The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Plan for and Execute Effective Communication Plans | PPP #85

Episode Date: August 29, 2021

Finishing out the 'Foundational 5' series with a definition of 'communication', importance of vertical and horizontal comms, the C.U.D.C. concept, active listening tips and guidance for IMTs and Project Teams.

If no one knows our leader's intent, that we've set smart objectives, created a functional organizational structure, and are requesting and coordinating resources, then we'll never accomplish anything. In today's episode, People Process Progress, Episode 85, Foundation 5, Effective Communication, we'll talk through the importance of communications up and down the chain of command, some quick references for personal and professional communications, and the folly of not planning communications effectively. But first, please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with people process progress in three, two, one. Welcome back, everybody.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your day. I am Kevin Pinnell. I'm your host. I am a husband, a father, a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman veteran. I was in public safety, public health for a little bit. All has incident management, so part of teams that go out and find missing people after hurricanes, etc. Now I'm in the project management proper space and podcasting here to share some of my ideas, those of my guests, and to interact. So I appreciate all the interaction from the folks, the, what, 97 countries across the world, 51 U.S. states and territories who have listened.

Thank you so much for checking out PeopleProcessProgress.com. Follow People Process Progress on Instagram, Facebook page. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Please subscribe. Please leave reviews. That'll help it get more exposure, the show get more exposure, and hear from me and my guests and more people like you. Again, if you have a story, a process, some progress that you've made, or a process that didn't work out, go to peopleprocessprogress.com, go be on the show, and then we'll chat and maybe share your story.

That'd be great. So what is communication? Again, like in the last episode, like in People Process Progress 84, Foundation for Request and Coordinate Resources, I used, again, my great research skills on the Google. And according to Merriam-Webster, communication is a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior. And there's a few more, as we know, when we look up definitions, there's different parts of it, different parts of speech and all those kind of Englishy things. But let's unpack kind of that definition here as we get started and before we get into some tips and some follies and those kind of things. And so to me, the keywords in there were system, symbols, signs, and behavior, right? So system. So

the most well-known system that I know for communication is language, right? So many languages across the world, spoken, sign language, right? Hand language, body language, which we'll get into here in a little bit. But that to me is the ultimate plus that's the people aspect, right? People speak language. I know computers speak language and there's other languages, but by and large language within a culture or between cultures is a huge part and it is a system. And of course, there are many, many, many electronic systems that help us with communication that are part of communication as well. Symbols, to me, hand symbols, like I mentioned, sign language or, you know, you're on a mission using hand signals or whatever high-speed stuff. Body language, right, is a symbol. There's symbolism there. Letters, right, are symbols that

we use to visualize the spoken word. And pictures, obviously, right? Pictures kind of similar to signs and stuff, but let's go to signs. There are movements, right? The way we move, the way you see an animal move is a sign. Are they hunting something? Are they being hunted? Are they fearful, right? Are they coming up to you super happy like your favorite pet, you know, when you get home? Hand signs, remember? Street signs, right good example uh that help everybody hopefully when we pay attention to them be more aware and be safer there are ads billboards right those are signs you know ads all over the place billboards all over the place pop-ups on the web browsers kind of the more modern version and all those kind of things and there's many more systems

symbols and signs and the last one that i took from that definition is behaviors and a big one's body language and i've talked about this before and you all have probably heard about this you know hands crossed hands on your hips looking away biting your lip versus you're kind of standing there hands at your side paying attention and we'll get into some of this great active listening tips here in a little bit but body language is huge posture right slouching sitting up paying attention not looking at the camera when you're on the Zoom or looking away, clearly multitasking, those kind of things. I think behaviors, emotions, our emotions help drive our behaviors or maybe our emotion, emotional response is a behavior, right? Which we see a lot of between anger and fear and people being really upset about other people's opinions these days and all that kind of stuff. Another one I thought of for behaviors, and this has to do with something I spoke about in 84, where people, or rather Foundations Friday this past Friday, where people being our most important resources,

a behavior you can see in any kind of work, but in particular just what I do in the private sector, if people start calling out sick, right, that's a behavior. That's a communication that maybe they're not happy. They're not burnt out. How can we help them? So not to go too deep in solving that problem, but something to consider. So communication is so much, right? It's in the way we talk, the way we look, the way we move, the way devices we use, radios, all these kinds of things. And we'll touch on some of those different aspects of it. But two, really, within

