43. How To Upgrade Your Communication Skills To Be An Elite Business Owner Or Professional

People don't understand that this is a shared responsibility. Just because you're sending a message doesn't mean that's the end of your responsibility. And the listeners have responsibility as well. The receiver must try and understand what is being said and feed that back to the person. And really people can only work independently and interdependently if they communicate effectively. And the biggest thing I see that people don't do is closed loop communication.

Welcome back to another episode of the Benneberg show with your favorite MBA and high school dropout. Today we are talking everything about how to level up your communication and drive performance. Led by our main man Bergs. He's got some communication feedback because I am an absolute abysmal communicator. And that's why Bergs has prepared a cracking episode today to help you be understood better, deliver your communication and messages better. And he's just got some awesome stuff he's going to share. So Bergs, man. Yeah, I know this has been a long time coming, mate.

It's pretty much just going to be a roast of you feels.

I'm going to get roast.

We're in the studio together, we're sitting down because we only get aircon in between like the episode. We got to turn it off otherwise like a woo woo woo. So we'll see how we go. All right. Communication, like seriously with business challenges, I reckon at least 99% of it is communication, interpersonal communication between different teams. And it's something that I actively try to get better at. And it's something you practice every day, you do every day across many different bloody channels. And, and it's not really something that we're taught. So I'm gonna go through today and give you some tips and tricks to really level up your communication. Things that I've used that have worked.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I just wanna add some context here for the listeners. So Bergs is our chief Product officer at Collective Shift. We've got a team of about 12 to 15 people. He came in probably about what, middle way through last year? Maybe six months. March last year, March last year. It was a bit like, oh geez, nearly this year.

Bloody hell, mate, what are you getting in for a year anniversary, mate?

Fucking nothing, mate.

More work. But we brought in Bergs because of his experience. We, you know, we're a fast moving team. We're a crypto startup. We've got a lot of different people doing a lot of different things. We had some problems with teams integrating and communicating, getting the best out of People. So Burgs came in and really helped us being able to, I guess, synthesize messages and communication and help teams work better together. We're a remote company and communication is really important that everyone's on the same page. So I think that's why we're doing this episode today, because Bergs is really a cracker in this sort of stuff. So, you know, for those out there that want to improve, this is going to be a good episode.

Absolutely. And look, when you're remote, you're playing on hard mode. So let's dive in. Let's go. Communication. So this is the process by which, you know, people. Information is transmitted and understood by, you know, one or more people. And really, people don't understand that this is a shared responsibility. Just because you're sending a message doesn't mean that's the end of your responsibility. And the listeners have responsibility as well. The receiver must try and understand what is being said and feed that back to the person. And really, people can only work independently and interdependently if they communicate effectively. And the biggest thing I see that people don't do is closed loop communication. Right? This is a very basic thing and they used to do it all the time at the hospital because otherwise people die if you don't do this right. They absolutely drum it into you. So basic communication. You got a sender and you got a receiver. So I'll send a message to Ben. I send the message. Ben's responsibility is then to acknowledge he's received the message and either confirms it or provides feedback. You can repeat part of the message. So I'll be like, ben, mate, can you please grab me a coffee? And he'll be like, yeah, no worries, man. I'll go downstairs and I will say thank you. So then I then reply and say, right, I've understood. So that completes it. I've sent the message. Ben knows what I'm saying. I then say, yes, you've understood. Thanks so much, mate. And really, you need to verify that message so that things can actually get done. But think about how we have to do that. Like right now, we're face to face. That's pretty easy. How do you do that in Slack or email or anywhere else? And Ben is an absolute shocker for this. My God. So people, please think about the burden you are putting on the receiver when you're a sender, when you send them a message, this guy, he's an animal in Slack. He'll literally just drop us into a channel with these random people from Another organization that I don't know. And he'd be like, hey, Bergs, meet this person. I'm like, bro, what is. So then my responsibility as a receiver is bro, what is the context here? Who are these people? I'm nodding your head. I don't understand.

