Tips to Improve Communication in Your Lab
Addressing the complexities of workplace communication will help you craft more persuasive messages
Effective workplace communication is a pervasive challenge, with many lab leaders grappling to enhance their communication. Here, Beki Fraser, MBA, PCC, certified business and leadership coach, offers insights to help build your confidence, provide meaningful feedback, and build trust through communication. Fraser will elaborate on these topics at the 2024 Lab Manager Leadership Summit, taking place April 29–May 1, 2024, in Denver, Colorado. To learn more about this event, visit summit.labamanger.com/leadership.
Based on your experience, can you discuss some common barriers to effective communication in the workplace?
My clients often share the stress around communication expectations. Some feel they are judged “deficient” when they share ideas. Some half-formed thoughts are “used against them.” And others feel dismissed or ignored entirely. It’s hard to be motivated to speak up when you feel threats to your professional, social, or even financial stability. Efforts to self-protect diminish their ability to communicate what needs to be said at the right time.
At its core, communication relies on trust. Without that trust, communication in the workplace becomes vague, incomplete, or destructively silent. Lack of trust might be lack of confidence in the stability of the organization, in the competence or care of colleagues, and especially self-doubt.
The solution isn’t about creating absolute and unquestioned trust within an organization or team. Trust isn’t all or nothing—it’s a spectrum. You can be aware of your environment and be intentional without cultivating an (energy draining) defensive approach to your communication. While you can’t force people to be who you want them to be, you can influence them with conscious intent and strategies.
Can you elaborate on the three key areas that managers can focus on to help build their
communication skills?
Communication at its core isn’t a complicated formula. You decide what you say to outline your points and deliver the message. Easy, right? It would be if the variables didn’t keep changing all the time! There are decisions to be made about the details the listener needs to know, how to package that message for the best impact, and recognizing the value you bring as the communicator.
What you say isn’t just grounded in the facts as you know them. The power in crafting a persuasive message is in helping others see a situation with greater clarity. You are creating a story where the other person can imagine what you are describing. That’s beyond cognitive understanding—it’s creating the flow of the message so the listener doesn’t get lost, confused, or overly agitated.
Another aspect is ensuring that you don’t tell the story only from your perspective. It’s about connecting with the audience and understanding how they need to hear the message. This includes decisions about what they need to know, how you want them to feel, and factoring in the relationship you want to have with them going forward. Being empathetic and considering how the other person will respond are two strategies to successful communication.
Finally, there’s that little voice inside that tells us things that mess with our confidence. Thoughts pop up, such as:
- I’m not senior/important/good enough to be in that room.
- I don’t have enough information.
- I don’t feel equipped to lead my team in this direction.
- I don’t know what they want me to say.
- I’m not a great speaker and I don’t want to make a fool of myself.
We are all a work in progress when it comes to building confidence. Even the most confident among us has “What have I just committed to?!” moments. Establishing practices for feeling grounded and cultivating confidence is incremental. Just as success is built over several years, confidence builds from a sprout into a full existence.
How can effective communication skills enable leaders to develop trust among their teams?
When a team lacks trust, you will see them share fewer ideas, ask less for help, avoid volunteering for extra assignments, and show tension or conflict. As a leader, you create clarity and focus for what each person does and how they are all connected. Trust comes from each person recognizing the lane they are in, the lanes others navigate, and clarifying where the gray areas are when lanes overlap—and they do.
If the team is still not trusting, you can give feedback and coaching. Beyond the tasks, you are there to guide them through the hurdles and rough patches of problems and conflict. You don’t (always) need to be the mediator.
What is a common mistake you’ve seen managers make when it comes to resolving workplace conflict? What advice can you share to help others avoid this?
It’s important to acknowledge that hope will not resolve a conflict. Often, managers will say to me, “They are all adults and should be able to sort this out on their own.” Maybe they can, but they haven’t. The relevant parties are focused on the negatives, likely criticizing each other, and creating a solution falls out of focus. Redirecting them to the problem at hand, highlighting where they agree, helps to resolve some interpersonal conflicts.
Related to this, attempts to resolve a conflict solely with logic regularly ends in frustration for all parties. Presenting logical arguments and facts often gets a defensive response, which is the opposite of what you want. They are inspired to provide their own facts and disprove yours. Instead, take the opportunity to acknowledge and validate points of view so the defensiveness recedes, each person feels heard, and the opportunity for logic and reason has space to return.
How do individual backgrounds, personalities, and differences impact workplace communication, and what approaches should be adopted to ensure effective communication in a diverse workforce?
Wouldn’t it be awful if we were all exactly alike? I ask clients what it is like to work with someone just like them. At first, they talk about how easy it is to communicate. Then, they think about the trouble it can cause. They talk about being stuck in the same way of thinking and how challenging it is to get creative about new strategies or methodologies.
Working with others who are not like us comes with its own set of gifts and challenges. It takes effort to communicate when the group comes from different perspectives and experiences. No two people have the same belief system, experience, or beliefs—even when raised side by side.
The first step to leveraging diversity is seeking those who are not like you. Once they accept being in your circle, it’s a chance to dive into curiosity. It’s asking things like: How was that conclusion drawn? Why did that path seem like the right one? What do you believe brought us to this point?
Aligning everyone around what a problem is and how it should be solved is not about having everyone agree with you. It’s actually about gathering all the perspectives and finding a collective and deeper understanding so the source gets addressed and not the symptoms.
Anything else to add regarding effective communication in the scientific workplace?
Typically, I’m coaching those I have often described as introverted skeptics. Naturally, they have other personality characteristics, but these two in tandem result in some common themes in the workplace. Technical and scientific environments often have employees nodding and smiling (or smirking) because they recognize themselves in that phrase.
Perhaps you are an introverted skeptic if you learn from watching and seek concrete evidence to develop a point of view. You likely favor exploring ideas and solutions independently or in a small, familiar group. You likely connect otherwise unrelated ideas or concepts in ways that others do not. And you may receive feedback that you need to share more in leadership meetings, slow down with all the critical questions, or celebrate the wins with your team more.
The thought of all that talking, especially in large groups, tends to drain your energy and leave you exhausted at the end of the day. But depleted isn’t the only way—monitoring how you use your energy is. You can get very intentional about what you share, the questions you pose, and how your team is recognized in your own way. Often there is internal pressure that you “should be” different. When you try to be like someone else, you can only achieve second best. When you try to lead as you, no one can be better. Working in a lab or other scientific environment, you have a great model that you likely know well. The scientific method. When you test a hypothesis in the lab, you don’t expect it to be perfect the first time. Instead, you learn, revise, and test again. You are able to use techniques you know in building communication skills. Why expect perfection in yourself or other people in terms of communication and building trust?
