getting that full dot connecting and you're not empowering and deputizing your leadership chain and your managers and your middle managers, everyone down the chain to really own that strategy. You're the only one talking about it. And so that's a huge miss around really calling your leaders forward to understand it and internalize it and do that dot connecting and communicating it down the chain again.

And so that's another really big challenge that we don't realize. We might have a really vocal senior leader. It might be us. We might love getting up there. Our team members might worship the ground we walk on. But if they're not hearing the strategy and how it applies to their role from their direct manager, they're just not as bought in. And I know this because I hear that every single day with the teams that I talk to. People are like, I just, I don't know. I don't know what my job is about. I don't know. I don't know how I fit in the bigger picture. I don't know.

You know, how all this comes together? I don't know where we're going as a company. And then I talk to the leaders and they're like, we talked about this a million times. It's likely you are making one of these mistakes. Now, another challenge that I see with communicating the vision and the strategy is it's changing quite a bit. And I think it's really important. And again, this is work you can bring in outside support to help you with is,

to establish a vision should be something that's pretty solid. So if the vision is something that's shifting when there's different competitive forces or different tides in the economy or things, then that's not really the vision. Right? Simon Sinek has the infamous start with Y. The Y is like bigger than the service you offer, the product that you sell. The Y is like what you believe at your core. It's a lot more connected to values. And...

So if you're feeling like, well, you know, we're changing this all the time, it's a real opportunity to go back and set your vision at the right level of altitude, explain it to the team, get them on board, get them understand that really seeing where they fit into that, bring that emotional investment in, and then be moving into strategy and priorities, those things, strategy should be a little bit more solid, but priorities, those can shift. And talking about that,

talking about the climate that you're in, talking about the knowns and the unknowns. And I think when we get ahead of that conversation, right, it's not that our teams are saying, priorities change all the time. We might say there is a lot changing. There's a lot of unknowns. Here are the priorities we're starting with. We're gonna revisit them at XYZ increments, and we're gonna be looking at this and that. And bring your teams in a little bit under the hood without making it feel like there's no plan.

Right, you really do have, you should have a plan, right? But it's not, you're getting ahead of naming that there will be change, that you'll be refining it. And that starts to quiet some of that conversation around there being a lot of thrash. Because as a leader, it's so fricking obvious to us, like, yeah, the whole world is changing day to day. How would we think that nothing would change?

our team members, don't always understand that piece and they can be frustrated and they can be scared and they're worried about the future of their role and their projects and their livelihood. And talking to people about this really openly and candidly, you I talk a lot on the show about, you know, the ways around communicating about change and uncertainty and how we don't wanna downplay, we don't wanna commiserate, we wanna talk about, this is the knowns and the unknowns and here's what I'm thinking about.

It's the same way we talk about priorities. So I think especially going into a year like 2026, if stuff is uncertain, it's creating that shell. What is your vision? Like what is your bigger why? What are you doing here? Why do you exist? The mission, what are you here to do and who do you serve? And then the priorities, discussing what's more firm and what's a little bit kind of taking shape.

and talking about what is your process for evaluating that and what is your process for firming those things up and how are you gonna be communicating decisions and collecting inputs. That's something that's really important to bring in the conversation. And a lot of the work I do with teams is also around employee engagement surveys. I freaking love looking at employee engagement survey data and going and thinking, okay, looking at what's lowest scoring and getting.

under the surface doing focus groups and interviewing folks understanding what's really like meant by these scores. But I'm gonna give you a secret right here. I have never seen, and I've looked at dozens of these, I have never seen employee engagement scores that didn't have lower scores around decision-making and priorities. It's always a weakness that folks have because at the leadership level, we understand our decision-making process and we understand the priorities. And it's that game of telephone down the line.

