Host Intro (Gene Kim)

So the next speaker is Paul Gaffney, someone I really admire. Previously he was the head of software and supply chain for The Home Depot, Dick's Sporting Goods, Kohl's, and later was Chief Digital Officer for Omni Logistics. We met in 2020. Paul presented at this conference twice, sharing the lessons he's learned. And as you've heard already, one of the things that I really appreciated was him actually giving some advice to this community, which is what we've been replicating for each of these three days. So Paul and I have been talking for the last year on the technology leadership puzzles, and I asked him to share advice that he thinks would be most useful to this community. So up next is Paul.

Paul Gaffney

Hey, enterprise technology leaders. How are you all doing?

Who wants to get better at communicating? Okay — anyone who didn't put their hand up, you can leave now and get cocktail hours, 'cause this is what we're gonna talk about for 20 minutes. We're gonna talk about better communication.

We're gonna talk about a very particular kind of better communication. There are lots of different kinds of communication. There's communication where your goal is to entertain. There's communication where your goal is to inform. I'm gonna help a little bit with that, but I'm gonna mostly focus on higher-stakes communication — leadership communication when you want people to do something, and in particular when you want them to participate in a big change or in accomplishing a big new objective.

Because in those kinds of situations — particularly if the stakes of change or the stakes of the objective are high — you need to enlist people. That's a lot higher level of engagement than inform or entertain. Your goal in high-stakes communication is to get people to understand what you're asking them to do, and then have their hearts and minds wedded to doing it.

I've been working on becoming a better communicator for 50 years. For 25 of those years, I had no idea what I was doing. And for the last 25 years, I've actually been using a model that helps me systematically get better. It also helps remind me that this is hard, because the times that I fail to use the model, I end up sucking; and the times that I actually use the model, I get better.

I'm gonna share that model with you, and my hope is that you'll adopt that model, even if on a trial basis. And I'll give you some instructions about how to adopt it and how to integrate it into your personal quest to become better at communication.

I first encountered this model in 1999 — that's the 25-years half of my getting-better-at-communication life. I first encountered this at Schwab. We had a fellow working there named Terry Pearce. He went on to be a pretty prolific author on leadership, and particularly leadership in the communication realm and the relationship realm. His first book, which I'd highly recommend, is called Leading Out Loud. This is my own version of the model, but it definitely has roots in what Terry initially taught me.

It has four main components. And if I were trying to brand this, I would be telling you this is the Gaffney communication canvas — or these are four threads that you'll weave into a tapestry. But this is a presentation about how to not be a bullshitter, so it's not any of those things. It's four very important things that you need to pay attention to.

And the first is clarity.

- slide: "clarity"

When you want to enlist people in a cause, it is incredibly important that you be clear. Clear is not like, "We are gonna launch an agile transformation." That's not clear. I delivered it confidently. The words are short and they make sense, but anybody can make up whatever they want if you give them that kind of instruction. "We're gonna launch an agile transformation. We're gonna have infrastructure week."

What happens when you're not clear is really only two reactions. The folks that you're talking to either smile and nod, and when they leave the room they say, "I have no idea what that person was talking about." Or they say, "This is great — this is ambiguous enough that I can just reposition what I wanted to do anyway and fit it within this very ambiguous instruction."

But we have temptations that drive us to not be clear. Pat Lencioni writes about this in both Five Temptations of a CEO and Five Dysfunctions of a Team. One of the five is the perils of attempting to be certain rather than being clear, particularly when the stakes are high. It's a tendency for leaders that we don't wanna give out instructions that we're not absolutely convinced are the right ones. That's a false problem.

We all know — you've spent the past three days, however many conferences you've been through and your lives, of trying to get people out of the mode of believing that they can know in advance everything that they should do, that they can in fact be certain. We know this — we live in an uncertain world. The way to better results is to decide to do something, do it, and then evaluate the impact. And that requires clarity.

So I want you to embrace this model. I'm gonna try and sell it to you.

- slide: "depth"

The second thing — and this gets harder from here, like clarity is the easy part. Clarity you can test in many different ways. You can find the person on your team who's always trying to justify what they want to do, given what you told them to do — and you can just ask them, "Am I being clear enough here?"

Depth is harder, but depth is really important. Depth — the ability to go deep. I did not coordinate with Admiral Richardson, but it's a very similar concept.

It's important as a leader — your communications will be more effective. Your ability to enlist people in the goal gets dramatically better if they believe you when you're asking them to do something.

My clear message at The Home Depot when we wanted to get better was not, "We're gonna launch an agile transformation." Not, "We're gonna start doing Scrum." Not, "We're gonna have all these ceremonies." It was — what I hope was a clearer message — "We are gonna get better results by shipping smaller pieces of software faster and getting feedback from our real end users and adjusting." And I very specifically said, "And that means we're not gonna do any of these named things. We're gonna get better results."

