Believable AMAs for Genuine Leaders
Mon 13 January 2025
Communication Scales with Scale
Communicating with your team scales up as your team grows - it's an experience not unlike the individual engineer to senior engineer to staff engineer path. As well as scaling up in terms of impact, the very method of how you do it changes.
You very quickly grow out of being able to do a full matrix of 1:1 conversations, likely before you even go beyond single digit numbers of people. Even with a smaller team, this method can get pretty exhausting for all involved quickly. It's also pretty lossy - rather than actively tracking what you've communicated to each person, it's not unlikely that you'll assume you've said something about team direction, strategy, etc to everyone, when you might not have. It's possible to track this more exactly, but it's probably best not to. This is one instance where after you open a new spreadsheet, it's probably time to have a quiet word with yourself and see if you need to change the method.
Next in the toolbox is usually the ubiquitous stand-up or team meeting - a much better way to make sure you've let the whole team know about something, and ideally to give them the chance to clarify anything. This is probably the most common way to 'filter' down either communications from the broader organisation, or directions just for this team.
Once you scale beyond a team, things get tricky. You want to filter a message to all of these folks, but also give them the opportunity to ask questions and fill in the blanks they might have, that often you haven't thought of. Google's TGIF meetings used to do this; I attended a number of these in person when I'd visit HQ, and seeing Larry and Sergey being surprised by questions was pretty routine. This isn't a bad thing -- you're not going to think of everything, and often you'll miss things that will be brought up by thoughtful questions. The answers here were usually pretty frank; this changed later on when TGIF answers got pretty routinely leaked, often in real-time.
When does it become time to do something similar for your own team? In my case, it was when I started managing teams in various different offices - I had teams first in Dublin and California, and later NYC, Sydney and Seattle. While I did do my fair share of aeroplane time, it quickly became unworkable to do local "town hall meetings", even virtually. I still did them when I visited offices, but I wanted these to be in addition to folks getting all the information they needed day-to-day.
Tip: Perception is Reality
If you put a message out to a group of people, and most of them think you meant a certain thing, then that's what you meant.
This is a common pitfall from leaders of all levels - I've seen everyone from line-level managers to VP+ everywhere make the mistake of communicating carelessly, and not following up when it becomes clear that folks misunderstood what they meant. There's a hard problem here for most leaders. You're a professional communicator, you're good at this, so it's very tempting to think something like "Well, if folks misunderstood then that's not my problem".
What just happened is that you said words and people parsed those words into meaning, and your words failed to get the meaning across. In fact, they got another meaning across that you didn't mean to, making that the reality for those people. If a senior person shows up and says something, and most of the team comes away thinking "Dave will fire us if we make mistakes", then that's what you said. You've got work to do, or learning to do, or ideally both. Don't let hubris make you skip this part.
Communicating a Thing Starts with Communicating It
How you actually make decisions is beyond the scope of this article - let's assume for a moment you've done a good job at having all the right folks do all the right things to make a decision, charter a project, or otherwise determine a path forward.
Perhaps you've gotten a few leads together for a day or two and determined your roadmap for a year, or decided to make some team changes, or something of that ilk. You've spent hours internalising all the factors involved, and ideally used good judgement and data to come to a decision. Why would you expect folks on your team outside the room to immediately understand why a decision is made, just because you announced it? That's assuming you announce it at all.
The primary mistakes I've seen people make when it comes to communicating direction and change is:
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Not communicating the decision, direction or change at all.
This is extremely common. It is a shockingly common assumption by rooms full of smart people that knowledge and context hard-won in that room are somehow magically transplanted to everyone affected by the outcome. I try to dedicate some "How are we communicating this?" time at the end of leadership get-togethers for this exact reason. There is real, difficult work in communicating things to folks; step one is acknowledging this and planning for it.
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Communicating a decision or change, without providing any means of asking for details, or otherwise questioning it.
Every organisation differs in how decisions are done. On one extreme, there's the autocratic "One person makes all decisions" model. On the other end is the apocryphal "Absolute Consensus on all decisions, always" model. Chances are you're somewhere in the middle. Someone on the team isn't going to be happy with any given direction or decision. They're going to have some opinions and (usually loaded) questions. You want to put yourself in a position where these questions get answered, ideally in public. Otherwise people will answer these questions themselves. You're probably not going to like those answers. There's really no downside to inviting questions and comment on directions and decisions, yet I've seen many otherwise smart folks think they can quietly implement a decision and maybe nobody will mind or notice.
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Not owning the decision
It's always tempting to defer to some external factor (deadlines, budget, leadership) when saying why a decision was made. This is a tricky balance, because while most good leaders don't like deferring to "Because I/we say so" as the reason a direction is being taken, that's ultimately what's happening. Yes, there are always contributing factors, but you've taken those into account to make a high-quality decision, which you should stand over as your own. If external factors seem to force your hand in all directions you take, then you're not really making decisions at all. Again, perception is reality. People are smart and will spot this right away.
Tip: Timing and Heads-Up(s)
As a conscientious leader or manager, you are likely highly practised at the art of delayed gratification. Most people aren't. If you're announcing something, 'fast follow' doesn't mean in a week or two when you can schedule a Q&A/AMA session. Let your ability to schedule this kind of session inform when you announce. Don't announce things on Friday and do the session on Monday; people will spend the weekend inventing answers to their own questions that will be way more compelling than any boring sensible answers you might eventually give.
