New York Women Leaders Association NY Chapter Meeting: Adapting Communication Styles

Well, now we are going to go to our next presentation. So, Julia, can you turn your camera on and say hello? Hello everyone. Well, again, thank you so much for being with us today. So, as you are pulling up your slides, can you give us a self introduction? Yes, my name is Julia Hamp and I am um general c sorry I'm can't do two things at one time obviously while I'm sharing my screen I can't even remember who I am I'm general counsel for we go chemical group which is a a chemical distributor here on Long Island and um I've been a general counsel for over 20 years now and I'm so happy to be following Mina because a lot of what she said about leadership we're going to talk a little bit about as well because I'm going to talk to you today about adapting your communication styles at every stage in your career and um you know Mina talked about when you get to leadership you know it's about having a new way of doing things and talking about what are you solving for not just getting the job done you know the technical aspects of the job done and we're going to talk about that in terms of how does it affect the way you communicate.
So, we're gonna hopefully I am sharing my screen. Yes. Not yet. No. Not yet. Okay. Try that again. There. There we go. Now, I think we're Okay. Terrific. Thank you. So, we're going to take a little run through uh different stages in your career and how that impacts the communication style. So, we'll start at the entry level, right? Whether you're at the very very entry level, maybe it's the first job, or maybe you're still at that individual contributor level as well. And in each stage, we're going to talk about sort of three things. What's the purpose of the communication? what's your focus for communicating and and what's the outcome you're trying to get from those communications and each time I talk about that is going to be from the perspective of the person at this level.
So someone in an entry level what's the primary purpose in the business world for their communication it's to learn. They still need to know how do they do their job? How do they get things done? Um how do they learn more for the next job? And the focus of the communication is really what I call technical or operational. Um, and that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, physically technical. You know, if you're working in a factory, yeah, it's how do I screw this rivet into this hole and let's make sure I understand that. Um, but just to conceptualize it in my world, right? So, I'm a general counsel. 50 60% of what I'm doing every day is reviewing contracts.
So when I say technical, I mean helping somebody understand what is an indemnification clause, what does it mean? How is it risky? And when I say operational, I'm talking about we filed contracts in this folder over here. And here's the business team members and here's the kinds of questions that you need to ask of the business team. Pricing, that's more on the business team side. That's not a purely legal uh question for us today. And again, what's the outcome? What what is that person at that entry level or at that individual contributor level looking to get? They're looking to gain knowledge. They're looking to advance their own knowledge, not only to do the job they're doing today, but to set themselves up for doing the job they want to do tomorrow.
When you step up in your career, now you're at the supervisor level. And at that level, every once you start getting into management, even at the very low supervisory type level, you're now going to have communications both up and down, right? You're going to be communicating to subordinates, but you're also going to be communicating with your superiors. So, we'll take each one individually because they have certain nuances to them. Supervising the the primary purpose is to instruct and teach. When you're communicating to your subordinates, it's about being effective at directing and instructing the people who work for you to make sure that they can get their job done. Your focus is entirely on this technical and operational side, right?
You're trying to make sure they know how to review this contract. You're trying to make sure that they understand, oh, here are the five uh states that we like their choice of law. So, if you got a contract that says this contract is going to be governed by the laws of the state of Illinois, that's okay. But if it says Virginia, that's not okay. Um, and what your outcome that you're hoping for is clear expectations and clear knowledge transfer. So, you want to make sure that your subordinate really understands what's expected of them and really understands how to get their job done.
Now, when you're at the supervisory level, but you're communicating up, your purpose is very different. You're still communicating information, but you're not obviously going to be trying to teach your boss how to do their job, and you don't even really want to be spending time trying to teach them how to do your job, right? You're looking to gain clarity on the direction so that you now as that lower level person that your boss is communicating with. You have clear direction on where you should be going, what you should be working on. And you want to make sure that your boss is understanding clearly what you're working on. Your focus is mostly technical and operational, but you don't want to ignore the strategic.
And the big difference between technical operational, you know, I I I explained what that is. That's the, you know, how do I do my job today? What how do I complete these tasks? Where do I find these files? Um, the strategic is more the why, you know, why do we do it this way or how in a broader sense of are there other ways to do this that would make more sense? And those are usually guided by bigger picture thoughts. So, you want to start trying to show that you have that kind of thinking and that you're interested in that kind of thinking and that you can gain that kind of thinking. Your outcome, you still want to get just like you wanted to pass on to your subordinates that that clarity, but you're also at this point learning to build trust and respect with your superiors.
you know, if you're looking to move to that next point in your career, you're not going to make those movements if you don't have trust and respect of your superiors. So, there's I I like to say that you should follow the three C's when you're communicating up, and that is you want to be clear, you want to be concise, and you want to be considerate. So, concise, yes, you need to be respectful of other people's times. You need to get to your points. You don't want to take too long. Uh if you've booked 30 minutes, you need to make sure that you've got your questions and the points you want to make and the information that you want to share boiled down to a way that it's going to come across in 30 minutes.
