8 Tips to Communicate Effectively With Your Employees

I was working with a CEO in Las Vegas and he said, I don't want to be totally transparent with my employees because I don't want them to know how much money I'm making. I'm like, dude, they get it. You show up every day in a 50 foot long limousine. You have two private Cessna Citation jets with a pilot who's waiting for you. They know you're rich. So that weekend, he brought all of his employees to his home, this massive mansion in Las Vegas. And they already knew he was rich, but they were excited to be brought inside of his life for the first time. And he realized that he could be totally transparent as well. Try it. It totally works. Why do I talk about the whole idea of loose lip sync ships? The reality is, I think we as humans need to have a trusted confidant in everything that we deal with in life. We have pillow talk where we talk to our spouse or our partner. We have a best friend that we reach out to when we're struggling with something or we need to share something, a fear or an insecurity or even something we're excited about. We want to share that with one other person. Even if I tell my partner something, she probably wants to tell somebody because she needs to have a trusted confidant. Did I give Cameron the best support? Did I encourage him too much? Did I handle that the right way? How do I keep it secret? So she's telling a friend, well, now her friend is going, well, maybe I should ask my spouse if I really helped Ashley. So the reality is, no one intends to share secrets. But stuff gets out, if you need it to be confidential, shut up, don't share it. Because loose lips sink ships.

People need to stop giving advice. And the reason for that is advice is often just an opinion, and opinions are like, we've all got one. The reality is, what people are going to learn from more than advice, more than your opinion, is the experience that you went through. So what we need to do more is share our experience at what we went through and let the person we're trying to help take from that experience and distill it in their own way. They'll be more receptive to it. They'll learn from it in a slightly different way. And they can take four or five different people's experiences and weave them together to come up with their own solution for the problem. But by telling someone what you think they should do or what they should do, your opinion is very narrow and it's not necessarily completely tied to the rest of their situation. So by sharing your experience, and in the entrepreneur's organization, EO, or in ypo, they call it the Gestalt Protocol, they actually teach us as entrepreneurs to only share experience, not opinion.

So we have to communicate our messages relentlessly to our employees and our suppliers and our customers. And what I mean by that is we have to communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate over and over and over and over again so they truly get it so that it sticks, so that it becomes a mantra. Jim Collins used to say that you have to communicate so often to your employees that they start making fun of you. And only when they start making fun of you have your ideas started to stick. The reason for that is people are busy. So let's say as an example, I sent out a very short, very concise, very clear email message to all of my employees. The reality is some of them didn't read it, some of them skimmed through it. That was one email out of 80 that they got that day. So they might have read it quickly and forgot. So you need to be sending it out in multiple forms. You need to be reinforcing it in multiple ways. You need to be making sure that it's clear and that it's stuck and that they actually understood it. But here's another reason why you need to communicate over and over again as well. I want you to write down a sentence. The sentence is, I didn't say you were beautiful. And if you read that sentence and put the emphasis on the first word, I didn't say you were beautiful, it means something very different from if you put the emphasis on the second, I didn't say you were beautiful. Or if you put the emphasis on the third, I didn't say you were beautiful or I didn't say you were beautiful, or I didn't say you were beautiful or I didn't say you were beautiful.

Right?

