Communication is Everything
Communication Is Everything
At the end of every quarter, I sit down with my team members for quarterly conversations. And this quarter, like many before it, the through line was the same.
COMMUNICATION
Not effort. Not skill. Not the wrong seat. The thing standing between these leaders and what they wanted most was how they were or were not communicating. And as we head into the next quarter, that is exactly what we are working on.
THE LEADER WHO HAD THE SKILLS BUT WASN’T LANDING
I think about a leader I coached who wanted to move into a bigger seat. She had the skills. She had the drive. But every time she was in the room with senior leadership, she was not landing the way she needed to. The opportunity she wanted kept passing her by and she could not figure out why.
The issue was not her capability. It was how she was presenting it. She was not preparing her data in a way that told a clear story. She was not framing her ideas in a way that got buy in. She was not showing the people above her in the way they needed to see it that she was ready for what she was asking for.
We worked on how to prepare. How to present. How to walk into a room and demonstrate confidence, competence, and clarity all at once. When she started doing that, the conversation around her changed.
THE LEADER WHO KEPT MISSING HIS GOALS
He was working as hard as he could, but quarter after quarter, the same story. And he was frustrated because he was working as hard as he could. What he did not see was that he was the bottleneck.
Not because he was not capable, but because he was not communicating what he needed. He was not asking for resources. He was not flagging obstacles. He was holding everything close and trying to figure it out alone, and in doing so he was quietly guaranteeing his own delays.
Once he understood that communicating what you need is not a sign of weakness but actually how you move things forward, everything started to shift.
THE LEADER WHO HAD GROWN BUT WASN’T SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE
She had made real, visible growth in one area. I wanted her to see that. To own it. But there was another area where she was still stuck, and that stuck place was directly blocking her from getting what she wanted most.
The hardest part of that conversation was helping her see that the growth was real/worth celebrating and that the stuck place was also real and worth addressing. Both things were true at the same time. The stuck place, like almost everything else, came back to communication. How she was showing up in certain conversations. What she was and was not saying. What she was letting go unaddressed.
