Be Direct When You Communicate

"Be direct when communicating" is a common theme I've been hearing the last few days in Pivotal leadership discussions and other places.

When I listened to the Twitter CEO Dick Costolo fireside chat with PandoMonthly (start listening at around 35:30) it crystalized how important this is and how easy it is to fall out of this to appease the feelings of someone you're meeting with. Dick describes how he has a management / leadership training class where they do exercises for this and how many experienced people still yield to the temptation to "migrate along the Y-axis" and give up clarity instead of "optimize for the X-axis." Doing this definitely takes practice, but I'm going to remind myself to think of these axes in my communication. It's totally great if the person feels great about the discussion, but how they feel about it is not as important as receiving and understanding the message. There are certainly many conversations where someone will feel badly about the message, and that's a fine outcome if they receive the message and were unlikely to feel good about it under any circumstances.