The Power of Good Communication for Small Business Owners

The ability to communicate is among a business owner’s greatest leadership strengths. Do it well, and everything falls into place. Do it poorly, and you’d best grab some aspirin for the headaches.

Many small business owners think they don’t have time to communicate. Or they think they’re communicating well, but they’re too overwhelmed to realize they’re not. In a fight-or-flight state, it’s easy to be short with people, say the wrong thing, regret it afterward, and have no time to go back and fix it.

A quick text to a client here, a burst of emails to staff there, and in the absence of body language, the recipient takes away an entirely different message than the one you intended.

Or you’re so busy that you forget to communicate, and you miss an important deadline—like submitting paperwork for the grant you hoped would get your business back on its feet. I had one client who forgot to ask his bookkeeper to send invoices for over $80,000 worth of work. Meanwhile, there’s always something new vying for your attention. Most people get three hundred emails a day. Is that frenzied, rushed state the best place to write back from?

Poor communication is often why small business owners lose loyal customers, damage employee morale, and fall into the trap of doing everything themselves. They convince themselves it’s easier than spending time explaining the why, what, and how of a task.

Do this every day with every task, and before you know it, you are your busiest and lowest-paid employee.

Effective Communication Systems

System 1: Active Listening

Do you ever feel like your employees, vendors, customers, or partners are not listening to you? How does that make you feel? When you don’t feel seen, heard, or understood, you may feel rejected. Like what you have to say doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make you feel like helping them succeed, does it?

Fail to listen to others in your business, and you’ll make them feel the same. Effective communications systems start with simply learning how to listen. Using active listening with employees, suppliers, shareholders, and most importantly the customers you serve is like having a superpower. Small business entrepreneurs can use active listening to make their conversation partners feel seen, heard, and understood.

Stop What You’re Doing

For many business owners, it’s a challenge to stay present—to stop talking, start listening, and trust that by making others feel heard, things will get done. In our fast-paced technology-driven world, it’s rare to have a completely distraction-free conversation. Being present means stopping whatever else you’re doing, turning off screens and notifications, and focusing on the individual you’re engaging with. Great leaders are great listeners. When they do talk, they ask solution-focused questions to understand what the other person is saying to drive results.

Listening is just good business sense. Your front-line people know more about what’s going on in your business than anyone. They’ll tell you what you need to know. Don’t talk to the general manager and be done. Ask the janitor. Reach out to your junior salesperson. The new hires. The student intern. The person at the front desk. When you make an effort to listen to everyone, you’ll get more information and move forward much faster. And it’s OK if you don’t always agree with or like what you hear. You’re gathering information, and you’re making the other person feel valued. Remember, acknowledgment is not the same as agreement. Nod and say something like, “I hear you. Thank you for sharing.” This takes the pressure off having to respond in agreement or tell them why they’re wrong.

Listen 80, Talk 20

Active listening is about looking for specific details in the other person’s message to understand their intent. You’re not just listening for words. You’re listening for feelings. For tone. For themes. For images. For what’s not being said.

In every interaction, aim to listen 80 percent of the time and talk 20 percent. Here’s a tactic I use to get myself into active listening mode. I take a breath and tell myself, Stand down, Beverlee. What do you need to learn? As the other person speaks, I ask myself, What else do you need to ask about? What are they thinking? How are they feeling at this moment? What system might need to be further developed?

Communicate Their Way

In our age of digital communication, active listening doesn’t always refer to a face-to-face conversation. Be aware of the other person’s communication preferences. Senior employees may prefer a phone call to written communication or a cubicle drive-by. Staff who are fifteen to twenty-five years into their careers often tend toward email. For anyone younger, a text or direct message is the best way to start or continue a conversation. The same applies to your target market. Yes, customers are people too.

Collect Feedback Regularly

If customers feel you are not listening to their needs, your reputation and your margins will suffer. I recommend surveying a segment of your customers via text, email, or phone call at least once a quarter. Ask what is going well and be curious about any changes you need to make. Any time a customer says, “I want this,” consider that feedback a gift. Don’t wait until you get a bad review to ask customers what they need. If you do receive critical feedback from a customer via a survey or review or from a conversation with an employee, always be polite—even if they’re not. Whether you or your employees are actually at fault or not doesn’t matter. Always tell an unhappy customer, “You’re right. I hear you. I apologize for the impact that had on you.” A gracious response turns a terrible experience into a remarkable one that most customers won’t soon forget.