Another one is if you ask someone to do something like, hey, can you please do this thing? A lot of people, even our company will just go off and do the thing. But I'm not sitting in Melbourne. I don't know if they've seen the message. You need to say, hey, yeah, I'm going to do that. Or you can jump on a call or, you know, do that passive aggressive thumbs up, which is supposed to be passive aggressive these days. Just provide some context.

There's assumed context, isn't there? Now I'm really bad with that. I assume in my head that the other person knows exactly what's going on when in reality they've got no fucking idea what I'm talking about.

Exactly. You go to all these meetings, you probably had six, seven. The ad agency would be like a classic one, right? You had six, seven meetings with people, then you're down the track, you've got a strategy and then you just like, hey, Bergs, I'll just loop you in. I'm like, let me into what, brah? I'm out of there. I don't even know these people. What is going on?

What are you talking about?

So, and also think, just really think. Make it as simple as you can when you're communicating a message for the other person to understand. So one thing I always do is frame up the situation for people. Even if we've been talking about, let's say, a project for weeks, I will say, whenever we start the conversation or a meeting or an email, I'll say, hey, this is what we're working on, this is where we're at. And I'm writing you because. So they know and they get in their heads because think about this, you've got 10 million emails a day, you've got Slack, you've got WhatsApp, you've got Signal, you've got Asana, you've got Notion, you've got phone calls, you've got sms. People are chopping and changing constantly. They don't have the context that you have in your head and you need to provide that to them to give them the best opportunity of actually understanding what you said. Because this happens all the time, where someone will provide a message and someone either won't do it or won't understand or will deliver the wrong thing. And then the sender will be like, oh, they're a fucking idiot, we need to get rid of them. And it's not them at all, it's the person that's actually sending the message.

Right. So, man, I think this has been amplified as well by the amount of platforms that are available in the windows. Like you said, you know, like, is it a slack message? Is it a voice message? Is it a phone call? Is it a zoom call? Is it in person? Is it a coffee chat, Is it an email?

Yep.

Like what? You know what? Is it the way that we need to structure the message?

Absolutely. And we'll get to that in a sec. But if people wonder why they communicate so well with other people and not with others, like, you and I can communicate quite well and there's a few reasons for that. And I went back over my old MBA notes. It's the thing called the communication process model. And essentially what it is, you got sender and receiver, but in the middle you've got noise. And that comes in heaps and heaps of forms. Right. So look, there's four main influences on an effective message. And I went through this, I'm like, this is pretty boring. But then I'm like, actually, this is what we do all the time. So the first one is communication proficiency. Right. So that's an encoding and decoding, like way of sending a message. So I need to. Very nerdy. But I got to encode a message. I have to use a certain language if I'm speaking to you versus if I speak to my software developer.

Yeah.

And then you also need to have a code book to decode that. Like, if I start talking to you about weird deep technology and stacks and you're just going to turn off, Right. I have to simplify it for you at a level that you can understand for the role that you perform. And if I'm able to do that, you've got a better chance of actually understand that, understanding it and having good communication with me.

Totally. I'm walking away, mate, if you start talking about all that bullshit.

That's exactly right. Like, people just glaze over and they shut down. You see this all the time with technical teams talking to management or team leaders or executives. It's like, no, you need to speak in the context for them. Something. We've done a collective shift as well. Like, we do a lot of market analysis. It's like, that's great, but what does that mean for the person actually reading that?

And who we're talking to. Yeah. And having that context of the person you're talking to before going that conversation or adapting as you go and figuring out, like, what level of knowledge they're at. So you can sort of speak.