You see how that one six word sentence means six completely different things? So, so the reality that you're communicating something out, it can get misinterpreted, misread, skimmed, not read at all, or just merely forgotten. So when there's important messages, you need to get out to your customers, your suppliers or your employees, you need to communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate over and over and over again. Should we repeat this? Should I tell you this all again? So you get it? No, I think you get it. We've all seen cc, which means carbon copy, and bcc, which means blind carbon copy in our emails. Do you know where they came from? So. So when I first started in my career At a company called College Pro Painters, we actually had memos that we would send out internally in the organization. And I would write a memo, let's say, to Matt, but I also wanted Justin to see it. I wanted Edita to see it, I wanted Kelly to see it. So I would carbon copy them and they would get a copy of that memo. But if I was the executive sending that out and I was going to carbon copy six people, either I had to go to the front of the office and shove one in each of their mailboxes, or my assistant had to do it. Now imagine if I sent out 17 memos in a day and I carbon copied 82 people on each memo. My assistant was now spending all day long shoving pieces of paper into everybody's mailbox and getting no work done. So we were very selective on when we used carbon copy. What I've learned in the email world now is we're overusing carbon copy. The reality is, if you're putting someone's name in the cc, tell them in the start of the email why you're sending it to them and what they need to do. Or don't send it to them at all because they don't need to be FYI'd on everything. They hired you to do a job. They trust that you're doing a job. They only want to know about something if they need to do something with it. The blind carbon copy actually is causing a mistrust or breaking trust. What's become popular now is I'm blind carbon copying you so that when people reply all, it saves your inbox. If you're not saying I BCC'd, you don't blind carbon copy someone, because then they're gonna wonder who Cameron's talking about behind my back. I wonder when he that emailed to me last night, did he be CC edited behind my back? It's destroying trust and you're doing it to yourself. Years ago, when I was the second in command for 1-800-got junk, I was the COO. I was going up the elevator with an employee. I didn't know who the employee was. I was pretty sure they worked in the call center, but we had a couple hundred employees at the time, and I wasn't even really sure. And they said to me, how's it going? And I said, good. Little frustrated with our customer service and we need to fix some stuff around customer service. But, yeah, everything's going pretty well. How's it going with you? It was a short elevator ride and they said, good. They got all off the elevator. And a day later, the head of customer service came up to me and they said, here's our new project plan for fixing XYZ and customer service. I'm like, where'd that come from? They said, oh, you were talking to an employee yesterday, and you said we needed to fix something. So we jumped on it. We had meetings all night last night, and we've pulled together a team. I'm like, I was just thinking out loud. And he said, dude, you're the coo. You're not allowed to think out loud. If you think out loud, we actually jump. And I realized that titles carry a lot of weight, and we need to be careful when we use them. Because every action, whether it's good, whether it's bad, if it's praise, if it's a. A reprimand, if it's something we need to work on, it's like a boulder being dropped into a pond. The bigger the title is, the more the ripples happen. And we need to be very cognizant of that internally when we're talking to our teams and when we're talking to our customers, and even when we're just thinking out loud in meetings. I've always been someone in business, sadly, who reacted versus responded to an issue. And when there's a sticky situation or a stressful situation or a conflict, I would tend to react sometimes out of anger, sometimes out of frustration, sometimes feeling backed into a corner instead of just thinking about it and then responding to it, or even taking time to say, let me think about that. Let me consider that. And then responding, maybe in an hour or a day. The reality is that any of those sticky situations that we're in or any of the uncomfortable situations or any of the conflict situations, it gives us an opportunity to pause and think, what if the person is right? Or what was my contribution that maybe made that happen in the wrong way? Or what's the system that's missing or broken that allowed that to happen? But instead of just responding and shutting the person down or reacting in a negative way, maybe just take pause and think, you know, what if they're right? Or what could we improve? Or what's the missing system in there? Or what was my contribution to the problem that we can get better at? And then also to remember that it's a growth opportunity, right? Anytime something is going wrong or there's a problem, it's an opportunity to get better and an opportunity to grow. So just take the time to respond versus react. There's a whole idea around open book financials or transparency around your financials. And years ago, where I really learned this, I was running my first business. I was about 21 years old. I had 12 employees. And I was really frustrated because all of my employees thought I was rich. They all thought I was making too much money. The reality was I hadn't started making money yet. I was still paying off my investments, still buying all of my ladders, still paying off my vehicles. Vehicle. And I was really struggling with the fact that they thought I was rich. And I was really struggling to even have enough cash in the bank, you know, to feel successful. So I talked to my dad about it and he said, why do they think you're all so successful? And I said, they see my revenue, but they don't know all my expenses. He said, well, show them. So that night I had them all come to my home. I bought pizza in and brought beer in. And I sat down and I showed them my accounting and I showed them all of the expenses I had the paint and the soft supplies and my royalties and my marketing costs and my gas and vehicle and insurance and workers compensation and unemployment and payroll. And within about 20 minutes, they all thought I was going bankrupt. They thought they were going to be worried for their jobs and they decided to start doing more marketing so that we would be successful. So within 20 minutes, I flipped the switch. You can have that same kind of transparency regardless of how big you are as a company. Again, years ago, I was working with a CEO in Las Vegas and he said, I don't want to be totally transparent with my employees because I don't want them to know how much money I'm making. I'm like, dude, they get it. You show up every day in a 50 foot long limousine. You have two private Cessna Citation jets with a pilot who's waiting for you. They know you're rich. So that weekend, he brought all of his employees to his home, this massive mansion in Las Vegas. And they already knew he was rich, but they were excited to be brought inside of his life for the first time. And he realized that he could be totally transparent as well. Try it. It totally works. The reality is, inside of companies, all of the energy that we have is created or destroyed. And we need to, as leaders, bring good, positive energy into the organization. Which often means we need to control some of our own stress and some of our own negative energy. Some of that starts before you even get to the office. And after you leave the office, it's about de stressing, decompressing, finding great things to thank people for and almost showing up with that attitude of gratitude we used to call it. So when you show up and you're looking for people to praise and actions to say thank you for, core values that are being exhibited, maybe even when you get to the office, you think, what's one thing I'm going to do to raise the energy level today? It often is you showing up in a better mindset in a better way so that you're less stressed.