our organization that we have made and the resources, the people that we're going to be working with that we requested as part of Foundation 4, right, our resources there, is communicating vertically, meaning up and down the chain of command in that org structure, right? With those resources, with our teammates, with our superiors and our subordinates, but then also horizontally across with our peers, with the other folks in the boxes, even with us. So let's touch on coordinating up the chain of command, right? It's a different communication. It's often a report out or an escalation like we talked about escalation is not a four-letter word right sometimes we need help from our bosses or the

bosses of other people to help us do things we through our relationships and our influence and our camaraderie and all that good stuff we want to influence and just work together sometimes we just need help right from our superiors or an approval for a certain amount of money or to go forward or not go forward with our plan or our approval for a certain amount of money or to go forward or not go forward with our plan or our project or whatever we're doing. And then to subordinates, sometimes it's a little different. Now, we should make sure everyone has the same common operating picture, right? Everybody knows what's going on from the strategic plan to the tactical level. But leaders usually don't want to get involved in the tactical level as much unless they have

to jump in because there's a gap maybe in leadership or something like that. But subordinates, for sure, we're going to get into the tactics of it because we're going to take that leader's intent from the top of the org structure, come down a little bit as we've done those objectives. And now we're going to help translate as we are and make sure we've communicated well what are the tactics we're going to use to solve those objectives and meet leaders intent and work within this organizational structure and does everybody recognize that and i've mentioned in the past for project management folks out there a part of the kickoff meeting and then as you have your regular meetings with your team is to do just that make sure everybody knows who's who and who's responsible for what who's not responsible for what and make sure that your leaders know what's happening on a regular basis whether you're sending weekly reports or there's a dynamic you know place you can send them to look at real-time data that kind of stuff

and that's vertical right up down horizontal communication is with our peers right team to team individual to individual typically pretty ground truth, straightforward discussions, right? When you're having a communication, you have the C-suite or vice presidents or whomever in the room, that's a different conversation that's usually not quite as open as it is when you're talking to your peers or even your subordinates. So the good thing about the peer-to-peer is you can kind of filter a lot of the politics and stuff out. You can filter out, you know, which we shouldn't, right? We should be objective in our reporting and our communications and how we're communicating what the status of anything is.

So it shouldn't matter. But it sometimes does. And not everybody on the team is comfortable communicating with the C-suite. That's fine. So that's something, too, we as leaders can help them with. But when we communicate with peers, we need to make sure across each team, across each section for the incident command system folks, across each division, sector, whatever kind of grouping, everyone has the same common operating picture of what's happening. We all have different parts of those objectives and leaders intent, but we all

should be coordinating what we're doing to reduce risk of losing money and time, safety when it comes to being out in the field or carrying out missions or responses or special events or anything like that. We all need to know what the other people are doing. And part of that is making sure that we are communicating between the leaders of the teams or the groups or the sections so we all have that common operating picture. So I want to share now a couple of the tools and some of the guides. This first one is CUDC or communicate, understand, decide, and communicate, which sounds kind of redundant and it is a little bit. So I'll get back into that in a second. This is one of the lessons learned that I took from that staff ride I talked about way back in

between the slides number 10. So go back, It's archived in this feed here about leadership lessons from the Battle of Gettysburg. And this was the CUDC method to kind of make sure and help active communication, which will lead us into some active listening tips from verywellmind.com. We'll get into that in a second. So what's this CUDC? So communicate, understand, decide, communicate. So the first communicate is listen, right? Active listening. We are going to communicate by letting that person know we are listening to them.

And again, I'm going to break down that a lot more here in a second. The second of that CUDC is understand. Know what is happening. What's the common operating picture? So first, I'm going to make sure I listen to the person that's telling me or briefing us or, you know, giving us that brief before we go out in the field. Then I'm going to try and make sure I understand what's going on. Then if I'm a decision maker and I have some room in how I'm going to do these tactics or meet these objectives, I'm going to decide. When I'm going to make a decision, I may not have all the information if it's a quick response or a dynamic situation, kind of like on the ground in Afghanistan or a public safety response or something like that. But based on my experience, what I understand the situation,

what I've heard in the in briefing, something like that, 80-20 rule, right? What's the best I can do to keep my people the safest to get the things done efficiently or for a project to save money, stay on schedule, scope, all that good stuff. But it doesn't have to be perfect. And we have to make a decision because again, if we're making decisions, if we're communicating, if we're trying to make sure we're communicating effectively in a timely manner, that time wedge where time goes, keeps clicking by, and our choices go down is against us. The last is communicate again. This is now we're not listening, we are responding. So we have listened, communicated, we have understood, we have decided, and now we're going to respond with implicit communication, which means

