In this episode of the Own It Podcast, host Nicole Hollar discusses her chapter on team communication from the anthology When Work Works. She frames effective communication as essential both at work and in everyday life, emphasizing mindfulness, healthy boundaries, and respect. Nicole introduces several practical principles: recognizing and communicating one’s learning style (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, digital) to ensure information is received in the preferred format; actively asking for clarity to close gaps in expectations; being fully present in conversations (“I’m Here, You’re Here”); critically evaluating whether a meeting is necessary or could be replaced by an email, including tips on agenda setting, avoiding unnecessary reply‑alls, and staying engaged during meetings. She highlights the importance of setting and respecting work‑hour boundaries, such as limiting after‑hours email expectations. Nicole advocates for continuous, football‑team‑style feedback outside formal reviews, and encourages regular self‑assessment of one’s contribution to the team. She stresses active listening, providing constructive feedback, and addressing uncomfortable topics promptly and appropriately, illustrated with a personal anecdote about a social‑media post. The episode concludes with a reminder of her coaching resources and a call to apply these communication habits to improve clarity, morale, and personal effectiveness.
Chapters
Welcome to the Own It Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar, where we're gonna talk about stuff to help you get out of your way, take charge of your life, and, well, other stuff too. Hey guys, it's me, Nicole Hollar. Welcome to another episode of the Own It Podcast. Today, I thought I would take this opportunity with the anthology that I've contributed to coming out this week to talk about my section on team communication. So this anthology, we're 15 authors, we're different thought leaders from all walks of life contributing to A book called When Work Works. For me, in my part, I talk about team communication. And team communication is obviously very relevant because we need to be able to have clarity understanding our goals, communicate what our needs are for deliverables, whatever it might be. But it also applies to our everyday life. So I start my chapter on team communication out with a quote. And what I say is that workplaces function best when everyone on the team is mindful, has healthy boundaries, and demonstrates respect. That applies to our whole life, doesn't it? How can't it apply to the workplace, especially a place where you spend more time there than anything else? So what I wanted to do is just kind of go through some of the main elements of the chapter of my contribution To When Works, because it's not just applicable to the workplace, it's also applicable to our life. My first heading is, it's called Communicate Like a Bendy Straw. I tried to be a little bit playful in my chapter. You've probably read it in my book, Feeling Stuck. I have a whole tenet on communication. I use an example of a client, Jessica, because for Jessica, people would tell her things on the fly all the time. So she wasn't meeting deliverables. She didn't even know what people were talking about sometimes. It was really frustrating for her because she actually understood her learning style, which I address in When Work Works as well as in Feeling Stuck. And her learning style is she's a visual learner. She wants you to write it down. She's told her people 1,000 times, and a lot of them would email her per her request, but some of them would still tell her stuff on the fly and became frustrating. So we had to find a solution. That would work for her for the people who just couldn't make that shift, who couldn't communicate like a bendy straw and were pretty rigid in how they were going to express what they needed. So the first things that I talk about in this section is understanding your learning style. Are you a visual learner? Are you an auditory learner? Do you need to hear things? Are you kinesthetic? Do you want to have your hands on it, teach it? Or are you more auditory digital, meaning you need to be able to process and assess the information? Those are really important things because if you know your learning style, you can communicate it to somebody. And then of course, we hope that they're going to listen and, and give us the information they need from us in the way that we learn best. But likewise, if you know somebody is a better listener than reading, maybe there's somebody you just need to tell something to and they're on it. And that's awesome. So knowing your learning style is really important, and that's why it's under this heading of communicate like a bendy straw. But with that, it also is important to ask for clarity. If somebody is giving you information, there's a lot of gaps, you really want to ask for what it is they need, whatever it is, you know, about the goal, the deliverable, the expectation, rather than fill that gap. And because, as we all know, when When we're writing stuff down, it makes sense. That's why if you've ever written papers, even when you were young in school, that you wanted other people to read it because there might be gaps which you've filled in naturally and automatically, or that you assume somebody else knows, which isn't necessarily true. So it's super important to ask for clarity. You know, and then in this section, I have a title called I'm Here, You're Here. I'm here, you're here. There you go, not hair. And that's just basically about presence. So if I'm gonna be here, then I need to give my focus and attention to you in that meeting, whatever it might be, because otherwise I'm only taking part of the information. And then even if there was clarity, you've missed a lot of it. So you wanna make sure that you have enough presence And that you're really being committed and focused on that person who is speaking at that time. Which leads us, of course, to my next one, which is meeting that could have been an email. I'm sure we've all felt this way. As a matter of fact, and I kind of giggle about it, there's a few things that I reference. There's about 5 or 6 main points, and then each point, you know, I give examples. And one of them is, is it necessary? Like, did you need to invite everybody to that meeting? Do you just want an audience? Like, is the meeting even necessary? But further to that, and this is the part that I giggle about, I do talk about, did you need to hit reply all to let everybody know that you were going to be in attendance or to say thank you or whatever? I mean, if I could give one point that you guys take away with today, and I don't work with a giant corporate office space, stop hitting reply all if it's unnecessary. Nobody needs to know that you're going to be at lunch, not all 472 people. It's just not important. I laugh because even in our group emails among all of the authors and editors, publishers, there was plenty of reply alls. Apply all engaged unnecessarily, I