You also obviously want to be very clear in what you're communicating, clear in the questions you're asking. Usually, we can all be clear in if we're giving information. We, you know, we've thought about it. We've we've done our job. we've and we know what we want to communicate in terms of information we're passing along. Sometimes where clarity gets lacking is when you have questions. You know, the worst thing that you can do uh when you're communicating up is to just come in and go, well, I don't understand this. And you leave it this big broad, I don't understand. You have to feed me. You want to have done at least a little bit of homework so that you can boil down those questions a little bit closer to I'm having trouble with this one piece of direction that I received and I haven't been able to figure out how it fits into what I'm doing.
Um why we're doing it that way. It would help me if you could explain more. So that's what I mean by being clear and then being considerate. That's probably the hardest one because it's not just being considerate of somebody's time, which comes into the concise and the and the clear. Um, but it's also being considerate of how does that manager like to receive information? How do they receive information best? You know, you can think of it in two I I I it takes two selectives that kind of generally speaking, and I'm I'm obviously stereotyping, but generally speaking, are are a bit on opposite ends of the spectrum. Your CFO is probably very data driven, right? They're focused on the numbers every day.
So, when you're bringing a question to the CFO, you want to come with the data. You know, it might be a numbers question. It might be about how many contracts did we sign in the last 10 days. It might be, you know, anything that but but whatever the data is that's pertaining to what you're talking about, bring that data because that's probably how that person thinks. On the other end of the spectrum, you might have a chief marketing officer who's much more about the whole big picture and the story. And so for that person, you don't necessarily want to walk in there with a bunch of facts and figures. You want to walk in there and and tell the story of what what you're working on and what you're looking for.
The third kind of thing I want to say about being considerate is pay attention to the messages that that your bosses send you. So I used to have somebody who worked for me and she was very young and she would come in and she would ask me a question and I would say well you're you know typically she would ask me a question of I don't understand this particular indemnification clause. So I would say to her well did you Google it? you know now today I would probably say did you ask chat GPT um and then you know she would either say yes she had or no she hadn't and then I would say did you go talk to the business team about this um to understand why the customer might have asked for a clause like this and she would either say yes or no but what happened was after five six seven probably more like a dozen times of me always asking those two questions she she understood and sheed started coming in and saying, 'Hey, I'm having problems with this.
I already tried Google and I already talked to the business team and I still don't understand. I need your help.' Great. That was her showing consideration for those kinds of key questions that I was going to ask, understanding that I was going to ask them, and getting ahead of the game, if you will.
Somehow, there we go. So, as I said, when you're when you're a senior leader, that's the next step that you're moving to. And and Mina said it best, right? It's a new way of getting things done when you when you come into that particularly when you come into a senior leadership role and it shows up in your communication, your purpose. Now, and again, we're going to talk about talking communicating down and communicating up. And I don't want to say talking down because we're going to we're going to speak about that in a minute. Um, but when you're communicating down to subordinates and then we're going to talk a little bit about communicating with other senior leaders. So, your purpose now is changing a little bit.
You're still informing, you're still guiding, but now your focus isn't as much on the technical and operational side because what your purpose is is to set the direction for the team and maintain that direction. You want to make sure your outcome is that everybody is rowing in the same direction, right? Everybody understands where we're headed, why we're moving that. You have a secondary outcome which is to build independence in your team. Um, again, Mina, I I I loved Mina's talk because it so feeds into the things that I wanted to say. If you're the only one who can do things, if you're the only one who can make decisions, then you become the bottleneck. You need to grow the independence of your team so that they can make decisions so that they can lead their subordinates on their own you know with coming to you for that guidance that direction but not that daytoday hey I need a decision here or hey I need this done and I don't know how to get it done.
your focus is coaching, guiding, and it's definitely still a mix of technical, operational, and strategic. Um, but again, you don't want to forget the strategic. If you aren't sharing the strategic message with your subordinates, then they're not being able to make sure that all of the things that they are doing and all of the things that their team is doing is is going in that same direction and is keeping everybody, you know, rowing in the same direction and and on the same level. Leadership at this level is really about being effective with that guidance and wi with still some teaching going on but much more about the strategic guidance.
