Leveraging Leadership

Speaking in Tweets: Effective Strategies for Communicating with a Rapid-Fire Boss

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 134

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Emily shares a story about her coaching client who struggled with his fast-paced, detail-averse boss. She explains how they adapted by using short, bullet-point emails, formulating yes/no questions, and using Google Notes for quick information recall. These adjustments helped improve the boss-client communication despite different styles.

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Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you.

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If you have ever had to adapt your style to a fast paced bullet point communicator, then this episode is for you. I want to share an example of a challenge my coaching client was working with in terms of communicating with his boss. And to paint the picture here, this boss was a fast moving, fast thinking, don't make me think about the details. I'm on the road 300 days out of the year, in and I don't have one on ones with my team members. I just send people random slacks and texts and phone calls with fragmented information and, uh, that was the boss. My client on the other hand was very methodical, very thorough. He was very proactive. He wanted to do a good job and he was nudging things forward as best as he could, but he was very, let me do all the research. Let me do the pros and cons. Let Let me try to understand what's happening so I can make decisions, all of that kind of stuff. So there was a definite gap in communication style. And my client was, was telling me these examples and saying, Emily, here's what I've tried to get information across. Here's what I've tried to get information from my boss and nothing seems to work. And like, Oh my gosh, he just texted me like, here's this text. What am I supposed to do? And I, at one point in one of the conversations, I said, It seems like this person thinks and speaks in tweets. And my client was like, Oh, Emily, he does think and speak in tweets. That's exactly what's happening. That's exactly what it feels like. And it was like, okay, boom, light bulb. Once we unlog that, then we could flex my client's communication style to his boss. So a couple adjustments we made, first of all, in terms of. Informing his boss or conveying information to his boss. It was instead of sending. Rather lengthy emails, which were very good, like very good, very well put together, had good information, very thorough. Um, my client was like, Emily, I send these emails and it's like, he doesn't read them. And I was like, let me look at your email. And I was like, he doesn't read them. instead of doing that, send lengthy emails. A one or two sentence email, send a bullet point, send a fragment of a sentence, a phrase, a word, just to get the general idea across to your boss, because that's how he thinks. He thinks in tweets, he speaks in tweets, and he receives information in tweets. The second adjustment we made was for getting information from the boss and same thing similar thing here instead of asking long Winding this caveat and remember to consider this and this decision tree and this consideration like no no No, like you lost him way back up here instead of a long winding answer. It was a short Direct, ideally, yes or no question, yes or no, go, no, go, thumbs up, thumbs down. And that helped with getting information. He had to do a little bit of guesswork and mind reading to like, I think he's saying this and formulating a yes, no question to get him a little bit closer. It was like kind of like playing 20 questions. So okay, if that's a no, then I have my next yes, no question has to be this to get a little bit closer and to finally get to the information he was looking for. But that's how the boss would communicate. Right. So that's how he flexed his communication style. The third adjustment we made was finding a way for my client to quickly recall the open items he had for his boss. And the reason this came about is because my poor client, uh, my client said, Emily, I feel so bad. Sometimes when my boss calls me at 2am in the morning, I have trouble remembering what I was going to say to him. I was like, first of all, the reason you have trouble remembering that is because you just woke up. So that's not on you. That's on your boss. But because this is the reality that we're working with, let's come up with a system to address that. So we came up with, Google notes where he could quickly bring up on his phone, on his iPad, on his desktop, wherever he was, whatever the boss called, he would be able to bring that up, know right where to go and have the top two or three open items for his boss. And whether that was something to convey to his boss or something to ask his boss, he'd have that right there. In the short form in the tweet form that he needed them to be so he could just boom, boom right away. So those were the three adjustments we made and the communication was much better. It wasn't ideal and it wasn't what my client wanted, but it was better and they were able to have conversations or they were able to have information go back and forth between them. okay. So I bring up this example because number one, just as a reminder that people can have such different communication styles, right? So I'm communicating, like I want to communicate or how I think makes sense to me, and that can be perfectly valid. But one of my team members could have a much different communication style and I have to be aware that's a possibility. And in fact, a probability when I'm working with a large team, the second thing here is once you've identified that. is being able to make those adjustments and being able to flex your communication style. And okay, this person speaks in tweets. I got to speak their language or at least get closer to it. So I'm going to make some adjustments and see if this works better. And the third thing I'd say here is just to make it clear, I'm not condoning this boss's communication style. In fact, I think it sucks, but I have met people like this and I know this is a real life situation for a lot of people. So if some of those tactical practical takeaways are helpful for you and a colleague, I wanted you to have those. So anyway, this one is short and sweet, but, uh, hopefully hopefully helpful for you and I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.

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