Absolutely. And I even tell people, I'm like, look, I'm going to talk to you. If you don't understand anything, stop me immediately. Because also, you've got to remember there's power distance between you and the person you're speaking to. You might be a couple levels above them. You might be their boss, you might be in control of their pay. So they're not going to arc up and say, I don't understand. They want to seem smart. So you've got to give them the opportunity to ask those questions. Because it's not about getting in there and just smashing things out. It's about making sure, spending the time up front that they've understood it. So when they go away and do the task, they're actually doing the right thing. It's about effectiveness. The next thing was similar code books. So dictionary symbols, jargon is a big one. If I start using crazy IT acronyms, you're gonna go, what the fuck? Right? And even when we talk and we talk to our analysts, they're on another level. And I'm like, bro, you're eight levels deep. You need to bring it up to my level so I can understand shared mental models of the communication context. So you and I share a lot of mental models because we're in high contact. We know a lot of different data points across the business. We run our meetings in certain ways and we share frameworks within our heads, whether we're aware of that or not. So the things you and I talk about in terms of business, if we bring like in our finance guy, he'll be like, what the hell? Because they don't understand where the money's going, why it's important, the strategy behind it. They just see the numbers. And the other one is experience in encoding the message. So over time, I. You have to adjust the way you communicate with different people. And there's actually a responsibility on the person receiving that information to let the sender know how they want to be, how they want to receive that message. So whether it's face to face, Slack, first of all, choose the channel. We'll get into that in a sec. Choose a different channel. But then how to communicate with me like this needs to be face to face for me. Because when you put it in text, I don't understand you or this is the way I like to receive it. Or if I really need to understand this, this is the best way. I understand for some people, it might be dropping a video. It might be. No, I need proper documentation for this. Another one might be, I need a conversation because I've got a lot of questions.

It's really fascinating. So we as a team, late last year, sat down and did a sort of a reflection on our own individual communication style. One of the parts was the individual communication style and how we like to be communicated to and in what format. And also our strengths and weaknesses. And one of my weaknesses is that I communicate without any context.

Absolutely.

And, you know, also, I struggle really with. I actually struggle receiving text information sometimes. Like, you know, I was talking to my assistant this morning. I woke up and I had like nine messages from. And I was like, I actually can't. I can't compute this.

Yeah.

So we got on a call and she just. I was like, can you just explain, like, what the hell you're actually talking about? Go through it. And within 10 minutes we had it knocked off. So for me, I prefer the phone call.

Yeah.

Just getting. Getting on a call. I think you do, too.

I do. Because in our business, we move very fast and there's a lot of complexity as well. Yeah. And when I'm writing a message, I've got certain things in my head. I won't be able to give all the context because it'll be a huge message.

Yeah.

And when you wake up, everyone communicates with you. Because you're the CEO.

Yeah.

You've got a thousand messages, you want to smash through them and you'll give kind of. I'll be like, hey, Ben, do you want option one or option two? He'll reply, yes.

Oh, my God, just give me a heart attack, mate. And you want to get through those messages. And I found, like, dropping voice messages to you, you give a lot more context. It's very quick to do. And even in Slack, you've got. It'll convert it to text automatically. Yeah. It's really, really good. So what I want to go through now is we've started to talk about channels, and when you're sending a message, you need to not only think about, you know, what's your strategy here and what do you want to do? What do you want to communicate and what is a good outcome for that? But how do I send this? So there's this beautiful chart we'll put up on the screen called the Media Richness Hierarchy. And for those listening on the Pod on, it's just a graph and on the vertical axis you've got the communication chann richness. And on the bottom it's from low to high. And on the horizontal axis you got the communication environment from routine to non routine. So if we start right down at the bottom left of the graph, pretty much where the zero is, you got financial statements. So things like that, they will generally be sent by email and they're routine, they're clear. And the richness of the channel is quite low because it's just numbers on a page. If we move up the channel, we get to newsletters. So again, it's kind of routine and it's very clear. But you can communicate more because there's a lot of text. It's not just numbers, it's not standard. It'll be something different every week. Move up again, we go to email and emails. Oh, mate. We'll have a section on email after this. Ben, what do you think about email? Ben?

Fucking hate email. Before the pod, I jumped on my again. Hayley called me this morning. One of my team members is just like, ben, like, your emails are out of control. Once again, you know, I just hate it.

So I've learned something about you just in this pod where all the text is like overwhelming for you and then email is just pure text as from people outside of your business, in your business where you just go, nah, can't engage with that because it just jumbles your brain.