Each interaction that you have with your employees should provide them more and more clarity on the larger picture for the organization. And you're obviously not going to share everything, right? If you're you're having senior level meetings with with other senior leaders, you know, you're not going to share all the nitty-gritty of what goes on in those conversations, but you want them to have the the flavor and the understanding of what are the primary goals and why are we doing things, you know, are we looking to gain more efficiencies out of our operational teams? Um, are we looking to grow into new products? Are we looking to just grow our business by inorganic means, meaning mergers and acquisitions?
And and we're getting ready for that, right? We're putting more processes in place so that if we had an acquisition in the future, we could easily fold that in because our processes are clean and and welloiled. So those are the kinds of discussions you want to begin to have. And finally, we want to talk about senior leader to other senior leader type of communications. So, your purpose here is is really about driving effective discussions, not so much providing information. Yeah, you're going to share information, um, but I'm not trying to tell the the head of supply chain, you know, what I'm doing in contract reviews and, you know, what we're doing in in um compliance areas.
But when we are making decisions as a company about what are we going to do in a particular area, we want to have effective discussions amongst the lead the senior leader team. Your focus is on relationship building versus the technical and the operational. Again, at this level, you're each experts in your own fields and nobody's trying to teach anybody else how to do what they do well. Um, but you're trying to make sure that you build a good relationship within the team and that you build good relationships with each of the individuals on the team. And your outcome is about persuading. You know, you're you're not going to walk into another senior leader and direct them on how to do something.
You're going to convince them that, hey, we should be changing the direction and and focusing more on on part part A than part B. Um and even sometimes it has to do with their own way of doing things. You know, one of the areas for me is compliance, right? So we have a lot of third parties that we deal with. We deal with our suppliers and we have to make decisions on the due diligence that we do on our suppliers and where we're going to draw those lines. So some of the lines are right easy to draw. if somebody's on a denied parties list, which is, you know, the US government says, 'Hey, you should not be doing business with this party in Russia because they're invading Ukraine at the moment, right?
So great, that's that's clear. That's a law. We're going to follow that. Nobody has any questions about that. I'm going to put the processes in place to make sure that that happens. I might communicate that information. Hey, we implemented this new software. It's helping us make sure we're fully compliant.' But somewhere below that there's a question mark. So you have a supplier who you visited twice, your quality team has visited them twice and they didn't check all the boxes. They didn't quite complete all their quality surveys, but we haven't been having any problems with their the quality of their product. The product's been fine, but when we go and we visit, the factory is not as clean as it should be.
um you know, we try to have a conversation with uh some of their direct line employees and their managers step in and won't let us talk directly to employees. That raises a red flag. Well, now you need to be having that discussion and you're going to talk to your supply chain manager and you might want to influence him to say, 'Hey, listen. Three strikes and you're out. You know, if they don't do well in their next quality audit, we may have to move on.' he's going to come back with his own influence and say to you, well, you know, we have other factors to consider. I don't have a replacement supplier for that one, so we may need to be a little leaner and we may need to take a a little bit of a risk with that one.
So, that's how the the conversation shifts and you really need to keep those things in mind. Um, one of the things I like to say when you're at the the senior leader to senior leader communication level is that you really need to um
ask questions more than give direction or um provide information. Just say things, right? Even if you know that this is exactly what you want to do, it's always a much more effective discussion to come in and say, 'Hey, we're thinking about solution A.' Does anyone here have can anybody tell me where they think there might be issues if we went with solution A? Now, you're going to open up that effective discussion and you're going to invite people almost to to criticize your idea. Now, you're probably already ready with ways to bat down that criticism, but if you al also then listen carefully and listen with an open mind, you might hear something that you didn't think about before.
And so, it's it's good effective discussion for yourself as well. The other thing is when you're with your peers, you need to understand that that they are all as smart as you are. They are all as accomplished as you are. And if they aren't, they think they are. And you need to treat them that way. Because again, if you don't if you don't have that kind of mutual respect for each other, you you can't possibly have those effective discussions. And Ginger, I'm just going to tell you, I I know you had asked us to please keep an eye on the chat, but while I'm sharing my screen, I don't seem to have uh my eyes on the chat.
So, if there's anything, please just uh jump in and let me know. All right, that's fine. We'll go through all of the Q&A at the very end. Okay, great. So, I want to give you a couple of things now that are just really little tips in making your communication even better. And and my favorite one is how do you speak up without talking down? Um, and it's about having an opinion and being able to defend your opinion. Um, but but being able to ask the right questions before you form your opinion. You know, one of the worst things that can happen is you come in and you're just like, 'No, it's this. It's this. It's this. It's this.' And you're not really even listening for other people's input and then suddenly you hear something and you're like, 'Oh, I was just talking down to everybody instead of sharing my opinion, asking questions, and listening for the answers.' Um, also remember active listening and listening between the lines.