assure you. You also want to have an agenda in this meeting if it could have been an email. You want to make sure that you're setting expectations for people and streamlining that meeting so that you have better focus. Nobody needs you to be meandering on forever. Some good examples, quips, whatever's good, but streamline it. Everybody's busy. You know, we want to adapt also the meeting presentation to the style that works best for our participants, but without losing sight of who you are. And then you want to make sure if you're going to be there that you are participating. If you are going to be sitting there, then participate. Don't be checking and catching up on your notes from the previous meeting because now you aren't focusing on the current meeting and you're always going to be meeting behind. So these are some of the topics that I talk about in my section of When Work Works. And then I also talk about— I have a heading called Your Boundary or Mine, meaning, you know, how many times do people send emails late at night? They might be an insomniac, be working at 1 in the morning, sending you out an email, and you create some expectation that you heard the ding and you're instantly replying. So you are creating this expectation and you are violating your own boundary and creating an expectation. So sometimes it's important to also make sure that you recognize that what you're doing, your behavior is out of the bounds of normal wellness and wellbeing, and to just maybe write that. I know that I've seen even some signatures now that people write, you know, if you've read this email outside of the bounds of normal working hours, please do not feel that you need to reply immediately. It's just their own working structure. And also, you want to review like a football team is another section. And what I mean by that is you want to ask for feedback outside of your annual review. Can you imagine if a football team just took their whole season and then was like, well, I guess we could have done better in that 3rd game or with respect to this play in offense or defense or special teams or whatever. So make sure you're reviewing like a football team and asking for quality feedback occasionally. It's going to give you an opportunity to make improvements, but also be sure to give quality feedback to people periodically outside of the bounds of it being based upon a bonus or a review because That's going to give them that opportunity to know that you want to help elevate them. And that's super important. And then the final thing I talk about in my chapter of When Work Works is that you need to be able to step away and assess where you are in your contribution. Like, am I acting as my best self every day? It's probably not going to be every day. Guess why? Because you're a person. I'm a person. We're not going to always be our best self, but we want to try to be. And just because other people aren't doing so great doesn't mean you don't want to do well enough to be proud of yourself. But honestly, if the expectation of the team is a B++ and you're giving an A++ and you feel that people are not giving you the commendation that you need, recognize that that was your decision to way overexcel. That wasn't the team's choice. And those are some of the things that you've heard me talk about as a theme in general. It's about setting expectations and knowing where you're at and being aware of who you're being. You also want to find out and think to yourself, am I listening? Am I listening to the needs of the people around me, or am I hearing them and just like, oh, Wendy's such a drag, Steve's such a, you know, a whore to work with? Listen to what they're saying because they're giving you feedback. They're trying To give you clarity. And the same goes for you, like, make sure that you are providing some type of clarity. You want to also ask yourself, is your contribution moving the needle? Are you there collecting a paycheck? Certainly many people are in workplaces and they're just trying to stick it out and survive. I get it. And you might be working with those people as well, but you want to consider for yourself, what can I do? In order to improve morale and team unity. Because if you can maybe be a participant to help boost that employee morale and unity, it's going to make your job less frustrating too, because you might have these people who are there just sort of collecting a paycheck and not really moving the needle. On top of that, we want to consider how to address things, uncomfortable topics like asking for feedback. How can you address things that are at a timely but also appropriate way. It's very important that we are open to constructive feedback, but it's just as important that we are capable of providing that kind of feedback. You know, I was on Facebook the other day. I know it probably dates me, right? That's okay. And, uh, I showed my wife this post and it was somebody who was posting. She's very proud. She completely redid the interior of her home. It looks amazing, but she shares it publicly. I was like, I made a comment. I'm like, hey, amazing, beautiful interior, blah, blah, blah. You know, instead you may want to consider sharing this not with the public, but instead only with friends. And my wife was like, well, maybe she's really proud of it and wants everybody to see it. And that might be true. And if it is true, me making that statement is no harm, is it? But if it's not the case and it was an oversight that she was sharing the entire interior and layout of her home with the entire universe, friend of hers or not, then at least I've made her aware of it. And her reply to me was, good call, thanks. So sometimes, you know, we want to just be able to address things in a timely and appropriate manner. And also recognize that people are just making statements sometimes. So that was it. I just wanted to share with you some of the basic outline of my contribution to When Work Works. Again, I'm talking about communication and how to be flexible in it, knowing your learning styles, but also about remembering, could that meeting have been an email? And some of the points to consider if you are having a meeting about the audience, the kind of structure you're going to have for the meeting, things to streamline and help to facilitate it, setting expectations as people leave the meeting so they know what the follow-up is afterward, about understanding, respecting your boundaries, but also knowing that we sometimes create a boundary scenario that we want to get out of, and reviewing as frequently as we can. You don't want to harass people, but if you had an occasional monthly touch base to go, hey, are we cool? That's amazing. And also being able to step away and assess and evaluate your contribution. That's it. I'm going to leave that for today. Remember, this is your time and that you can find me on most social media @NicoleHollerCoaching, as well as check out my website, nicoleholler.com, for more information about books, coaching workshops, and so on. I hope you have a great day.
