Write Like a Leader: How To Be More Impactful In Our Written Communication w/ Grace Aldridge Foster

In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with senior instructor and principle at Bold Type consultancy Grace Aldridge Foster on how leaders can be more impactful writers and build connection with their teams.

Grace shares her insights and experience with...

• Thoughtful communication in leadership writing.
• Writing as a model for expectations.
• Audience awareness is essential
• The ART tool for writing and strategic communication.
• Impact of writing on relationships.
• Jargon and complexity can alienate.
• The power of storytelling.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Grace Aldridge Foster, and here's why she is awesome. She's the co founder and principal at BoldType, a consultancy with the mission to change the way people write so they can express their ideas with confidence and clarity.

In her career, she has worked with organizations like the U. S. Special Operations Command, Capital One, Johnson and Johnson, National Park Service, I could go on and on. She's also a member of the Center for Plain Language and Services as a judge for the Annual Federal Report Card and Clear Mark Awards, which scour federal agencies and other organizations on their ability to communicate clearly, which I just did and fumbled on the stupidest part of that sentence for their online audiences. Government communications. That is a whole other conversation. Did I mention she's a senior instructor at the Brief Lab that provides professional development training services for corporations in the military. And she is here. Hello, Grace.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Hi Russel. Thank you so much for having me.

Russel Lolacher: Of all the sentences of clarity in that bio that I had to F up, that was the one. Well done.

Grace Aldridge Foster: It all, it happens to the best us.

Russel Lolacher: Yes. even the worst of us. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I'm excited about this conversation because I'm a communications nerd. That is where I, my entire career is, focused on communications and leadership. So leadership writing and how it's different than regular writing. So let's, before we get into any of that though, because I don't want to jump the gun.

What is your... got to ask the question I started all my episodes with. What is your best or worst employee experience, Grace?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, I'm going to break the rules and tell two quick stories.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, you're ruining it already. Okay, go.

Grace Aldridge Foster: We're doing great right out, of the gate. Yeah. So the first one when, I knew you were gonna ask me this question and I was thinking about this as I was brushing my teeth this morning and, immediately, two stories came to mind.

The first, I was at, this was at the beginning of my career, I was working as a writing center coordinator, but then I decided to take on a little bit of part time work on the side, just to do something different, fill my time. A local bakery hired me to bake cupcakes and become a barista and make coffee.

And I was really excited about that. My first day I show up to work and my boss immediately puts me to work, mopping the floor and washing dishes. And as I'm washing the dishes, she's standing over my shoulder micromanaging how I'm washing the dishes. And so that it was, a really interesting sort of first day of work and I realized wow, we were, our communication really broke down.

My expectations for this role are completely different than what we had discussed previously. So that was definitely a bad employee experience and a second bad one. I feel bad to start off with two negatives, but they're also kind of funny. I was working a job and early on in this new job, my boss sent me this email in which he was sort of complaining about something that he, that I had done that he was not pleased with, but he sent this email on a Saturday morning and I didn't have great work boundaries then.

So I had notifications set up on my phone and I got the email. I read it on a Saturday morning and it ruined the rest of my weekend and definitely set a precedent for, long kind of passive aggressive condescending emails coming out all hours of the day and week So those were two of my worst employee experiences

Russel Lolacher: And oddly enough, I mean, oddly in air quotes, both in relation to communications.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Exactly.

Russel Lolacher: So how did it inform you moving forward in your career? Having those experiences at a younger age too, where you're still trying to form your opinions of what it is to work in a work environment, what leadership looks like, how did it inform you moving forward in your own career?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, one thing that it made me realize is I don't think for either of those employers that they thought very hard about those communications, right? I think the conversation that I had with that first boss at the bakery and she was like, yeah, we'll have you bake and we'll have you we'll train you up to be a barista.

I think she was just she wasn't thinking that hard about it. She just threw it out there. But for me, that was really significant. It's kind of what I latched on to and it really shaped my expectations. Same thing with my boss and that second story I was talking about. You know for him, he was sending that email when it was convenient to him. I'm sure he didn't overthink it. He just wrote what he was feeling. Hit send. Never thought about when it would arrive or how I would perceive it. And so what it made me realize going into my career is that especially if you're in a leadership position, you have to be extra thoughtful about the way you communicate with folks, because if you just throw something out there and it doesn't mean much to you, it actually might be really significant to them.

And, so it just made me a lot more thoughtful about how I communicate, especially as a leader and as an employer myself.