I am going to give, if I'm the decision maker, some pretty direct orders. And part of this came from in one of the battles, a misinterpretation of guidance from leadership on the union side, defending the hill. Should I go out there? What should I, you know side defending the hill should i go out there what should i you know should i should i go forward toward the enemy and leave this gap in the line well i think they said this well whether you're in a civil war battle a modern battle a public safety response a special event a project we shouldn't guess or need to guess because back in what we talked about before, if we are the superior coordinating or communicating rather to our subordinates, we need to be implicit and let

them clearly know this is what's in scope. This is what's not in scope. This is the area we're going to work in. And there's so much more, right? Whatever details need to be part of that plan or that briefing, we need to be super clear clear and especially in our leader's intent, right? It's not a flowery thing just like our objectives are not. It is direct. It is to the point. It is task, purpose, end state. So to help get us to that end state so that everybody understands, we want to actively listen to the briefing on what the situation on the ground is, to the planners or owners of the special event to the stakeholders or whatever body approved the project. And as I mentioned, right on last Friday, people are the most important and we're going to hear this from people, right? We may use technology and systems and computers or

whatever to help communicate, but we are going to have face-to-face or zoom-to-zoom, but people-to- people communication. So again, I got this from verywellmind.com, active listening tips, and they're really good, and we're gonna talk through these a bit, how we can be more effective with each other, person to person. So the first one is eye contact. First thing I thought of, and I think about this a lot,

and I tell my kids this, is always look eye. That's the quote from Mr. Miyagi, from the original Karate Kid, the best one, in my opinion. Eye contact, it's huge, right? It means you're paying attention, you give a crap what that person is saying, and you want to hear more, and that you are, you know, trying to do your best to communicate with them. You are doing the first communicate from the CUDC, which is active listening. You're going to paraphrase, right, what you hear them say. Let them know that you are paying attention. This is a part of a tactic too from crisis intervention training or CIT that law enforcement learns, right? They see

a person do an introduction. What's your name? I can see that you're upset. So what I heard you say is this kind of thing, right? So when you are active listening, you're making eye contact and you paraphrase what people are saying. They know that you give a crap and that you're listening to them. The third thing is don't interrupt, right? It's not about you right now. You're trying to listen to why people called you for help. The next thing, number four, is watch nonverbal behavior, right? We mentioned body language. You all have seen it. Someone's listening. They roll their eyes. They cross their arms. They're kind of looking away. Their hands are on their hips, right? There's so many, there's a lot more information that i'm not going to cover all here about body language but pay attention to it right see if someone's interested or not or if we're active listening

look at that person are they in crisis right is this a person that's totally burned out on your team so as you're seeing their non-verbal language and they're disengaging their their lips quivering right is it just too much we need to time, give that person a break and get back to them? We need to, the fifth one is shut down our internal dialogue, right? This is where we, it's related to that not interrupting, right? Too much mind from the last samurai where Tom Cruise's character was sparring and he was thinking too much. Well, he was thinking about what was going on with him instead of the situation,

right? Thinking through things. When we shut down our internal dialogue, we are not immediately trying to solve that person's problem before we listen to what's happening or be part of the solution or get all the information before our mind starts going. I know I've had this, right? I, and I'm sure many of you were helpers, were doers. We respond.

We want to help somebody. And so we get our wheels turning to, oh, okay, I've heard these things. I have solutions for those, or I think I do. Get the whole picture first, give that person the time they need to let you know what's happening. And then we'll work through it. Then we'll move to understand, right? And then we'll decide, and then we'll communicate back what's happening. The sixth thing is show interest by asking questions. This is kind of like paraphrasing, but it's really be involved in their discussion with you. So you've let them talk, you're looking at their eyes, you're not interrupting. But when the appropriate time is, and you can tell, right, people pause to make sure that kind of you're paying attention. Then, right, ask the questions,

expand, you know, can you expand on this piece of that I didn't quite understand? Or, oh, well, what do you think about this? You know, get into that kind of thing the next thing is avoid abruptly changing the subject and I think this comes into when you're talking about hard stuff right when you're talking about difficult situations like the airport in Afghanistan a missing person that was kidnapped after a building collapse what's happening or someone that just needs to talk to you that need you to actively listen to them this is critical right and this is where us as communicators and leaders leaders have to be it's happening or someone that just needs to talk to you that need you to actively listen to them, this is critical, right? And this is where us as communicators and leaders, leaders have to be able to communicate. And this is a huge thing right here of not changing the subject on a person that has either come to you to talk about something or they need your help escalating something,