I don't like newsletters. Not that I don't like them. Like, I like news, the idea of a newsletter, but I just can't consume it. Consume it. Email, it's just not me.

You're even saying about reading books, where you try to read books, you're like, oh, it's all too hard. But then you have the audiobook playing to you while you're looking at the words and then you're on ninja mode.

So if you send me, like, I'd much prefer when you send me voice messages. I love that because I like, I can listen to it. I can go on a. I can be after a meeting or I'm traveling and I'll like, I'll batch them. I'll just go and listen to your voice and then I can send one back. I love that. So much easier.

Perfect. Yeah. This is the kind of stuff you need to do with your teams, have a conversation with them. Cause otherwise I'm sending him a bunch of text messages. He's reading them and going, oh, f this I don't want to do it and then sending back crappy messages. Whereas now I can keep it really simple. I can actually get more information in a shorter period of time in a richness channel. So if we go up this again, you've got up the stack. You've got blogs, then you've got instant messaging. So that's like email, but it's a higher response rate and it's richer. Then you've got telephone. Think about this. You're typing on a screen to someone else in instant message and you're like, let's escalate this to a phone call. And on the phone it's pretty much like what we're doing now. You can. We do actually a lot of phone calls because we're in a similar time zone now. And it's so much better when you want to go over 50 things or if you want to persuade someone to do something or convince them of, hey, we should do this in our project or you should pay me more money. Yeah, that's going to be a phone call or face to face conversation. It's not going to be an email.

Yeah. Or assumed questions from the other person. Right. Like if you know it's a deep thing and there's going to be a lot of, like, maybe not necessarily pushback, but just a lot of clarifying stuff. I think there's nothing worse than sending a message because it's like, okay, yeah, thanks, man. I've got 47 questions.

Exactly. And when you've got 47 questions, people are just going to shut off.

There's not even going to reply.

No, it's too hard. And they're just like, look, it's all too hard already. We're not doing the thing. Or they're going to push you to the side and then you will have failed in trying to communicate. Right. And if we go just up the stack a bit more, we've got video conferencing and then face to face. Face to face is the best for anything that's complicated. Or if you need to persuade someone, convince them of something or if you need them to understand, if you need empathy as well. Like if people can see things on your face. If you're really struggling, you need to have a conversation with your manager. You're not going to do that via email because it doesn't convey tone really well.

There's also a natural, the word sparks, but natural progression that happens in face to face conversations. Especially when you, when we do like a deep strategy stuff. When you're all in person, you just get that. It's just so much more that happens. You know, you see each other. The energy, that's the energy, that's what it is. You know, you don't get that anywhere else.

And also be aware because there's things like emotional contagion which can be good and bad. Like if I'm in like a really shitty mood that's going to bring things down and then Ben will be at that level. If I'm really sad because something happened in my life or if I'm really happy as well, like I'll sit in a certain way, but that's just not for the sender, that's for the receiver. So let's say Ben's my boss and I walk into his office and. And he's all pissed off and he's angry, his arms are folded, but I need to tell him that my mum's really sick and I need some time off. Be aware of those things and how you're actually acting and how that can affect the other person and it'll really affect the communication between the two.

It's a good point. My follow up question here, and you might be about to go into this, but for the listeners at home, how do you select which one to do here? Because I think that can be difficult sometimes. You're busy, maybe you don't have time to do a face to face. It's physically impossible. How do you select which one you need to use for your communication?