Russel Lolacher: It also shows what an employee may need or not need to know, i. e. how they need to be more clear with their communications. I came in to be a baker and and to do things that are not cleaning. So I say this because when I started early in my career, I worked at a restaurant was my very first job.

And in the application process, there was what position do you want? Keep in mind, I'm 15. There's not a lot of options for me in a restaurant. So it said, I put any, I was just happy to have a job. So I put any, so they're like great dish pit. So I thought I came in here looking to be a busser. I had applied to be a busser, but I was not clear in my own communications.

So the leader was going to be like, all right. So we need this position filled. I did it for a month. I did move into the busser role. I don't regret it, but I do regret that I didn't communicate more clearly about what my expectations were because they'll take this conversation in the story. However, they need to based on how I'm communicating as well.

Grace Aldridge Foster: That's such a good point. I mean, imagine if I had showed up day one. She'd said, here's a mop and here's the dish pit. And I'd said, oh, actually, can we talk about this? Because my expectation is that I was going to be baking and learning how to be a barista. Is that still happening? Are we on the same page about that? But I didn't, because I was just like I didn't feel that I could, or I didn't know yet because I was so, young that I could have those conversations. It would have gone probably differently. Or maybe not.

Russel Lolacher: Confidence is such a key part of this as well in communication is knowing where you're communicating from, what position you're communicating from. And I don't mean hierarchically, I mean, just clarity. So let's get into this cause this is going to be, this is going to be fun one because we're both nerds in communications.

So I want to first clarify what we're talking about when we talk about writing, leadership writing. Are we talking emails? What are we meaning when we're talking communication in writing? Because there are so many different ways leaders can and should be communicating with their employees in their organizations.

Writing isn't always one of them. So just a little clarity of what we're actually talking about.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Great question. Email definitely is a big part of it. It's sort of the, still the most common way that, that leaders, I think in writing communicate with their teams. So yeah it's, email, but I think that a lot of interactions that leaders have with their teams also might start out as writing.

Even if they never, even if that's not the final format that people receive those messages in. I think about prepared remarks at a conference or at a meeting or something like that, right? That actually is writing, even if that's not how the folks are, sort of receiving it or how it's being delivered.

But email's a big thing. Newsletters are a big thing. Even letters to shareholders, right? Things like that. I mean, yeah, I think that's kind of the stuff we're talking about.

Russel Lolacher: What makes this different than other type of writing within a, within an organization? As a leader, how are you, how is it different? Are we looking at it from a different lens? Are we looking at it from a different impact, desired impact?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Sure. I think that it's whereas like lateral employees maybe are communicating with each other, mostly just on a particular topic. It's just sharing information about a topic. A lot of times when it's kind of top down communication from a leader, it's also a, it's a lot more about also, I think, culture. Sort of defining culture.

And also it's about setting a precedent or a tone for how other people in the organization are expected to communicate or are allowed to communicate. I think that people read a lot more into how leaders communicate, especially in writing than they do necessarily from, from just a teammate. Right? So they're looking at tone, they're looking at length even if you have a very lengthy wordy leader whose emails out to the whole staff are very long and very flowery and all this stuff, then that also maybe sets the expectation that other folks are supposed to communicate that way as well. So we're looking to our leaders also to model the kind of communication that we think is expected of us in a particular organization.

Russel Lolacher: You tap onto something that's really important, which is the culture piece of this. I'm curious your thoughts on communications influence on leadership writing, because I can see it in two ways. How is the culture of the organization impacting the writing and how is the writing impacting culture?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes. And I think that leaders who aren't careful are influencing culture with their writing and not letting culture influence their writing. I think that conscious leaders should be doing both, should be aware of both. But again, that second boss that I talked about was a very small team,

he was influencing the culture of our team with his writing. He was not thinking about what is the culture I want to have on my team and how should I reflect that in my writing, right? So I, think that a good conscious leader should be thinking about how to do both.

Russel Lolacher: So it's, the push and pull I'm hearing a bit too, is as a leader, you need to influence culture in your writing, but you need to be super situationally aware, which I constantly talk about as a superpower, of your culture to understand how it might influence . Can you give an example of that, of how a leader would need to consider their culture?

Grace Aldridge Foster: That's a really good question. Let me think about that. Yeah. How a leader would need to consider their culture. Well, tone, I think, is a really great area to think about with this. Let's say, you're working in a startup and things are exciting, but also there are a lot of unknowns.

There's a lot of uncertainty. There's high energy, but, but not a lot of certainty, right? We're, sort of all in this, it's experimental where whatever. So I think that being very aware of how your, how your tone can affect your team members confidence in, in the, project and the mission and the future of the company is very important.