right? And you don't give them the time of day and you don't pay attention and you don't keep on the topic that they want to talk about. This is a hard one, depending on what that person is talking about, especially if you have preconceived notions about it, is to be open, neutral, and withhold judgment. And as Jocko Willink likes to say, he has normal face. And I try to do this as much as I can in meetings. I may already know some of the issues that this person has or they're having with their team or somebody else or what's going on somewhere. I think I know. I won't say I may already know. I might think I know, but not have the whole scoop.

Or be sitting in a meeting and hear a certain response that I don't agree with or that may actually make me upset. I do everything I can to just have a normal face. Take it in, think about it, what's that perspective, and then respond, right, after that. And that's a very hard thing to do, especially if you're kind of a sounding board for someone and part of their feedback is about something you have or haven't done. Really hard to take in. Along with that, which goes hand in hand with that, is to be patient, right? You just have to give that person time. You have to be patient with them getting it off their chest. Say they're really upset. They were involved in the critical incident.

They are part of the locality where a tornado tore it up, messed up their town, killed some people. You're there to help. They're going to be upset, right? Or it's a special event. It's their first one. They're new, like sports 5K hosting company, and you're there to help them. You going to be upset, right? Or it's a special event. It's their first one, their new like sports 5k hosting company, and you're there to help them. You got to be patient with them. The last one is more so becoming kind of a student of this active listening. It's learn to recognize after listening, active listening, right? You can appreciate that in someone that's active listening to you. If they're making that eye contact, are they paraphrasing? Are they not interrupting you? Are they watching your nonverbal? You know, are they clearly shutting down their internal dialogue? They're asking questions, right? You can tell that and appreciate it and

learn from it. And I'm going to share real quick, another great thing for active listening or making sure you know the intent or that you're in the right frame of mind when you are talking to somebody else or listening and got this from my my wife who I think got this from her executive coach. Three things to prompt the person who needs to talk to you, right? And this is not just maybe personal. It could be professional as well, right? And not a tactical communication or anything like that. And that is when someone says, hey, can I talk to you?

And they clearly need your time, is to ask them, do you want me to help? Do you want me to handle? Or do you want me to hear? Super great. I don't know exactly where those come from other than learn it from my wife. You may know, would love to hear from that peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com. Let me know. So the first thing is, do you want me to help? Do you want me to actively listen to you and then give you suggestions? So it kind of prompts the person ahead of time to know, okay, I'm going to actively listen, but then I am going to take a second and then I am going to give you some responses because you asked me to do that. Do you want me to handle this? And

as a parent, right, as a co-parent of almost 20 years, so actually my anniversary is in a couple of weeks, which is pretty legit, 20 years. Do you want me to handle this honey right do you want me to listen to you and then take this on and then go talk to the boys and then take it on right or similar say you're talking to a peer or say you're talking to even you know someone you work for do you want me to handle this are you letting me know about this because you'd like me to take this on and take action what's the intent or do you just want me to hear do you want me to just be a sounding board right do you want me to let you go and just talk because people like to talk to each other right it's it's part of what makes us humans some people are introverts right and say you know i don't like

to talk to people etc but i have found that a lot of those folks do feel better about things when they actually do talk through stuff particularly horrible horrible stuff, right? If they've seen something bad and maybe they're not extroverted, but folks in public safety or just other areas, it helps to talk about it. So help handler here is a good prompt for someone that you're going to talk to or that comes to talk to you to get the intent. What's the intent of this conversation? The couple of things that I want to end this episode on, one specific that has to do with communications and the incident command system, incident management space,

and then the second is for kind of project management, those two worlds that I've lived in or lived in now, both of which are preempted by my statement of don't half-ass your communications. Say that again. If you are an incident management team, if you are in public safety, if you an incident management team, if you are in public safety, if you are in the military, if you are on a project, if you are in anywhere where

communications is going to be vital, do not half-ass it. I have seen this. I've been part of this, unfortunately, where it didn't go well and you don't want that. And so my hope is that just that sticks in your brain, right? Don't have fast communications. So I'm going to use some of this national incident management system, terminology, incident command system type stuff. The first one is, and these are the concepts, right? Interoperability, redundancy, flexibility, reliability, these kinds of things. So if we do have fast our communications, we will reduce our interoperability.