If there are folks who need to know about something in advance, because they're key stakeholders, or simply because people will ask them about it first and they don't like surprises, do give them a heads-up. If you're worried about leaks, then that's a good instinct. Do this as late as is practical. Things will leak, accept this as a fact of like and plan accordingly.
Making it Real: The AMA
This section sets out tips on AMA ("Ask Me Anything") sessions. These can be held in relation to a specific announced thing, or be semi-regular. I've often made a point of doing these regularly (and per-timezone, for folks at an offset time from me).
Tip: A note on 'Corp Speak'
The jig is up, corp-speakers. Everyone knows you're doing it. You haven't cracked the ability to make people believe you through clever use of words.
One thing that increased numbers of virtual town-halls have given us is the ability to leave without tripping over chairs or being noticed, and the ability to watch attendee numbers in real-time. I've personally watched viewer numbers drop off a cliff on these kinds of calls when a particularly 'polished' answer comes out. This is a shame, as it drives disengagement from the message coming from leadership, and even if the rest of the content is credible and sincere, this can derail people's engagement with the decisions or directions being communicated. At best, folks will just think less of the corp-speaker.
One clue that this is not the True Way is that most CEOs are not corp-speakers when they're at home. In a company-private setting they are generally quite open and communicate as openly as they can. Generally when they defer a question to a corp-speaker, it's because they need protection from Saying the Wrong Thing, or smell a Trap. more on Traps later.
Setting Expectations: The '3 Answers' Model
I've seen several variants of this model of AMA, so I can't take any credit for it. However, it has worked for me for many years across teams and orgs.
The basic model (which you should absolutely tell attendees in advance) is that attendees can ask anything. The answer, however, can take one of 3 forms.
- I answer the question to the best of my ability.
- I tell you that I don't know.
- I tell you why I'm not telling you, to the best of my ability.
First, you'll notice there's no "I will bloviate for a few minutes and hope you look bewildered and stop asking" option. The intention is that the answers are credible and concise, and engage with the question in good faith.
Option #1 is straightforward, and ideally is the option you take most of the time. Answer the question. Be prepared for follow-ups. If you've done your homework, this is the easy option. If someone's pointing out something you haven't thought of, say you haven't thought of that, and offer to follow up with them. Congratulations! You've successfully found one of the most tangible outcomes of holding these sessions: a high-value connection with an engaged team member.
Option #2 is just as straightforward on paper. It's not an answer many leaders like to give, however, as the pageantry innate to most corporate hierarchies generally assumes the senior person in the room to be all-knowing. What you're actually doing here is letting people know that you've really heard the question and you're not going to bullshit them by guessing. The ideal answer usually takes the form of "I don't know, but let me find out and get back to you", or "I don't know, let's talk after and we can find out".
Option #3 is the tricky one. The premise of giving this kind of answer is that it's more credible to say you're not answering than to use smoke and mirrors to try to steer people away from the subject. Some common reasons not to answer a question is that it's information private to an individual, it's information that's privileged, or that it's information where answering would be worse for team cohesion than assuaging some folks' curiosity. I've been asked questions in AMAs related to individual performance of folks on the team, which are straightforward "that's not my information to give" answers. I've also had 'escalations' of decisions made at the team level, where it's appropriate to say something like "I'm not here to overrule decisions you don't like, someone else owns this decision and it's been devolved to them entirely".
Tip: A Note on Traps
You're likely going to run into questions that are designed to make you say something that'll either get you in "trouble", or make you take a firm position on something you don't need to. Always ask clarifying questions if you feel things are a bit vague.
I once joined a team where in my first regular AMA, I was asked "What is your opinion on monorepos?". This may seem like a benign question on its face, but the fact that someone chose to ask that means that chances are there's a monorepo holy war happening somewhere on the team and I'm being asked to weigh in. My answer was essentially "I will not referee your nerd fight", and this was Option #3 above.
On a more serious note, I've also been asked if a new female exec on my team is "able" to take on the teams she was hired to take on. Again, I could very easily (and emphatically) answer such a question, but it was more valuable to take Option #3 and say something along the lines of "I'm not answering that because I know what you're doing, knock it off."
Tip: Anonymous Questions
I used to take anonymous questions, but don't do that any more. You get more questions that folks would otherwise not ask, but the quality can vary massively (the above question about a female exec was anonymous, in case it wasn't obvious). What worked instead was to nominate some folks in the organisation as proxies for folks who weren't comfortable asking questions themselves, for whatever reason. These proxies weren't necessarily very senior folks, just people on the team who were considered safer options. The reasons for wanting to proxy a question don't really matter; it can be tempting for a leader to say "No anonymous or proxied questions because this is a safe space", but that's not strictly true. Also, perception is reality, as we've established.
Answers Aren't just Answers
A side-effect of some of these answers you might give (especially Options #2 and #3) is to let people know your style, and your mind on things. The quality and timbre of questions tends to adjust over time. This means that AMA questions are 'messier' than curated FAQs or simple top-down announcements. This can be a little intimidating, but is an investment in your credibility as a leader, and in your team understanding your mind on things. Whether we like it or not, teams tend to quietly imitate the style of their leadership. Over time, a culture of openness and of consequence-free questioning of the status quo more than makes up for any initial (or ongoing!) awkward moments. Like any investment, the key is to stick with it.
Category: Writing Tagged: writing leadership