So if you're sending out an all staff. email or a team update, I think being very careful to think about... so tone, but also brevity, right? There is such a thing as being too brief. There's a negativity bias with email, right? So people tend to read your emails on a harsher tone than you intend them and intend them to.

So if you're trying to kind of inspire and encourage your teammates, if you're trying to encourage openness also, let's say a culture of openness where they feel that they can approach leadership and share ideas and you're sort of all in this together, right? Then I think that you have to, think about like, how can I make sure that I'm not being so brief that I'm like, I'm trying to spare people's time. I give them permission to be brief. But also so I'm not being so brief that I seem terse, though. Or I seem annoyed. Or I seem like I don't have time for them. Or I seem like I'm being secretive. I mean, that's the other thing that sometimes I think leaders do.

They're, thinking, I want to spare people's time and their inboxes, so let me be very short. I can also come across as I don't want to share. I don't want to be open. I'm not open. So that's kind of a scattered answer, Russel, but those are some of my thoughts about that.

Russel Lolacher: Fair. And I was looking at it or thinking about it also from, and you have experience overlooking government online communication. And I'm also thinking of, private sector communication, so they're an illegal communication. So there is some cultures that are very, I'm gonna use a great word here, stodgy, where they're very risk adverse.

They are very about, we have to say it in just this right particular way, while others are a little bit more wild west, a lot more personality. So you're going into an organization as a leader where there's these preconceived notions of how you can communicate or rather should be communicating. And as a leader, I don't always agree with that because just because it's a way we've always talked about or is expected of us, that's also not how you engage and connect with other human beings in how you write and how you communicate.

So that's how I was, that's where I was sort of going with is sometimes these cultures can really influence how you write for good or for bad.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes, sure. And like your, own personal career experiences. Your last job influences how you're going to write in this job the and expectations you, bring to your current position.

Russel Lolacher: So as a leader, I'm right now, I'm trying to be super focused on how I am going to represent myself, how I'm going to communicate and write as a leader. And I mean this, and I should be clear here, podcast about relationships at work. It's very much about internal communications. It's very much about how we engage with our other employees, other leaders, and that sort of thing.

I know the public is a very, I mean, the mechanisms are the same, but that's a different audience. So focusing on me as a leader, trying to engage, connect, become relevant, with my organization, what do I need to be considering? Because we sit and write, we have, there is a bit of a process. And so where would you say we should start?

Grace Aldridge Foster: In terms of your process for, writing?

Russel Lolacher: Sure, I'm mean for instance, I immediately think, are you considering who you're trying to communicate to?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes. Yeah, that's, well, exactly. And if you're skipping that part, if you're skipping thinking about your audience, you are not going to get it right. Or if you do, it's just because you got lucky. Yeah. So like we teach clients a really simple tool and this is where I recommend that folks start and it's the ART tool for audience awareness.

And it's just a really simple acronym. Before you write anything, ask yourself, who is my audience? My primary reader? What is the result that I want from this communication and the more specific and the more measurable, the better. And also this should be realistic, right? What can this one communication realistically accomplish?

And then T is tone. What's the tone I need to take to move my audience to the result that I want. So people often think about tone in terms of what are my feelings towards this subject? But it's actually about how do I need my audience to feel about me and my subject in order to do the thing that I'm asking them to do or feel the way that I'm asking them to feel.

So the ART is something that anyone can do. You don't need a fancy program. You don't need fancy materials. You can write it on a sticky note. You can do it mentally. And it, saves people from making a lot of mistakes, leaders and otherwise.

Russel Lolacher: How do you know you're not ARTful? Oh, look what I did there. How do you know you're not using, I mean, cause there's a lot of leaders that will write something and send it into the audience void that is the organization. So you mentioned about measurability and you mentioned about that. So I'm curious how, because it's a broadcast, not a communication, a lot of the time for leaders.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yeah, good point. Because when it's when you're sending someone an email, one person an email, and you're asking them, can we schedule a meeting at this time next week, the way you measure the success, the ARTfulness of that email is do they respond and say yes, and here's when I'm available.

But you're right. If it's sort of a broadcast to an organization, it's harder to tell. It's harder to, decide what your metrics are for success. And I do talk about this with folks I work with sometimes, it's you hear folks talking about it in the hallways. You can tell that it, that it reached that the message reached them because you literally hear people talking about it.