Absolutely. So you've got to think about the message you want to communicate, how complicated it is, how much emotion you want to put into it. And you can look at this media richness hierarchy and you can select which one. Because there's an overloaded zone where if you're choosing email or something and you want it to be. And you want it to be rich, you're in the overloaded zone, you're trying to shove too much into the channel. Whereas if you're going to face to face and you just need financial statements, then you're in the oversimplified channel. It can be very complicated to get a face to face with your boss. Right. So you don't need to select the channel straight away. But you would say, like with my boss at my previous work, she's very busy, you'll hardly ever get a meeting with her, you can walk into her office. But what I would do is I would send her a text message saying, hey, look, I've got something really important to say to you, need to have a chat with you today. Can I come to wherever you are and meet you, or can we at least have a phone call and I'll send her a text because that's the channel she preferred because she's does email all day long but she's always in meetings or she'll be doing some media stuff or God knows where she is in the world. I wouldn't even know where she is. But a text message will always get through. She'll get it and she'll reply, yeah, nice. Yeah. So you need to select the channel that's appropriate for you and also for your boss and just have a chat with them or not even your boss or your co workers. And again in organizations, in larger organizations, you'll always have kind of policies that say, you know, you do email for this, you use teams, you use video conference. So they're the kind of social norms you need to obey. But don't be afraid to buck the trend. Like even when I was working in the hospital, I would only check my email like once in the morning and then once in the afternoon. And I, cause I read, you know, the four hour work week, right? And you know, yeah, let's do four hour work week, let's go. And I thought, oh, the shit's gonna hit the fan. But in reality people just emailed me, they knew they wouldn't get a response. Between those hours I could do my meetings, I could do deep work and it just freed my mind and I said I had an autoresponder that said, hey, I only check my email at these times. If it is urgent and important, give me a call, here is my number. And guess what? Hardly anyone called because it wasn't urgent and important.

And one thing that what you and I have done is we've started, we've got our weekly strategic meeting that if there's anything really important or deep that we want to go through, we might jot a note to each other just to have a think about it beforehand. But then we'll actually go in deep in person because you're trying to go, when you think about strategy or product development or like pricing or you know, something that's really going to be a big topic. You want to have the time to, to really sit and think because if you, if you sort of have an off the cuff conversation or you're trying to do it over Slack or WhatsApp, sometimes you're just not going to get, you're not going to get anywhere.

Exactly right. And sometimes you need to like, God, like you have this thing in your head and you want to give the message like straight away, but you need to select when do you do it? Right. So things to consider when delivering a message is, you know, what is your strategy, what do you, what do you want to achieve and how do you know when you've achieved it? Who does it? Like, who sends that message? Is it you? Or should it be someone else in your team to an external party or to your boss or. Or to your board? What is the power distance there? What is the dynamic and which medium do you choose? When do you do it? Is it going to be, is it urgent, important, it needs to be done now, or do you save it for your next meeting? And you say, look, we need to kill this elephant in the room before we begin this meeting. And then, you know, which channel do you need? Face to face, because it's going to be complicated. You need lengthy, all that kind of stuff. And again, face to Face is very powerful. You have a lot of nonverbal cues. You have a lot of gestures, language intonation that you use, like in email. I don't know. I always read him as angry. It's so hard to convey tone. And even, like a couple of our advisors are really good. Like, they'll say something but then they'll put a few words afterwards. They said, said in the nicest possible, happy way.

How good is that?

Yeah, we're actually smiling. Tease me with that because you'll read it. And it's just like, so we're redoing our site. This is the context. We're redoing our website. And basically he just trashed an entire thing. And bet I could imagine Ben just going, oh, absolutely deflated. He's like, no, no, no, this is where we are. I said this in the nicest possible way. This is where you need to get right.

That's good, really good.

Oh, and even now, like, even when you're, let's say you're negotiating with someone, you could just stare at them, you could just sit there in silence, you can fold your arms. All of these kind of tactics. Absolutely. Absolutely unbelievable. And let's, let's go through some of the things that we do at Collective Shift and then I'm going to bag our email for a little while because I email. So this is just, this is what I could think of last night. The tooling that we use in Collective Shift. We're a fully remote team. We use Slack email, Asana Notion, Jira video conferencing, voice conferencing, face to face at co working spaces and like we are now voice messaging. We create loom videos comments in SAS tools, docs sheets, figma phone calls on mobile, WhatsApp indirectly via Twitter and LinkedIn when we interact through podcasting and it's like, oh my God, we've got to daily stand up channel in Slack where we describe what we're going to do. We've got weekly meetings with our huddle, we go through our company values, those kind of things. We've got different kanban boards where we have our company objectives, but then we've got our software development team as well. It is heaps, it is insane. But I think even though we have all of those channels, different teams use them and we know if we're interacting with other teams we will generally just jump on a call or with our team is actually surprisingly good at jumping on video conferences. I don't understand huddle in Slack. Explain this to me. Yeah, which I really appreciate. Even our very technical and nerdy teams, they just do it all the time. Whereas I found when I was working in larger organizations, people would just sit there and fester and come to their own conclusions to send an email and they wouldn't want to do that. All right, should we trash it?