Body language says a lot. You know, if somebody's sitting back and you can see the look on their face that says, 'You have no idea what you're talking about.' You know, we've all seen that. The arms are crossed and the angry face and the person might not be saying, 'I don't agree with anything you say,' but their body is telling you that. So, make sure you're paying attention to that as well. Use positive connotation language. And and my what I mean by that is you're wrong. Well, that's a negative connotation language. I'm not sure I agree with your point on that. Can you tell me more? Or I'm not sure I understand your point fully. Can you tell me more?
That's how you stay positive. And if you yourself stay open, sometimes you do find that you you learn something different. It might not change your opinion, but it might help you to hone your opinion in a way that allows you to influence even better. It's always important to agree with what you can and disagree with respect, right? Go with yes and instead of no, but and then finally paying attention to your own verbal cues. And I I always put arm roll eyes rolling in because it's my worst habit. If someone says something that I truly think is ridiculous, it is the hardest thing in the world for me not to roll my eyes at them, but I I concentrate on that.
Like, don't roll your eyes. Don't roll your eyes. Um, and and you know, sometimes you'll see somebody who's just shaking their head while somebody's talking the whole time they're shaking their head. That says you're not listening, right? Even if you disagree with someone, you should still be listening and going, 'Okay, okay. I'm hearing. I'm hearing. Not agreeing. But I'm still listening. I'm still going to pay attention.
And finally, controlling your emotions, but also have empathy for people who have a hard time controlling their emotions. Um, at the company I'm at currently, we we have it's a familyrun company. So, you have that that dynamic layered over the top of it that these are these are all family members and they own and run the company. And so meetings can get very heated and sometimes a large part of my job is learning how to diffuse the tension um while at the same time having respect for the fact that there's a lot of layers to these conversations. And you can't just say stop yelling at each other. That's not helpful. You know, you have to bring the tone down.
Um and if you start from a place of empathy to say hey I I know how I get with my family. um that's more helpful to controlling a situation. Finally, when you're in a senior leadership role, these are the key questions that I think you always have to have in mind that help your communications. If you have an idea, how is that idea going to help the c the company's customers help grow the business? What do you need from the rest of the executive team for this idea to be successful? And these are questions that you should be asking yourself before you bring an idea forward because it will help you to communicate your idea in a better way.
And sometimes these are questions that you have to bring forward during the meeting, right? How my my best one is how would the company's competitors react to this? I ask that question all the time. Um, we are dealing currently with the tariffs that Trump just imposed and we source a lot of our goods from China. So, it's a huge price increase for our products. And we were preparing a letter to send out to our customers. And the first thing I did was bring this to four or five of the senior leaders. And I asked all of them, what do you think our competitors are doing? Are our competitors sending out this kind of a letter or are they sending out something else?
And one of the guys actually said to me, 'Oh, I have one. It's one of our smaller competitors, but they sent out this and one of my customers forwarded it to me. And we had written a very factual, not a harsh letter, but just a, 'Hey, there's tariffs. It's going to cost this much more. We're very sorry. Nothing we can do about it. We're going to have to pass the price on to you.' And their letter was much more what I call soft and squishy. It was, 'Oh my gosh, there's a new thing going on. It's so out of control. nobody knows what's going to happen and like buried way down in the bottom it was like we're so sorry but we're going to have to increase our prices and so it made me stop and think and went oh ours is a little too just right to the point factual we need to soften ours up a little bit as well um and that can come from all kinds of ideas um what would happen if the company does nothing instead of pursuing this idea I think that's the most overlooked question in any communication that you have.
What if we did nothing? Most times things are brought in terms of we have option A and we have option B. And sometimes the answer is you have to do something. You can't do nothing. But people don't often think about the option of well what if we just did nothing. And so that's sometimes a very good question to spark a great conversation. What if we did nothing about this? What if we just let this problem be here? What would happen then? And you'll take people by surprise, but I'll I'll tell you, nothing sparks a great conversation as much as that question. What else could we do instead? Again, many times a conversation starts with two options and and it's framed as we're choosing between option A and option B.
And sometimes you just need to get people to think broader. You know, maybe there's an option C and option D. Um, and then also what are the assumptions being made? You know, never forget that. Yes, I somebody's showing up with with two options, but what are the underlying assumptions against each of them? And that's a good one back with the what if we did nothing. You know, what your underlying assumption is something terrible would happen if you just let this problem exist or this whatever it is you're you're thinking that you want to solve um exist. And sometimes the answer is yeah, it's not the most efficient way to do of doing things. But honestly, it's not causing major problems.
