How to talk to non experts – Tip 7: Use level appropriate content

Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's take a look at tip number 7: use level-appropriate content. Now this is a little bit of a repeat of tips 2 and 3 earlier in this series, but it is so important that I'm going to expand on it a little bit in this tip here. So the tip is use level-appropriate content, and what this means is that When you describe a topic, when you're talking to your audience, you need to consider what level they are in the business and in their expertise, because particularly on the business side, different business levels have different priorities and different perspectives. You're an expert in your topic. You know why it is important for you and from your perspective. But when you're talking to the business or you're talking to somebody who's higher or lower in the business, They will have different perspectives, different priorities, and it is really important that you adapt your message to fit with those so that it makes more sense. Now, what happens if you don't do this? Well, you could deliver the wrong message, you could get worse outcomes, and you could even damage your reputation. What, what do I mean by these? Well, if I was a software developer and I discovered a problem And there was an issue with a piece of software and I was talking to my manager about it. If I started talking about the details of that bug and what it meant for me to fix it, it's going to take me 3 days to fix it. That's not necessarily the perspective of the manager. What the manager needs to hear, the right message for the manager would be, this application is not going to work. The sales team that use this to track their progress are going to be without it for 2 days. We probably need to tell them. That's the right message rather than focusing on the individual defect. So considering the business level means you consider their priorities and you can then avoid delivering the wrong message. Now for poor outcomes, if I want funding approval from a leader above me and I don't describe my topic in a way that considers their priorities, they're less likely to care and less likely to approve the funding, so I'll get a worse outcome. If I'm trying to explain how something is important and why another team needs to pay attention to it because it's important, if I describe it from my priorities, they're probably going to care less than if I describe it using their perspective and their priorities. It'll make more sense. It'll have more urgency. So I'll get a better outcome. I'll avoid the poor outcome if I describe it from their perspective. And the last one is reputation damage. If you are looking to progress within your organization, you'll be interacting with people at different levels above and below. If you can't communicate across that divide in a way that considers what those audiences need or care about, you're going to be seen as someone who can't communicate effectively across the organization. That's a barrier to being promoted. That's a barrier to to progression in our careers. And every time you deliver a message that's not relevant and relatable to the people you're talking to, it's a little bit of reputation damage when it comes to your communication skills. So this is what happens if you don't do it. This is why I'm repeating from the tips earlier in this course. So now that I've hammered that home, how do you actually do it? What can you do to identify and consider the business-level gaps? Well, the first step, as we talked about before, is identify the actual gap. We're talking organizational hierarchical level here. What is the gap? Are they 2 levels above me, 1 level above me, the same, or below? Know that difference and then start to think about how you can change your message. Identify their perspective. Are they 2 levels above but they care about the user perspective? Are they 1 level below but they care about the business perspective? What does it mean for the business? Identify their priorities. What is it that's important to them? And then you adjust your message to fit with their priorities. You're not ignoring what's important to you, but you're presenting your information. You're making a case for whatever you're trying to achieve using their priorities. So this is how you do it. First of all, identify the level gap. The bigger the gap, the more you will need to work to adjust your message because you're trying to communicate with someone who is in a very different frame of reference than you. Let's take a look at an example. Let's say a team has achieved the sales targets early. Now, I'm the manager of the team. What do I want to say? So this is what's happened. We've achieved the sales targets early. I'm the team manager. Well, if I'm talking to the CEO, I might say, revenue targets are up early this quarter, we will be ahead on the financials for the end of the year, we can hit the company targets early, you can then report that in the quarterly earnings report. Those are things that the CEO might care about. Equally, if I was talking to the team, I wouldn't talk about the quarterly earnings report because they don't really care about that. What I could say to the team is, congratulations on hitting your target early, it means that That— now we're talking about impact. It means that there's a greater chance of sales bonuses at the end of the month. It means we can set a new record for the team. It means we can now have this celebratory event. So we met our targets early. You've done a great job, and here's what it means for us and what we're going to do next. The 2 messages are different because there are different priorities at the CEO level and at the sales team level. And as a manager, if I didn't consider that and just delivered one message, it might only be relevant to one group, or it might be relevant to neither of them. So as an expert talking to non-experts, make sure that you are using level-appropriate content in your messages.