Feedback is hard to receive; it’s also gold. I once recommended a lawyer I’d had a good experience with to a girlfriend. After meeting with him, my friend called me to complain about their awful process and begged me to never recommend another company like them. I was surprised because I thought the lawyer knew better. He clearly wasn’t listening. I called the lawyer to share my friend’s feedback, and he didn’t want to hear it. I never recommended him again.

Humans don’t like bad feedback. If you don’t acknowledge it, you don’t have to deal with it, right? Wrong. Yes, feedback can be painful. Accept it anyway. We don’t want to feel bad, yet if we ignore bad feedback, we lower our odds of future success. In a successful business, feedback is an essential communication loop. An employee or customer shares their negative experience with you, you actively listen, you redesign the affected system, and the experience is improved for next time.

Maybe you pick up the phone, and the first thing a new customer says is they couldn’t find your phone number on your website. What does that tell you? To add it to your site in an obvious place. If one or two customers share feedback with you, chances are hundreds of others have had (or will have) a similar experience.

Record All Feedback in One Place

You need a systematic way to collect both feedback and suggestions, especially those your employees hear off the cuff from customers mid-conversation. Obey the one-book rule—record all customer feedback in one place. For customer surveys, keep all answers in the same document, spreadsheet, or folder. For day-to-day feedback, log customer complaints and suggestions in one easy-to-access location. For my retail clients, I suggest a notebook they keep at the checkout counter. For example, if a customer says they’re disappointed you ran out of a product, the employee or manager (or you) talking to the customer writes it down on the spot.

“Thank you, I appreciate you telling me that,” the attending team member can say. “Let me write that down, and I’ll bring it up in our next meeting.”

That’s a customer service home run—so long as the book of feedback actually makes it to the meeting and affects change. Acknowledging is not necessarily agreement when it comes to employees, yet with customers, it usually is. And writing down their feedback in front of them makes them feel heard more than anything else will.

System 2: Coaching

Listening to your company’s stakeholders and doing something with that information are essential in any small business. What about when it’s your turn to do the talking? A top-down, tell-you-what-to-do communication style is the default in companies that make employees feel ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood. People don’t like to be told what to do or that they’re doing something wrong. People do best when they’re guided by their own influence, understanding, knowledge, and horsepower.

The solution is coaching. You are the coach. Similar to mentorship, coaching is a form of communication in which a leader supports another person in achieving a goal. Knowing how to coach is an essential leadership skill every owner must master. Coaching drives performance and builds a healthier culture. It creates an environment for understanding, learning, change, and action.

Question, Not Command

While coaching is a powerful tool for meaningful and productive conversations, it must not be driven by your agenda. Your job as coach is to ensure your employees’ needs are met by discussing what they want to talk about. That’s where the first communication system, active listening, comes in. Think of coaching as the opposite of command-and-control communication. Remember, people don’t learn when you just tell them what to do.

Famous coach and author David Rock created the SCARF model,[1] in which he uses neuroscience research to show how to work effectively with others. The SCARF model was developed in 2008 in Rock’s paper “SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating with and Influencing Others.” SCARF stands for the five key “domains” that influence our behavior in social situations. These five social domains activate the same threat-and-reward responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. They are:

Status: our relative importance to others

Certainty: our ability to predict the future

Autonomy: our sense of control over events

Relatedness: how safe we feel with others

Fairness: how fair we perceive the exchanges between people to be

In fact, we’re physically wired to challenge any new situation to protect us from the potentially harmful unknown. When we’re told something rather than asked, that order enters the fight-or-flight center of our brain. We can’t help but unconsciously resist the command until we’re sure it is safe.

Only when a person is asked a question and generates the possibilities for themselves does learning take place. When we’re asked a question, our brain is wired to process our thoughts based on what we know, what we’re curious about, and what we care about. We have no choice but to think about what was just asked, so we become inquisitive rather than defensive. A good coach listens and asks questions objectively without solving peoples’ problems for them. They’re also curious and nonjudgmental. Yet that’s easier said than done.

