The Snowball Effect: Communication Techniques to Make You Unstoppable

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When you want to stop your messages becoming diluted

When leaders ask me to improve communication cascades within their company, I always ask two questions:

Question 1: When your team cascades your messages, do they enhance them, add nothing or dilute them?

They virtually all say “dilute”.

Question 2: And whose fault is that?

Most say “my team’s”. The rest say “their teams’”. And nobody says “mine”.

This unearths two big problems:

• Answer 1 is, when you think about it, ridiculous. If your team enhances your message, it makes sense to cascade through them. If they don’t, what’s the point of going through them? Why not just skip the middle-man and communicate ...