Sometimes you know that you were ARTful that you use the ART effectively because people reply and say, thanks for this, or this resonated with me. Sometimes it's about open rates like sometimes you, you can look at the, just at the numbers, right? Especially if you're using, various platforms to do this.

You can say, well, how many people actually opened this email? How long did they spend looking at it? So sometimes there's, like some hard data, but other times it's, yeah, what kind of questions are people referencing the updates that I shared and meetings are, yeah... Do I hear them talking with each other about it?

Are they asking questions?

Russel Lolacher: I also love that you highlighted that it is important to be strategic and intentionful. Sure. Let's go with that. Intentionalful?. We're a communications writing group and I'm making up words. Intentionful.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Love it it. That's how all words were started. They were made up.

Russel Lolacher: It's great communications, horrible grammar is what I usually say. You knew what I meant.

Grace Aldridge Foster: I sure did.

Russel Lolacher: But you highlight the fact that you need to have this process, even if you're just talking to one person, because a lot of people will think, Oh, okay. Writing strategy. Got it. It's got to go to a team. It's got to go to the whole organization, a branch. When really that ART you talk about is as impactful, if not more so on a one to one basis, because that's where the relationships really start digging in. So I love that you highlighted that.

Grace Aldridge Foster: I, that's exactly what I was thinking as you were, saying that, it's that people undervalue how important written communications are to developing relationships. And I think, especially in our post pandemic world when there's so much remote work, I mean, this is something that we saw during in 2020 and 2021.

Because folks were working from home, the reliance on written communication boomed, right? People were sending more emails, more slack messages they were on teams more often and that's really where your relationships are formed, especially, think about it, like writing is often the first impression that you make on a new colleague.

It's, an email, you send them an email and say, Hey, I'm so and so I'm going to be working with you in this capacity. Can we meet or can we do this? You're setting the tone for a relationship, every communication you have with someone, and certainly verbal as well, but I think especially in writing because you're not there to, contribute body language and facial expressions and stuff, right?

So the tone of your writing, the way you write something immediately starts to affect your relationship with someone. And also, I think that it defines your reputation. We all know someone who, when their name pops up in our inbox, we immediately sort of go, ugh, not an email from them, right?

Because you've come to expect that they're going to be either very long winded or they're going to be grumpy or passive aggressive, or it's going to be really scattered, right? So those, written communications can also affect your reputation.

Russel Lolacher: I want to dig a little bit more into the ART acronym a bit because you talked about it from a high level, but for someone who's trying to consider their audience, the relatability, their tone, what are they, what are they first asking themselves? Because when we asked the question for a lot of leaders who's your audience you're writing to?

They're like, Oh, I don't know. It's the team. Okay. But what about the team do you need to know in order to influence and inform your writing?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Oh, yeah, because just saying the team is not enough, that doesn't do much. So part of what the ART is prompting you to do is to build strategic empathy with your audience. It's very difficult to empathize with a whole group. It's much easier to empathize with a single person. So what we typically recommend, what I recommend is if you're communicating with a group, think about one representative person from that group, a single person from that group who's either maybe the most significant person you're communicating with or like your primary reader or something like that, or just a represent, very representative reader from that, team or from that group. And walk through what you know about them. Now, is this necessary? Every single time you email this team, let's say you email the team 18 times a week, you maybe don't need to do this every single time, but maybe once a week or once a month, even remind yourself, who is this person? What do I know about them? them already. How much do they care about my topic? How much do they know about it already? What is our relationship? What are they probably feeling about this particular topic or about me? You're thinking through... what do we have in common? What do we not have in common?

That's one thing that I think about a lot when I'm planning especially any kind of like outreach to, new folks or people I don't already have a significant or a longstanding relationship with. So those are the types of questions you should be asking yourself. And again, you don't necessarily have to ask yourself those questions about the same person every time you email them, but certainly the first time and sometimes kind of do a check in when it's been a while since you've thought about it.

Russel Lolacher: Some of these really helped me as well as understanding the motivations of those you're trying to talk to. I've done some research and also some, workshops where we were trying to figure out the values and the motivations of a team, and it was great. It was really, helpful, but not only did it help them inform each other, but it helped inform me going, Oh, that will not light a fire under your ass at all.

But if I do this and talk in this way, just because it's not my motivation doesn't mean it's not it's, not. It's not your motivation. So if I can write in a way that resonates with you in what pushes you and fires you up, then I'm going to be a little bit more relevant, a little bit more... anyway that was, all really values and motivation has always been helpful.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, that's right. I mean we're, all writing to make something happen when we communicate at work. We're not doing it just for fun. It's not the same thing as the journaling that you do in your free time or if you write fan fiction or short stories, right? That's, not what we're engaging in at work.