Do it.

Let's do it.

Let's trash email. So all of you out there that are working in corporate roles, email is the bane of your existence. You get to work, it runs your day, you've got it on your phone. People use email like instant messaging. They reply. All the absolute dogs. So let's just quickly go through this is what the literature says about advantages of email. You can write it quickly, you can transmit it and edit it quite quickly. You can send it to a lot of people. So it's one to many communication. It's asynchronous, it's a good filing cabinet and there's fewer social barriers. Like you can email whoever you want. It just goes through. It's not like you have to go to a place, you have to dress up, there's social cues, you're having a dinner, whatever it may be. Disadvantages, it's a poor medium for communicating emotions. Like we're saying, like when t sent that thing reduces politeness and respect is very direct. It can be it's bad for ambiguous things or complicated and novel situations which we all tend to work in these days. Contributes to information overload. And really whenever you work in a business, you really don't have email protocol. And you're always. Or you might do, but then you're always working with external Companies and they can just be dogs. Especially if like they're the customers and like, you know, whatever they want, they'll just like they'll hammer you about it and man, information overload. People just reply. All the stats say 30% of people's day is spent answering and reading email.

30% work day.

It is incredible. And even T had in his team, he was like on Wednesdays we just don't email each other. Yeah, like just reduce that burden. People roughly receive 100 emails a day that they have to read, process and respond. Which is mental.

I find it's all really much external stuff as well. Like I don't think we communicate much internally if at all on email us we're pretty like slack and phone call messages but there's so much external shit that comes through and you waste so much time.

I think you and I have really set the tone on this. We're like, we're not replying. If you want to get to us, message us this way and that's the way to do it. So leaders out there, you really need to set the tone and yeah, treating it as instant messaging. And we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. So we apply that context in our heads to the email and things. You get mountains out of molehills. A lot of the time we would have, it'd go on and on, back and forth over email. Months would go by, we'd have meetings about emails and it's just, it is, oh my God, it's a big to do about nothing. And the expectation you're setting as a leader, like my previous leader was a very high achiever and she would wake up really early, send emails at 4am, 5am and then people would get to it. Her expectation was not that you would reply, but when people wake up, what do they do? They check their phones. Emails on it. Oh, my boss has emailed me, I need to reply. And then all through the night people are replying and by the time you get to it, it's 50 emails of reply alls, which is just crazy. So don't do that.

So look, sit down with your teams, work out what the burden is, where the majority of email is coming from and try and work with them to reduce that and give yourself back some time. Even with people that might email you 20 times a day. Just go, no, we're not doing that. We're having a five minute coffee meeting and you sausage it all into that.

Yeah, I like that.

Send it to me if it's important. Yeah, yeah, just work it out.

I think too that that idea of just having a chat to maybe a colleague or your boss, you know, whoever you're communicating to and just going, hey, how do you prefer to be communicated to? Like as we're, you know, and we've had this conversation before because you know, I, as Berg said, I tend to just throw voice messages here, message on WhatsApp, all this sort of shit. But Berg's, he's pretty clear, he's like, no, don't message me here. Can you do it in this way? That'll help me a lot out. You stress me out when you do this. And I'm like, okay, cool. No, it's like I understood that.