Your team members have to know how decisions are made and how they're communicated. And usually they don't really understand that. Priorities, same thing. Usually we have more work to do than can possibly get done. And our team members, when it's low scoring, they might feel like, well, there's too many priorities or they're too unclear or they're shifting all the time or there's something there. We want to get under the surface and we get ahead of this. Right? I talked about this recently, perception versus experience. We get ahead of this.

by being proactive and communicating how are we making decisions, how are we prioritizing, and how are we revisiting these things. This is the nuance that no fricking script that you get from chat GPT or Claude or Gemini is gonna give you. How to formulate these ideas, how to think through it, how to organize. I love Gen. AI for that kind of thing.

I love it, but when you go in front of your team and you're talking about what is your thinking process and how did you arrive at this, that's gotta come from you. That's what you are here to do as a leader. Utilize these tools in the right way. Do not replace yourself in the moments when your team is looking, what is the vision that you, I'm pointing at you if you're listening, I'm pointing at you. What do you think? How are you thinking about these challenges? What is your...

Literally, you're specifically, you are process for making decisions. How are you going to evaluate it? That is what your team wants to hear from you. And that's not gonna come from Gen. AI because it doesn't know what your thought process is. Again, great place to use it is, okay, this is where I'm thinking it's a little bit abstract. Can you help me form a narrative around this? Okay, and then you look and you're like, yeah, that is really what I was trying to say, but still bring it back in your own words.

because your team wants to hear from you. And when you communicate, whether it's right out of the gate in a few weeks in January or mid-Jan or Q1 at some point or whatever, your schedule is for communicating what this year is about or what this quarter is about or what this next week is about. Here is how I determine what's important and here's what gets me out of bed in the morning and this is my vision for this team. Those things, they've gotta come from the heart.

and people have to hear them more than once. All right, this is our first installment of communicating with confidence as a leader, right? Avoiding these missteps that can immediately lose team members because when your team members don't think that the team is going anywhere or the company's going anywhere, they are looking for the exits. Every one of these episodes, today about communicating about vision and strategy priorities, next week is about communicating difficult feedback.

I yeah, that one's a hard one. Next time, and after that, communicating anything around pay, you can imagine these are the biggest levers for retaining employees. And the biggest places, if we go wrong, people are looking again for the exits, they're looking for their next job, they're updating their resume, they're on LinkedIn. Today, it's about, I don't know if where I fit into the picture here. I don't know where the company's going.

It seems scary. I'm already scared about the future. Now they don't even have a set of priorities or it's changing every five seconds. Or we had this one vision and now this week it's this. This is why these things are so important. And as always, if you need support, reach out because it can really help to have an outside perspective to pressure test the way that you're communicating things, to help you build that model of how are you getting your leaders aligned? What are the expectations of them? What should they be communicating so that it's not just coming from you?

so that it's really, it's the same message, seven different ways, right? From all of the rungs on the ladder. This is the places that we can really lose folks or we can keep them excited and motivated in the new year. All right, I'm so, I'm so excited to be doing this set of three topics around communication because like I said, our words, like that's what we have. Our body language, our tone, how we show up, what we emphasize, what we're excited about, that's all we have, okay?

So this is, I think it's a moment where we're really needing to think about how are we driving engagement on our team? How are we starting off the year strong? How are we motivating folks? And the way we communicate, that's what we have most control over, literally. We have 100 % control over that in a world, in a moment where there's so much out of our control. So let's dial that in. And again, if you need support, hello at leararv.com, let me know and we will talk.

Next week, you cannot miss this one because this is a moment when difficult feedback, it's happened to be shared every day, right? Do not miss this one. We're gonna talk about where folks go wrong with difficult feedback, especially with some recent examples I've been hearing from clients, some spaces I'm like, whoa, this is a really simple shift that we can make to both re-engage that team member and feel like we're gonna see some changes that we need to see. So you're not gonna wanna miss this one. And then after that,

how to avoid so many common pitfalls I hear on communicating things with raises, bonuses, creating promises that we can't keep, getting stuck, a little bit handcuffed by your team members and the demands they're making. This is another good one. So I'm like so excited for this series and I will see you next time.