We're writing to make something happen. So if you want something to happen, you can't afford not to think about people's motivations, their values. What do they need to hear? What do they need to know to do the thing that you're asking them to do? Not just what do you want to say.

Russel Lolacher: Now I'm curious about correspondence. So it's one thing to start those conversations or to broadcast a desire or a want of a thing, but then we go back and forth. And sometimes the conversation... so I'll use an example here. I'll have a conversation with say a colleague or a boss and I'm not liking what they're saying and my conversation and my writing gets shorter and shorter till the point where I'm in a text message going 'K', like I don't want to use any other words, no more do I want to engage with this human being?

The less... so I can go off and sulk or be pissed off the better. I'm almost using it as I'm doing the bare minimum to stop this engagement as soon as possible. What kind of advice would you give for that? Cause I'm obviously speaking a clear message that I may not intend to, but I'm also doing it subconsciously in my writing.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yeah. Well, to me, I think those types of back and forth conversations, like especially over email, I think is kind of what you're describing or maybe text or Slack or whatever. When it gets to that point, that kind of like constant back and forth where it's almost like we're just having a real time text conversation and I don't really want to be having it anymore, to me, that's usually a sign that of a couple of things. First of all, that, conversation probably didn't need to happen in writing. It would have been a lot more efficient on the phone or in person or over Zoom. So, there might be a mismatch between what it is that you wanted to accomplish and the format you chose to have that conversation.

And then also probably the original message was not very clear because if you have to keep asking follow up questions or they have to keep pestering you for more information and more information. It tells me that there wasn't enough thought put into it in the beginning. So if you are in a leadership position and you are, you find yourself sort of like on the receiving end of this type of communication where it's it's dwindling, it's kind of going on and on You don't want to be having it anymore. I think that's an opportunity for you to a check in with your team about like how you use email versus meetings, right? Like when do you schedule a meeting or a phone call, a pick up the phone versus when do you send an email? So that you don't continue to find yourself in those situations.

Russel Lolacher: There's a term I've used a few times, which I didn't come up with, but I find interesting, which is the curse of knowledge, which is we're really good at talking and writing in a way that only we understand, maybe we're engineers, maybe we're whatever type of work that you... lawyers are a big one for this. Finance people.

So we're getting into the jargon of it all. How much should we be leaning into that jargon? Because we're talking about relatability in tone and nothing can be more relatable in tone than we have our own special Hobbit Lord of the Rings language. Then other people may not understand reading it. Where does that fit into communication when it comes to writing

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, I'm not a fan of jargon, . I don't, I hear, but you're making an interesting point though, which is that jargon is one of the ways that we signal that we're sort of all in on something together. So, I hear what you're saying that's really interesting. But I think that often comes at the expense of clarity.

I think, again, it also sets this expectation that, that our communication is more about signaling how much we know rather than actually accomplishing something, and I think that's a really dangerous precedent to set because we're already dealing with so much, just a massive amount of information in a given day.

So I just think that folks should think really carefully about what do I want my role to be? And, the, Information consumption that everyone I know is, dealing with in a given day. Jargon can also be really alienating. To new team members, to maybe folks who don't have the same background that you do, even culturally or, let's say team members who, for whom English isn't their first language. It can be really alienating as well.

So what is it that you're broadcasting? Sure. Maybe you're trying to sort of like project culture in a way or unify people around shared language. But I think that what you might be, I think that you're also, there's, you're risking a lot there as well.

Russel Lolacher: And acronyms are jargon too people. Anybody that use a million different acronyms, especially for new people. I remember starting a job and I'm like, no acronyms for a year. Not a single... I don't want to hear a single... write everything out. Cause I don't know what it means. Talk to me like I'm an idiot. Cause I am. I'm learning.

But yeah I, love that you brought up divisiveness because it really can. And people won't have the confidence as we illustrated in our stories at the beginning to ask what words mean because they're not high enough on the hierarchy or don't feel enough confidence to ask for clarity because they're assuming they're stupid and they don't know rather than asking because you're a horrible communicator and only use jargon and... So then how about the plain language versus corporate speak point to this because we may not get into the jargon side of it, but then we'll start talking to like robots where we use these big flowery words. Well, it's not relatable to people going, well, I don't know how to speak as a lawyer and have 9 dollar words when 3 dollar, 1 dollar words were, will do. Do you find that happens a lot with leadership trying to sound smarter or trying to fit some cookie cutter culture?