It's so funny because Ben just non stop works, right? And I'm quite similar but I try to stay away from it. So I've removed stuff from my phone and then either out of hours on like a weekend, I'll get a couple of voice messages from Ben which I don't mind, but then he'll like go to a conference and be so pumped. I was like, bro, we've got to fix a product. We've got to do this, we've got to. What about that? And we need a sales team. We have. I'm like, bro, just chill. Like seriously. And just that message will put me in a different mind frame and I won't be able to rest when I come to work. I'm tired. I'm gonna be the worst employees. I'm like, bro, stick it in Slack and we'll see next week if it even actually matters because you might just be pumped up from whatever you do.

Yeah, exactly.

So look, let's sum up here. Effective communication. Look, empathize, put yourself in the receiver's shoes and the burden you're gonna put on them. Another one was our developer was away for two weeks and I didn't tag him in a bunch of stuff in Slack because he's going to come back, he's going to have to read 50,000 things. I don't want that burden. He's not going to know what's important or if it's even. You still have to do it. So I just wrote a little list for him and when he comes back I'll see if it's still important and then I'll have a 10 minute meeting with him. Done. Save him like a couple of days. Reduce ambiguous words and use emotive words strategically repeat the message and this is tell you what you're going to tell Them, tell them and then make sure.

Make sure they've actually heard it right.

And acknowledge that you don't want to put a burden on someone but also acknowledge they have responsibility. Teach them that if I give you something, this is what I expect in return. That you've heard it either say, you know, play that message back to me. If it's complicated, you need to go away and do something. I need to understand that you've understood.

Yep.

You can use multiple communication channels. You can even use multiple communications for the same channel. Sometimes I will call someone and say, hey, this is the thing, this is what we're going to do. I'll drop you an email or slack about it. And that works really, really effectively.

I found that really effective when you have a group meeting and you really need someone to take notes and then actually have those action points because you go away and you go into seven other meetings you completely forget about we spoke about.

Exactly.

Document that list. You have actionables. Who's in charge of that when it's going to be due by kind of keeps you in track.

Absolutely. And be descriptive. Focus on the problem and the opportunity, not the person. If you're having a challenge with them, whether it's a communication challenge or other, don't focus on them. Focus on what you're trying to achieve, who you're working with and what the end goal is. Always focus on that. Like if they've not done a good job unless it's, you know, really, really shocking and you've talked to them quite a few times, just be like, hey, this is what we've done and we want to get to this point. This is what we need to do. Not you've done a bad job, you need to do better because don't attack the person's self esteem.

Yeah.

And mate, they are my communication.

Top class, mate. Absolutely top class. I hope everyone got something out of that. I certainly did. And I think this is a cracking episode. If you want to refresh your communication skills or maybe your business, your startup, your colleague, maybe there's some communication stuff that we could improve on as a team. You can share this episode to them. It's a great model. If you want some of these diagrams as well the Bergs touched on, they'll be on the YouTube video. So you can head over to Ben and bergs on our YouTube channel and you'll be able to see this diagram. But Bergs, that was really helpful, man. I'm sort of already taking some stuff away from this. You know, upon reflection of my communication skills.

Thanks, mate. No, I've learned something about you with the voice messages as well. So I completely reduce all of those big text things that I send within Slack and everywhere else and just drop you like a one minute vm.

Brilliant man. Fantastic. Have that conversation with your colleague or your boss too. I think five minute conversation will clear that up and it's gonna be a much easier, smoother time.

And this is something you constantly need to work on. It's an easy conversation. And if you talk to your colleagues or your boss and say, hey, I just want to get us to communicate more effectively, we're going to work on it for however long we work together. Let's just try this one thing out, see how it goes for a week and then let's just build from there and you'll both have a much better life.

Brilliant man. Thank you everyone for listening. This has been our communication 101. For busy professionals and anyone building a business or have a team. This is how to level up your communication and drive performance. If you think this will be valuable to a colleague or a friend, we'd love you to share it with them. Dylan Bennebergs has got some dropping some communication dimes for him, so check out the episode. If you've got any feedback for us or any ideas for content you'd like us to talk about, please tweet at us bensimpsonau on Twitter and babybackburg. Leave us a review. Good, Bad, Ugly, let us know and we'll be back next week for another episode.

Thanks, champions. Have a good one.

Thanks, guys.