Communicate, Connect, Engage

FountainBlue’s January 14 Front Line Managers Online meeting on the topic of ‘Communicate, Connect, Engage’. My thanks also to our panelists for their participation: Tammy Sanders, Shobhana Viswanathan, Louise Lamb.

We were fortunate to have such practical and inspiring leaders for this week’s panel, speaking so passionately and eloquently on how to better communicate, connect and engage with your stakeholders.Our panelists shared why engagement was so important from the people, product and business perspectives. Their success stories showed how they overcame obstacles to deliver quantifiable and qualitative results for their teams and organizations. Below is a summary of their advice for how to better communicate, connect and engage:

• Align on values and ensure that you and everyone else can consistently think, speak, and act on those values.
• Embrace the opportunities for contemplation and reflection to see how your own view of the world could be a little more flexible, more broad.
• Hire, retain and develop the passionate doers who will show up and follow through, and support them in adopting others-like-them on to the team.
• Look also at what’s-not-said/done, for reading between the lines can tell you what motivates others as well as what they meant by the words they said, the actions they took.
• Create a safe space for people to transparently and authentically share their challenges, opportunities and successes.
• Understand the motivations of your stakeholders and ensure that you and the team are solving problems of interest for each stakeholder.
• View the problem from a larger lens/perspective, so that you can better communicate and better connect and engage with others.
• Speak from a bottom-line/revenue impact perspective to get sponsor and executive buy-in.
• If ‘snow melts on the edges’ as Andy Grove would say, invite the team to understand what the product, business and customer implications are for today’s circumstances and needs and for tomorrow’s technologies and solutions. 

People have always been a company’s greatest asset, and it’s much more important now when we are all impacted by the ‘Great Resignation’. Communicating, connecting and engaging with your people helps managers and leaders at all levels to recruit, retain, and develop their people, and encourages everyone to go that extra mile to deliver value, while contributing to a positive culture.

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