Sure. That might or might not exist.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes. I think especially when folks are, have first been promoted or first hired into sort of like the next tier of leadership. I think that's when I see people especially lean into let's use big words. Let's... they just they're feeling pressure to seem smart and to seem competent.

And we, you know, we've seen from other leaders in our careers that, that will, that we want to try to emulate them. The way to do that is to yeah, make things sound really flowery and really impressive. But that's not a great way... first of all, it's not a great way to connect with people because of the, divisiveness issue that we were talking about, right.

It can be really alienating. It also can make you seem very, like remote, very lofty, very apart. Because it's not the way that your team is communicating when they're having conversations, probably, or texting, or or whatever. Yeah, I think that leaders really struggle with that. And it, it's a, I think a lot of times it's just because it's what you've seen other people do. So you think that's what you're supposed to do. Or it's a insecurity thing, right? You're like, well, I want to project that I know what I'm doing, but it can backfire. I think that the most impressive thing you can do is to use really simple language.

It makes you seem like you have nothing to prove. You're confident. You know what you're talking about. It's actually harder to explain a complex concept in plain language than it is to do it using a bunch of jargon and a bunch of lofty language. Yeah. So again, and I think it's, all about setting a precedent.

You need to give your team members permission to communicate in plain language. The only way they'll feel empowered to do that as if you yourself do that.

Russel Lolacher: Are there any pet peeves that we haven't mentioned that drive you a little up the wall?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Oh, sure. How much time do you have Russel? I always say that one of my pet peeves is when people use semicolons in emails. And it's because, first of all, people tend to use them incorrectly. And second of all, if you're using semicolons in something like an email, There are probably a whole host of other problems.

You're probably using big words, long convoluted sentences. They're probably too grandiose. You're probably thinking more about like, how do I want to come across? How do I impress people? Then, you're thinking about how do I make sure that they receive the information. So there are a lot of like small little kind of petty things like that that are definitely pet peeves.

Russel Lolacher: I like that the semi colon is a canary in a coal mine that you may be thinking a little too much about this.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes. And that's if you use it correctly too. If you use it incorrectly, then oh, that's a whole other thing.

Russel Lolacher: How do you, feel about delegation? Cause a lot of leaders don't write their, don't write their writing. They are delegating it to HR or their administration staff. And they're like, yeah, looks good. Send it out. And I, it drives me nuts because I hate that we're delegating relationship building. I hate that we're delegating tone and personality because we're quote unquote too busy.

Again, people are very busy, but you're prioritizing the wrong things. How does leader handle that?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, I think that ideally, if you're going to have someone ghost write for you, you should give them examples of your own writing so that rather than them producing writing for you and a tone for you and you signing off on it, what they're doing is they're learning they're analyzing your own pattern.

They're trying to emulate the voice that you've already established. I think that's the best way to do that because, look, I mean, practically speaking, some leaders have to delegate at least some of that. They don't have the time like the president of the United States does not have time to write their own speeches.

So it makes sense that the to delegate some of that work. But if you're going to do that, I do think you, you should be providing the people that you're asking to do that for you with examples of your own writing or with the direction before they write. Because otherwise, yeah, someone else is dictating your tone for you, is determining your, communication patterns and styles for you. And it can get away from you. It can feel really inauthentic.

Russel Lolacher: Unfortunately, we have a lot of leaders in positions that have no skill in writing whatsoever and never have had any training whatsoever to do this because they were really good at a thing. They got promoted. But it was never about communication or leadership. It was all about, you did a thing really well.

So then they find themselves in these positions where they have to communicate. They have to create a brand and a persona, or 'persona', but really it's them, you know what I mean, as a leader, but they have no skillset. So when they're delegating, they don't even have any good examples to point to or know what to go, oh, this is what I want because they don't know really what they want.

So where do we start as leaders to train ourselves, to learn how to be better communicators so we can even delegate properly.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yeah, well, this is a self serving answer, but I do think that it's true. I think that if a leader knows that communication is a weakness of their own, a great thing to do is to engage someone to, to run a training for them and their team, because I also think it's very humanizing and also more effective when leaders are in skills based trainings with their teams anyway.

So I think being able to come in and say, this is something that I, and you can keep it positive. It's not like we're doing this training because this is something that I suck at. You can say, we're doing this training because this is something that I think is important. I want to improve at, and I want all of us as a team to improve at. So we're going to invest in this together. And when you, approach it with humility like that with openness, and I think that's a great way to set precedent. And then you as a team, you as a leader and your team, you can all sort of work towards a shared goal of communication standards and things like that.

