Answer the Unasked Questions — A Guide to Proactive Communication
When you're asked questions — do you literally answer just those questions, or do you try to answer the root question behind them?
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
The first version of this article was written 6 years ago. I love this article. I wanted to update it to my current style and get it out to all of you readers.
Gilbert wanted to be promoted. That much was clear from his invitation. He was a junior development manager who reported to a peer of mine. Gilbert said he had some exciting updates from his team he wanted to share.
When you’re a relatively senior leader at a company like Amazon, you often get people scheduling random, cryptic meetings. In general, why would I care to set aside time to hear about exciting updates from a junior development manager on another team? Because I’m fairly sure there are other ways for me to get those updates apart from a 30-minute meeting.
The thing is that many companies require other leaders to vouch for your skills to get promoted. The expectation is that through the natural course of you doing your job, you’d interact with enough senior leaders to make this naturally happen. But if you don’t naturally interact with enough senior leaders, you end up with situations like Gilbert’s meeting.
Gilbert excitedly walked into my office, his chest puffed up. He was certainly projecting personal pride and excitement.
“Hey Dave! Thanks for making the time!” Gilbert said.
“Not a problem, Gilbert, happy to hear from you!” I said, lying. I know it’s my job to evaluate more junior leader’s performance, but these meetings feel so artificial. I was at most mildly fine hearing from Gilbert.
“We’ve had a huge success launch, and I wanted to let you know about it.” he said.
I nodded to let him know I was listening. This was following the expected script.
“Our metadata service has needed to be refactored for years now. We had many big blocking issues due to it. And while it took many months worth of engineering effort, we finally refactored it!”
I nodded, waiting for details and more explanation.
Gilbert smiled.
I raised my eyebrows, to clarify that I was waiting, not having a seizure.
Gilbert visibly panicked, realizing it was still his turn to talk.
“And so our next step is to improve the monitoring and alarms on the metadata service to ensure that we know about any operational issues!” he said, in conclusion. And then looked at me. He was clearly indicating it was my turn to talk.
“What’s the metadata service Gilbert?” I asked in a patient voice. Because I’d never heard of it, and I wasn’t familiar in detail with his team’s charter. And I hoped that I’d made it clear that he’d absolutely missed giving me any context on anything.
“Oh.” he said, pausing. “It holds metadata for our content?”
“Well, I understand a metadata service would likely hold metadata” I said, trying very hard keep the sarcasm at bay. “But what type of data does your service hold? How much data? What types of customers do you have? I don’t have context on your service, so it’s hard for me to understand why this is a big win.”
“Well it’s a big win because it was an incredibly hard challenge.” Gilbert said, a bit too defensively. “We originally thought it would take just 8 weeks of dev effort, but it ended up being over 18 weeks. It was a huge accomplishment to finish it.”
I felt bad, but this was not a cheerleading meeting. This was intended for me to evaluate Gilbert’s ability to lead in a more senior role. And Gilbert was doing pretty poorly. The meeting continued to go downhill for the next 25-minutes. My conversation with Gilbert’s manager was also uncomfortable.
Where did Gilbert go wrong? I understand that it may not be immediately clear.
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Gilbert had explained what was important to him. From his perspective and his priorities.
He wanted to refactor it for a long time.
He thinks it blocked some other things which are important.
It was super hard to finish.
Why was this type of explanation a problem?
He told me his priority on the work, not my / the organization’s priority on the work.
He should care about why I should want it done, not why he wanted it done. This would mean I’d need to know what the service is, and why it needed to be refactored. With zero context or additional information, I could assume that this work was not needed.
He completely neglected context on everything.
He didn’t explain why it needed to be refactored. He didn’t explain what it was blocking (a potential input to the priority of this work). He didn’t explain what challenges they overcame. He communicated from the perspective of someone who knew everything about his team.
He evaluated the value of his work incorrectly.
As a leader in an organization, I can calculate the value of work by two simple variables. Value = Benefit - cost. He excitedly told me that the cost was higher than expected. I understand, from his standpoint, that makes him feel even prouder of his work. Because we all feel a natural joy in completing hard work. But I want value, not cost. And that’s a problem. He doesn’t appear to know what I value.
Communication, and experience.
Imagine you’re writing a document, responding to an email, or writing a quick memo. You usually want to accomplish something. You want to get recognition for your accomplishments. You want to convince everyone to do something. You want to keep people updated on your plans.
One of the clearest differences between junior and senior employees is how they approach communication. Junior employees will frequently lay out the details that feel important to them, answer the questions important to them, and propose actions they would like to take. The context of all that communication is their perspective.
This effectively screams, “I’m inexperienced!”
A senior employee, writing the same communication, lays out the details important for their audience. They propose actions that can be understood by their audience and explain why the audience would care. They answer the audience’s anticipated next questions.
The one tool that makes all the difference is empathy—the ability to understand others from their perspective. This includes the ability to understand what information they’re interested in, what their needs are, what their priorities are, what information they already have, and what knowledge they don’t have. Essentially, empathy puts you on the side of your audience: I understand you. I can feel your needs. This is about you, not me.
Follow-up questions
I love developing new leaders at Amazon. When mentoring others on this topic, I always propose a simple tool to use to know when they’re nailing or missing the mark: If you get follow-up questions to your communication, you’ve made an error.
I believe that personal growth comes from being able to identify gaps where you could have one better in a situation. This means if you’re explaining something in a meeting, and someone asks a clarification question, you could have done better. If you send an email, and someone replies with follow-up questions, you should assume you provided an incomplete message. And if your document leads to follow-up questions which could have been anticipated in the document, your document is flawed.
Of course, it’s possible some questions couldn’t be anticipated. You might be missing the context of a co-worker, or someone in your audience may have a different view on what data is important. Regardless, I believe a strong leader will assume that they could have anticipated the request, and a junior leader will identify the questioner as wrong / dumb / ignorant.
Let’s walk through the differences between junior and senior communicators.