Be Curious

Curiosity is thinking, What is this person really saying? What is my part? What don’t I know? What do I need to learn?

Curiosity means saying, “Tell me more about what that means to you.”

Curiosity is more than hearing; it’s paying attention. Watch for cues, emotions, and voice modulation that give you clues into what the other person is feeling. Ask thinking questions—“What do you think?” This is a powerful entry into a constructive dialogue.

Acknowledge What Others Say

When listening to someone else speak, it’s natural to judge what they say. When we hear something we don’t agree with, our judge’s gavel comes out, and our mind shuts down. How do we get around this instinctive response? Remind yourself: acknowledgment is not agreement. When we acknowledge what others are saying, we make them feel seen, heard, and understood. In a coaching conversation, it doesn’t matter if you agree with anything that is being said. Your job is to ask questions that get to the root of whatever the other person is thinking. As the leader of your small business, take some time later to reflect on what you heard to determine what if anything needs to be done. For now, just listen and learn.

Keep Advice to Yourself

Contrary to popular belief, and as difficult as it is to keep quiet, a coaching conversation is not about giving advice. Even if you think you have the perfect solution to another’s challenge, this is not the time or place to give it. The individual being coached has the wisdom, power, and desire to talk things out so that they can resolve their own challenges. Your coaching gives them the opportunity to do so. If our goal is to empower our employees and support their growth, then we need to give them the space to think. Asking powerful, thought-provoking questions is a skill you can develop through practice.

Consider how sports coaches ask questions. How did that work? What did you notice? How did it feel doing it that way? What would a better performance look like? What’s your next goal? What do you need to be successful? What do you need to solve this problem? How can I help? What does that look like? What would be a win for you today? What’s our plan to tackle this? What do we need to learn today?

Contrast this approach with command-and-control leadership. Every coaching question elicits an answer. It empowers the other person to take ownership of their problems and their outcomes. Each follow-up question digs deeper. Often, in a coaching conversation, the first idea that’s brought up is only at the surface of what that individual really wants to talk about. Your job is to keep asking open-ended questions until they’ve found the root of the issue. It’s also valuable to inquire about the impact this challenge is having on the employee now, and what will happen if it’s not resolved. Steer away from blaming others. Instead, ask how the person you are coaching has tried to resolve the situation thus far.

What if you’re in a situation in which a task absolutely has to get done? Can coaching communication still be used? When my cousin worked at that insurance company, she was assigned the task of evaluating a new payroll software—on top of her usual forty-hour-a-week work. Of course, she had to complete the new payroll system training first. To do so, she would have to work eleven hours a day, six days a week, and there was a ban on overtime. She was completely set up to fail.

What if her supervisor had used a coaching system to communicate her new payroll responsibilities? She might have said, “I understand these are really challenging times. What have you got on your plate? What’s realistic? What’s your deadline for getting this done? What other help do you need?”

This communication is far better than burning out your employees and having them quit. You as the boss might think something has to get done. If it does, wouldn’t it be better to know as soon as possible whether or not your expectations are realistic? Then, if needed, you can assign the additional support the employee needs before it’s too late. You’ll be amazed at how motivated employees feel when you ask, rather than telling.

Make coaching a company-wide system, and you create an almost metaphysical state of cooperation without backstabbing, infighting, or quitting. This applies to personal relationships as well. In our family, we don’t fight because we just ask. Asking eliminates all the conflict. When you have the opportunity to tell your side of the story, you feel understood. It’s safe to disagree. It’s like the Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Coaching communication lets you live these words day in and day out. When you are the boss, there are some things you don’t need to be in the middle of. That means not everything is going to be your version of perfect. Pick your battles. Know when to acknowledge and when to agree. If something just isn’t that important, can an employee lead the way? Even if it’s not exactly how you would do it, if it’s working for them, great. Don’t change it. You’ll likely have a new and improved system on your hands if you stay curious.

Be more than a small business owner. Be a coach, and you’ll lead your team to business victory.

System 3: Delegating

Remember when you wrote “and any other duties” in your position agreements? Tasks come up along the way that you shouldn’t be doing yourself. As your business grows and changes with the times, there’s always something new to delegate. Delegation is a communication system to give others the authority and responsibility to act on your behalf. Along with delegation comes accountability for the results. This is why you must always delegate results, not tasks.