Meaning if we don't get together like we should between departments police fire ems different localities whatever we won't be able to talk to each other and when something bad happens that's not going to be good right we won't have redundancy because we won't have backup systems because we didn't plan it like we should have in our contingency plannings right for that pace planning that primary alternate contingency, and emergency planning for communications, we won't be redundant. We won't be very flexible because we will be isolated to our own communications that we have to talk to ourselves. Certainly won't be as reliable, right? Maybe our radios work good. Maybe the, you know, satellites are up. That's awesome.

But can we rely on each other and have more redundancy because we have, you know, satellites are up, that's awesome, but can we rely on each other and have more redundancy because we have, you know, more radios that we're working together? We may not have portability depending on how we planned, so maybe we as one locality don't have a great cache of stuff. Maybe you as a locality that we're working together do. Well, maybe you have all the portability and we don't, and that could be a problem. Maybe we can't scale because we didn't work together, and so now we can't expand our communications network, set up new towers, all this kinds of stuff. And the last thing, which unfortunately I have seen happen, is people might die. If I can't talk to your people and your guy,

and I've used this example before, rescue task force. If we can't talk to your people and your guy, and I've used this example before, rescue task force. If we can't talk to each other and one of your officers gets hit with a brick or shot or something bad, and we're not all communicating on the same frequencies or channels are patched in together, and I can't get my medics to them, that's not good. So if we are doing special events, if we are public safety responding, if we're an incident management team, there's a whole communications responding, if we're an incident management team, there's a whole communications process, a whole communications unit and logistics. They know their job, rely on them, work together, talk to each other. We need to make sure we're interoperable, we have redundancy, we have flexibility,

we have reliability, portability, and scalability in our communications. Remember those concepts. So what about for project management? We're not, we're in portable, we're 800 megahertz radios, right, with emergency buttons on them, but we're using Microsoft Teams, we're using Zoom, phone, text, all this kind of stuff. Same preface, don't have asked the communications, right? Put time into determining what is the meeting frequency that we should have as a team from kickoff to the end it'll change and be dynamic with it right value added time do we need to meet or can i email this stuff of course i mentioned it but then this day and age chat

right whatever platform you use it's pretty reliable also a good thing pay attention to whether that person's in the office out of of the office, if they mark busy. Chats pop up on the screen. What if they're in the middle of a meeting? You chat about a person that's in it. All that kind of stuff can happen. It has happened. I've seen it happen.

It's unfortunate. Communications where we push to the public, meaning kind of our users, even if it's within our organization. How are we making sure we're recording that kind of stuff for the project, right? Do we have regular emails? Is there a status board? Is there a dynamic kind of thing that's always up? For the team, the project team, make sure everyone has the same internal common operating picture. We know what the objectives of the project is. We know what our milestones are. What's our overall timeline? What are the expectations of you from the analyst level, or, you know, kind of boots on the ground level up to the C-suite level? And do we know who to contact if you're stuck? What's the escalation path? That's a critical communication piece to

know how to solve problems and get help. So we don't just sit on things and they fester and not get better. And it knocks us off schedule and scope and all that good stuff. How are you scaling your updates? Very tactical updates and what's next task by task for the regular team. How do we summarize that and give the bottom line up front for the executives? You're going to have to have a happy medium. You're probably going to be communicating a ton different ways, a lot of PowerPoints or dashboards or whatever you use, but they're going to have to be different ones for different audiences. The last one that's different than public safety and incident management that's less, we'll say, critical health-wise is people may leave, right? If we don't communicate, if we don't loop people in, if we treat our information like it's

top secret for our project and say, oh, that's not your level, right? Which I hate that statement. It's a horrible thing to say to somebody on your team. That's above your pay grade, right? It's not funny. It's not effective. And it's not good for people's morale. I hope that all of you listening have good morale these days. COVID surges, masks, shots, what works, what doesn't, politics, the horribleness in Afghanistan, the lawnmower right outside my window, my son doing his chores. But I wish you all the best out there. I know it's tough times.

I thank you for giving your time to this show. Again, please reach out on Facebook, Instagram, People Process Progress, and at peopleprocessprogress.com. Got archived episodes. Need to get some of these backlogged in there. But thanks again. Please stay safe out there. Wash those hands. And Godspeed.