But if I'd stopped there, people would say, "Well, how does he know what he's talking about?" I successfully enlisted people because I had done the homework to be able to go deep and to explain the consequences of the long project cycles that had resulted in shipping big 700-function systems that everybody hated. And my ability to do that in that circumstance with actual facts — and resonating with people — was going deep to underscore what I meant by the change I was trying to enlist people into. Depth is super important.

Depth in communication has been commented on by some of the deepest thinkers about communication. Ray Dalio, who ran Bridgewater Associates — some regard him as a total crackpot, but he delivered fabulous results, and a lot of people who worked for him claim that he changed their lives. He wrote a book about all of his principles. But one of the most important ones is this concept of: when you're trying to figure something out, the most important thing you can do is find other people who are believable in that domain.

Believability is a version of depth. Believability is: you've proven that you've done this before, and I'm interested in your deep commentary on it.

Another dimension on depth, super important: you all should be reading Letter from Birmingham Jail once a year — anyway, I'm gonna encourage you now to read it twice a year. The reason you should be reading it once a year is you should be reminding yourself of the magical context that Martin Luther King Jr. gave all of us from which to understand how racism in America has truly been experienced by those who have been victimized by it. But the second reason — he's a master of enlistment communication.

That letter starts off crystal clear — you'll experience that for yourself. But what he does immediately after establishing the clarity of his purpose is he goes deep. Now, he goes deep in unusual circumstances. It's April 1963; he's been jailed. He's been jailed technically for conducting a parade without a permit. He's in the jail cell with nothing — except he gets newspapers and his lawyer manages to smuggle in a pencil in a toothpaste tube. And in those circumstances — no reference library available — he writes Letter from Birmingham Jail, which is addressed to some local Christian ministers. He goes deep on at least 11 deep thinkers about philosophy and religion. And over the course of three pages basically says: if you didn't know who I was before I wrote this, you do need to pay attention to me, because I know what I'm talking about. That's what depth is all about.

Clarity and depth are the two ingredients that get people to feel like they know what you want, and they believe that you're credible in asking them to do that. There are two more threads in this tapestry — two more ingredients in the meal that you're making.

- slide: "care"

When I first started — the first 20 years of using this model — I labeled this section "empathy." We talk a lot about empathy. Empathy is something we're all encouraged to do. It's so prevalent you'll encounter enough people to say, "I'm sick of empathy." I worked for a guy at Schwab once. He says, "Yeah, I get all this empathy stuff, I just don't have any time for it." He wasn't an effective communicator. He was totally incapable of one of the four critical ingredients.

I've changed this to "care." I've changed this to "care" because I was inspired by Nel Noddings, probably the most recent impactful ethicist who's written to us about how to think about how we live with other people. Nel Noddings' book Starting at Home is basically her explanation of a theory of care as a way for engaging in productive relationships.

Care in communications is demonstrating that you understand the impact that this request might have on the people that you're trying to enlist. It might be complicated; it might disrupt their lives. They might not be interested in it. You want them to know in advance that you'll be grateful for their participation. Care is incredibly important because you want the people that you're trying to enlist to feel like you're engaging them as a human being.

We have mythology for reasons. Myths communicate to us durable truths that have been important to human flourishing over time. And one of those important myths — and Noddings talks about it — is the Grail myth. The story of the existence and the quest for the Holy Grail, which is a metaphor for the magical truth that will unlock human flourishing.

And in almost every version of the Grail myth, there's a character — a feeble king or an injured king, sometimes known as the Fisher King. The Fisher King guards the Grail. And the seekers of the Grail can't get to the Grail unless they go through the Fisher King. And what they have to do to get through the Fisher King is something that almost none of them do, because they're so obsessed with finding the Holy Grail. They're trying to get info from the Fisher King about how to get the Grail. But what they have to ask the Fisher King is: What ails you? What is afflicting you, and how might I help?

And in most versions of the Grail myth, actually asking that question — demonstrating that you can subordinate your goals for the moment to the needs of another — in the myth, that unlocks human flourishing in most cases. There are dozens of versions of this myth, but this ability to take care of your people is an essential ingredient and often missing from leadership communication.

- slide: "responsibility"

And then the fourth dimension is responsibility. Responsibility is your role as a leader to explain to those that you're trying to enlist the larger context in which this is all positioned. 'Cause usually as a leader you have some insight into things that your team or your larger team might not necessarily have. You might know something about commitments made to stakeholders. You might know something about regulatory pressures. You might know something about impending changes in the strategic landscape. You might know things about societal change that the company's trying to influence, and that this change you're trying to enlist people in is gonna be helpful with that.