Delegate Results, Not Tasks

Just like the other forms of communication, delegation is a two-way communication. You tell the employee what to do and how, and you must ensure they receive your instructions. And vice versa—the delegate gives you feedback on the work you expect them to do, and you receive feedback on whether your instructions were clear or not. Then it’s their responsibility to report back to you. This builds on the reporting system we discussed in the previous chapter.

I’m not saying delegating is easy. Sometimes it’s painful to learn how to delegate. However, the longer you hold off on learning how to delegate, the longer you have to do everything yourself. And the longer you’re trapped. Most humans find it far more difficult to articulate what they want than just to do it themselves. You may not even know how to do the task yourself, yet it still needs to be done. Most small business owners will figure it out and do it themselves or not do it at all. Anything before delegation.

This is why we need a delegation system. Effective delegation reduces burnout, helps you scale faster, inspires others, saves money, and gives you time back for family and other priorities. How? Delegation allows you to get work done through your team. Delegating to your team builds valuable experience and skills. It also helps reduce your own stress of feeling like you have to do everything yourself.

Ideally, the person you’re delegating to will complete the task with as much effort and skill as you would. In a small business, however, there are often skills, training, and resource gaps that make this a challenge. Luckily, you have started on your procedures manual, allowing for others to do things the way you want and expect them to be done. Remember to breathe; the task often doesn’t need to be done as perfectly as you did it.

Follow the Five Delegation Steps

Step 1: Evaluate

With so much on a business owner’s plate every single day, it’s ridiculously challenging to even think about what to delegate. Here are some ideas to start with:

• Routine tasks
• Tasks that are low priority but still need to be done
• Tasks that someone on your team can do as well or better than you
• Tasks that will help train your employee and further develop their skills
• Tasks that are fun, interesting, or appeal to others on your team
• Tasks that you don’t know how to do
• Tasks that must be done because a system is missing or broken
• Tasks that are faster to do yourself than asking a team member

And anything else you’re willing to let someone else do.

Step 2: Select

For each task to be delegated, choose someone on your team or hire a contractor with the capabilities of doing a competent job. Can’t afford to hire someone? Think again. What is the lost opportunity cost of you not having time to build and grow your company? Consider the long-term value of selecting and training the most competent candidate. Refer back to Chapter 5 for your essential hiring system.

Step 3: Define

Brief the delegate on your requirements and expectations. Be very clear on the overall objective and required outcome. Include all available resources and determine the deadline and method to complete the task.

If you have yet to document a process for this task, include creating one in your instructions so you’ll have it the next time this task needs to be done. Ask questions of the delegate to confirm you’ve communicated your request clearly.

Step 4: Monitor

As I’ve mentioned, there’s a difference between delegation and abdication. Abdication is dumping and running. Share with your delegate how you can support them and identify any possible red flags to watch for, which is when you’ll want to be notified. Monitoring progress is an important step to help the delegate be successful. This does not mean micromanaging the task or interfering with their getting it done. It does mean being available for questions, providing additional resources if needed, and agreeing on regular times to check in. If you see things going sideways, don’t jump in and take over. Work together by asking questions to determine the next steps.

Step 5: Review

Always provide positive feedback on a task well done. If needed, ask the delegate for feedback on how they think they could have performed better. Review the documented process you asked them to create. Ask questions about anything you feel is unclear, make any necessary changes, and sign off on it together. If appropriate, have the delegate show others on the team how to do the task by reviewing the process document. We learn best by teaching, so delegating is giving this individual another opportunity to grow in their confidence and skills.

Getting comfortable delegating tasks to others may take time. It is, however, essential to getting free of your daily operations. And the more you do it with the small, easy projects, the easier it will be when it comes to the big things.

By actively listening to everyone involved in your organization, from the customer to the janitor to the largest stakeholder, you’ll enjoy a happier, more relaxed workplace as well as a business that practically scales itself. And when you use coaching questions to empower employees to solve their own problems, you’ll feel a huge weight lift off your shoulders, bringing you that much closer to freedom.

[1] Gin Lalli, “David Rock’s SCARF Model: Social Threats in the World of Work,” World of Work Project, July 8, 2019, https://worldofwork.io/2019/07/david-rocks-scarf-model/.