So I think that ideally, that's an awesome thing to do. If you're assuming a new leadership position, you know that communication is a weakness of yours. Use that as an opportunity. to get some support, not just for you, but for your whole team. It can be kind of a team building thing. So I realized that's like a little bit self serving though, because I train people, but, I think that depending on how busy you are or, and how important this is to you, absolutely ways that you can intentionally invest in improving your own writing and establishing your own tone. The biggest reason that people aren't good at it is because as you're talking about, they haven't taken the time to work on it. So if you think it's important, take the time to work on it, right? You can actually, you can use tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly to help you with this.

I mean, those tools don't exist just to do your work for you. They're like, your, they're like super powered assistants to help you, if you're intentional, improve your own skills and your own confidence around writing. And I, think that's a lot of the conversations that I have these days with folks is well, how do you use those tools? Not just to do the work for you, but to, make you better at your own work.

Russel Lolacher: And to be clear when, we say it, if you think it's important, let me, let us answer it for you. It, is important. Every leadership challenge I've ever seen or every, let's say, put it this way. Every, mistake, failure has always come down to 90 percent communication or lack of communication in some way, shape or form. And writing is the DNA of most of the right, most of the communication that we do. So if you're a leader and don't think communication is important, you're not much of a leader. Let's be super clear about that.

Grace Aldridge Foster: I agree totally.

Russel Lolacher: How do you keep up with change though? Because we can talk about this all we want. But then there's a Gen Z, Gen Zed over there going, I want emojis in my emails. And there's a Boomer going on my dead body, will there be an emoji? Where do I put this semi colon? Like that is very much a push and pull of how we want to communicate and be communicated to, and as a leader, you have to communicate to all these type of people.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Oh yeah. Generational differences around communication preferences and communication styles, it's really why I have a job. Because most people who, who engages for training or, whatever. I mean, A lot of times it's because you've got a mid to high level leader who is, has 20 to 30 years of experience in the field.

And they're frustrated with younger team members, new team members, because the way they approach communication is fundamentally different. It's not always wrong. And it's not always bad. But there's a, there's just a big disconnect, right? And so a lot of times I feel like what we're actually doing is getting called in to mediate these like generational differences by communicating like, kind of establishing a shared standard. And I think that is the thing to do. Well, you don't necessarily have to bring in external trainers to do this, but I think that you should have conversations around communication expectations. You should not just assume that everyone is on the same page. They aren't. They most definitely are not.

You should facilitate conversations around that. You should provide effective examples. I don't have to be ones that you yourself as a leader have written. But if you see someone doing something well you should share it and say, this is an example of what I'm looking for and, here's the reason why we should all be trying to make our fill in the blank look more like this.

That's a great thing to do. And, Yeah, I think that also doing something like the art and if everyone has a shared practice around that can help solve a lot of those problems as well because you, get out of this mentality of, again what, is it that I like to see? What is it that my own personal preferences are and more into the mindset of what does my audience want to see? What will they appreciate? What will resonate with them?

Russel Lolacher: I find it so funny cause I'll hear from different generations and they're so clear about how right they are. Like it is though, this is how you write. And I'm like you're being just as stubborn as all the people that you're pushing up against. You're so much more similar than you think. So I really appreciate you going, can we get from the same song sheet and at least have common language that we can agree on.

In how to communicate, and I don't think that work gets done enough because we're so, to be a lack of a better term, narcissistic and how we want to communicate because that's how we prefer to be written to or write ourselves.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes. And I'll just add something I should have said before, which is also establishing style guides and actually socializing them at an organization is very, helpful with this. So I would say maybe only a ballpark 30 percent of the organizations I work with actually have a style guide. And of those 30% a very small percentage actually use them.

Mostly they haven't been updated for years. No one knows where to find them. And they're also, it's all just about like, how do we deviate from the AP style here? And it's well that's not, that helpful. That style guides are a real opportunity to also talk about things like the ART, like what are best practices around communication?

What are, what is our voice as an organization? And how can we make sure that we're all referencing the same thing? We're all on the same page. It can be one page and those things can be so super valuable and they're, way underutilized and often ignored.

Russel Lolacher: It's funny you bring that up. So CP style for us Canadians, Associated Press AP style, I remember writing something and trying to tell a boss of mine that it was the proper way of writing it because it was CP style. And they said, I don't care what journalists do this is how you write it. I'm like, no, that's not how this works, but you're the boss.