I want you all to embrace this model because I think it's super important that the next generation of technology leaders be excellent at the kind of communication that enlists people in change.

I've talked to a lot of you — I've heard you feel like, "Yeah, I don't get great communication from my leader. I'm worried that I don't deliver great communication. I wish that I could bring about more change by being more impactful in my communication."

It's one of the reasons you're not gonna be able to turn to ChatGPT too much for this, 'cause I've heard from a lot of folks that there's not a lot of good examples of great leadership communication out there. So you turn to ChatGPT and you get the models of bad communication. So you're gonna have to work on this yourself.

But hopefully I've given you the four things to think about, the four perspectives to bring to bear. You can do these in sequence: you can work on being clear, and then work on going deep, and then work on showing care, and then work on explaining your context of responsibility. Or you can weave them together in your own way.

But the interesting thing is — if you are aware, and you're now all aware of these four things, right? The rubric for grading your next communication is these four things. Go get an A — go get an A on all four. You can tell ChatGPT what each of these things are, and then give it your communication and ask it to rate you. Right? That's — I couldn't have given you that instruction two years ago.

You also have the ability to take this framework and retrospect. Go back and look at your last recorded presentation. Go back and look at the last high-stakes email that you sent. And, you know, no one has to know — just go rate yourself. It's humbling every time I do this to myself, especially when I skipped the step of looking at the model, when I didn't do TDD on my communication, when I just wrote the code — and then the results weren't so great, and then I went back and like, "Oh yeah, I missed two big things in the model."

- slide: "motivation" - slide: "customer" - slide: "customer / company" - slide: "customer / company / me" - slide: "customer / company / me / team" - slide: "customer / company / me / team / society"

As you're thinking about these four elements of excellent enlistment communication, I want you also to know that you're not just talking to yourself.

There are many different ways that folks have looked at sources of motivation at work. One of those ways uncovers that there are five fundamental motivations that people bring to work.

The first: a lot of people are at work because they are motivated by serving the customer of the business. Second big population: a lot of people are at work because they care about the company — they want the company to succeed; they're affiliated with that company. Many people come to work because they're in it for me. Sales departments tend to be populated with these folks — folks who are looking for improving their own personal income, their own personal stature. Some people come to work 'cause they love their team — they're motivated by being with their team, by having their team succeed. And some people come to work because they actually believe that their work makes a difference in society, whether it's their local community or the world at large.

An exercise that you can do as a takeaway: take these five, jot 'em down on a little piece of paper. Take a hundred points distributed across the five. I'll pretty much guarantee one or two will rise to the top for you if you're being honest with yourself. But if you did this among a group of, like, a thousand people over long periods of time, it's proven out that these are largely equally distributed among the workforce.

And so you'll find yourself as a leader, when you are trying to cover the four bases that I discovered — you're trying to be clear, you're trying to be deep, you want to show that you care, you wanna put things in the context of a larger responsibility — you'll have a tendency, like I do, to speak to yourself. My fundamental motivations at work are customer and company. I tend to think through that lens all the time. And when I'm lazy, which is the default condition, those are the only motivations I address in my communication.

When I force myself to do the work, I step back and say, "I have to speak to the other three motivations as well." Now, that doesn't mean you need five different sentences for everything that you wanna say. It just says: exercise some care on each of these different motivations.

- slide: (summary) "clarity / depth / care / responsibility" alongside "customer / company / me / team / society"

When you do these things, you will be very pleasantly surprised at how much room you create for people to be on your journey with you.

The higher the stakes of the thing that you're asking people to enlist in, the more important it is, in my opinion, that you spend time in each of these in depth. The lower the stakes, you can peel back on some of these. And care is pretty hard. 'Cause if you're gonna care, you actually have to go ask all the Fisher Kings what's ailing them. It's very difficult at work for people to be fully enlisted into big change if they're bothered by things that you haven't addressed.

I want you to try on this model. I mean, I want you to adopt the model, because I believe — and I hope I've demonstrated to you with my own version of depth and care and responsibility — that it will make a big difference. But at the very least, take the model and retrospect on something you've done. You don't even have to create new communication. Take what you consider your last high-stakes communication. Just give yourself an honest evaluation.

But if you really want to get an A, I'd love some of you to show up here next year and tell a story about how you more effectively drove change by engaging deeply in this model. And if you would be comfortable, my ask would be: share your stories with me. Send me emails. Folks who have engaged with me post these conferences on email know — I try to take that very seriously and get back to folks right away.

- slide: "paul@gaffney.io"

I've enjoyed sharing this with you. Good luck with becoming more effective communicators.