So maybe the right answer is to do nothing. Uh because we're in a massive period of other kinds of change going on and adding one more change would be too much for the company to take at this point. So those are just some things to ask yourself, some questions to bring with you into a conversation that help you have those really effective conversation particularly at the sea level uh the senior leader level. And this is my my favorite way of saying there are no stupid questions because I start with the stupidest one. Is rain wet? So at this I with that I invite anyone to open up and ask any questions that they might have.
Well Julia, thank you so much for that wonderful presentation and yes and everyone please keep those questions coming into the chat. So we'll start with our first one from Calie. And Calie says, 'How can I speak up in a situation against authority?' Against authority. She says, 'But I do not want to seem disrespectful or like I'm undermining anyone.' Yeah, that that is often a hard one. And that's that's where you're speaking up without talking down, right? Um and I think many times some of those key questions I talk about will help in those situations. You know, if you're asking somebody, well, okay, you made this decision. I'm not sure I fully understand. Can we talk about the assumptions that underlied that decision?
Um or ask someone how did you come to that decision uh to do A or B? You know what whatever it is. Um sometimes it's a little more straightforward. You know, if it's just something that I disagree with the way we're going, you can still present it in a way that says I don't agree with this decision that was made and I'm wondering if I'm missing something. here's the reasons why I think it's the wrong choice. Can you tell me where I'm what I'm missing? That's how you can be respectful is just if you start with the assumption that everybody's doing the right thing and the correct thing from their perspective, then your job is to try and understand what's their perspective.
Wonderful. Thank you. So, next question comes from Debbie and says, 'There was a situation with a co-worker that was not listening to the business line saying no after three times of explaining everything in different ways. Any advice on how to get them to listen
that, you know, sometimes you just have a an obstinate uh coworker.' Um, but again, I I think uh sometimes it's asking them questions. Okay, you keep saying no. Um, can you explain to me why you're going against this decision that was made? The business line is telling you that we want to do A. You keep saying no, we're going to do B. Why are you doing that? Help me to understand where you're coming from. Because the decision's been made that it's A. So, we need to find a way to get us both on the same page. Um, I will say that that works sometimes. That doesn't always work. I have a particular co-orker I'm thinking of in my from my past that um we also have a similar kind of an issue on a regular basis.
And frankly, none of my tricks work. But um I think if you engage with the person openly and honestly, like not just as a trick, but but you're truly engaged and you truly want to understand where are they coming from. um you can sometimes at least make a little bit of inroads.
Well, thank you for that. Well, I think we have time for one more question. And for this question, let's see, we're going to read the question from Alyssa. And she says, 'What is the biggest mistake you see people make when trying to speak up?' She said, 'I know my personality can be an issue.' And follows up with, 'I'm also loud.'
Yeah, I think the biggest I think you kind of did hit on it. The biggest mistake that people make is not paying attention. They pay so much attention to the words that they've chosen and they're not paying attention to other things. Um, I had a young woman who worked for me for a number of years and and I pat myself on the back all the time because she's now a vice president of contracts for for a com the company that we used to work for together. Um, and she started from she never read a contract in her life. So um but she grew up with deaf parents and she spoke very loudly and because she from the time she was a young child she was always the one advocating for her parents she also had no sense of boundaries in terms of walking into a senior leader's office and telling them exactly what she thought even if the time wasn't appropriate.
And so we did spend a lot of time saying, 'Hey, you need to modulate your volume a little bit. You need to think about when is the right time to interrupt somebody to share your opinion. And you need to pay attention to your body language because if you're coming across as aggressive, and unfortunately a loud voice comes across as aggressive, um you're not going to be seen as assertive. You're going to be seen as aggressive.' And and you want to be assertive. if you want your words to have impact, but they don't have impact if everything else if you don't pay as much attention to everything else. So that's that's my biggest tip is to pay attention to both what you say and how you say it.
That's wonderful. Thank you. So as we wrap up and move to our panel discussion for the afternoon, do you have any final words of wisdom for our viewers today? So my my final thoughts is is to think um good communication sometimes we think that good communication will just happen and it doesn't. It it's like any other skill. It's like any other tool in your toolbox. You need to work at it. You need to think about it and you need to think about how do I get better at it. So if you just spend some time uh even if you take yourself give yourself two minutes when you come back from a hard conversation and think for a second okay what went well during that conversation what didn't go well where could I have made some small improvements just in the communication you know in in the method of my communication in the way I delivered my points um that will really help you as you go that's wonderful advice thank you so much for your time today thank Thank you.