So I have to listen to you, but that is So it was hard. I

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, yeah. And so then there's what is technically correct? And then what is, useful and effective, right? And, those there's overlap, right? But technically correct does not mean that it's going to be effective or that it's going to accomplish anything. So again, thinking about what is the point of something like a style guide? What are the expectations that, that we want to socialize that everyone should have in common around communication? I think that requires some thoughtfulness.

Russel Lolacher: I want to wrap up our conversation around what I think is probably one of the strongest skillsets that isn't used enough when it comes to writing, which is storytelling where when we write, we get almost to the point because like you were saying earlier, we don't want to bother people. We want to be really quick. We want to get to the point, but it also doesn't attach to relevancy. It doesn't attach to impact because we're not telling the story of value. How important because even the ART perspective of it, stories in there, but it might not be clear enough for people. Because it's more technical. It is. It is more of a strategic as opposed to storytelling, which is really the connective tissue of ART.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Mm-Hmm,

Russel Lolacher: And in between that. How do you convince a leader that they need to be amazing storytellers?

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, I think that the, way to, to convince leaders of that is just to talk about people's attention spans in the 21st century. I mean, people struggle deeply to pay attention, and it's not even really our fault , right? It's, it's our brains have adapted to, to the information environment, right?

And so I think that in order to be effective as a leader, you need people to pay attention to you. In order to get people to pay attention to you, you have to hold their attention. The way to hold people's attention is to tell stories. And I think that there are some folks who go, well, I'm not a good storyteller.

I'm an engineer. I don't tell stories, but telling stories is really thinking about the order in which you present information and what it is that you present. So think about how do I make sure that I'm not starting in the middle, for example. Likewise, how do I make sure that I don't start with so much background and context that I've lost people before we've even gotten into the good stuff, right?

So I think one thing that people can do actually to, this is, a little counterintuitive when it comes to telling stories. We tend to save like the big reveal for the end or, the big, culminating action comes towards the end of a story. I think start with it. I think start with your mic drop and then you can give the background and stuff like that.

You can tell a more compelling story when people know upfront why it matters. So that's something to think about. I think in writing in particular, really focusing on concrete verbs and nouns, rather than a lot of flowery adjectives and jargon, right? Those things hold people's attention. It helps them picture things in their minds and focus in on what it is that you're saying.

So storytelling, I think sounds like this mystical art to some people, but it's not, it's something you can break down into really easy to understand components. Anybody can tell a good story if you just think about how they work.

Russel Lolacher: There's a phrase saying don't bury the lead...

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yeah, exactly.

Russel Lolacher: When it's really important. I'm like, I just had to read through seven paragraphs to find out why the hell you sent this email to start with.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Yes. And that goes back to all the stuff we were talking about earlier on about how you're setting up expectations. It influences your, reputation. So if you are someone who regularly sends emails that are seven paragraphs long and it's hard to find the point, people start to expect that when you speak or when you write, it's not worth their time to listen because it's going to take all this time and effort and they're going to have to search for the point or they're going to have to ask, people are tired before they've even opened your email.

You have to think about it's not just this one message. Am I burying the lead? But am I teaching people to expect poor communication from me? Am I teaching people to tune me out?

Russel Lolacher: On that negative note.

Grace Aldridge Foster: We did, we started on an negative note and we've ended on one. I'm feeling pretty bad about that.

Russel Lolacher: So let's wrap it up on an upper. So what's one simple action right now, Grace, that people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

bYeah, sure thing. I think everyone should be using a fun little feature of Grammarly, which is the tone detector. I think tone is so often misread, misinterpreted in writing in particular. Everyone can do themselves a favor use a free tool that's available to you.

Grammarly Tone Detector does like this little uses emojis to sort of reflect your tone back to you. Even better, get another human to read your writing out loud and tell you if it's achieving the tone that you intended. But in lieu of that, use your tools, use Grammarly, use the Tone Detector.

Russel Lolacher: That is Grace Aldridge Foster. She's the co founder and principal at the writing consultancy, Bold Type, and also a senior instructor at the Brief Lab. Thank you so much for being here, Grace.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Thank you, Russel. This is fun.

Russel Lolacher: And I won't even note that your background is amazingly color coordinated. I couldn't tell you how much of that is brilliant.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Well, I won't tell you how long it took me to do that would be embarrassing.

Russel Lolacher: Don't reveal the magic. Don't reveal the magic. Thanks, Grace.

Grace Aldridge Foster: Thanks, Russel.