Hello everyone, welcome back to the HR Connection, the place for those managing HR and a 1:500 employee headcount. My name is Sabrina Baker, I am the CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions. We are an embedded fractional HR support firm, and I think today's episode is going to be one where those HR practitioners listening are going to say, "Oh my goodness, that is so happening in my business." And it has to do with this idea that we call a lot of things "communication issues" that actually aren't. So without further ado, let's just jump right into it. Most organizations don't have a communication problem. They have a leadership problem. They have an accountability problem, a decision-making problem, a manager capability problem. Communication is just where those problems become visible. They do have a communication problem, technically, but the underlying reason is not communication. It's something else. That's this whole episode. I want to walk you through some scenarios where this plays out, where we call something one thing but it's actually something else. Because if you are listening and you are managing HR in a small employer, 1:500, you're living every version of this. Everything that I talk about today, you are likely going to say, "Oh my gosh, that so happened to me." And you may not have always had the language to push back on it. And today, I really want to give you that. I want to give you the language for you to be able to say, "Hey, maybe this isn't a communication issue, or a retention issue, or something else. Maybe it's this. Maybe we need to look back up a few steps and look at something else." So let's jump right into it. I want to start with that. The most common example. It's the one that sounds the most innocent, and probably the one you hear the most. I know that I get calls every single day from businesses who want communication training. And someone at the leadership table says, "We have a communication problem." And so then HR gets the assignment. And what does HR do a lot? We look for predictable solutions. So maybe we do some communication training. Maybe we do an engagement survey. We do some team-building events. Maybe we rewrite a few policies. And none of that fixes the actual problem, because the actual problem wasn't necessarily communication in and of itself. It was that leaders weren't cascading information. Or managers were withholding feedback. Or decisions are being made with no explanation. And leaders are contradicting each other in front of their teams. All of those are communication results, but the underlying problem is not communication. You can't workshop your way out of that stuff. A communication skills class doesn't fix a leader who chooses not to share information. You can tell them in that class they should be sharing information, but if they don't know how to share, what to share, when to share, where to share, what medium to share through, then the issue is not actually the fact that they're not sharing. It's that they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. Communication skills class is also not going to fix a manager who avoids hard conversations. I don't want to act like communication skills training isn't important. It absolutely is. But it's just not going to, in and of itself, fix a manager who won't have a hard conversation. Definitely one class is not going to do that for them. This is a system problem. This is a behavioral issue that needs to be structured. It needs to have some development around it. Communication skills class is not going to fix an executive team that can't align on a message before it hits the organization. Communication often breaks down because leadership behavior created the breakdown. And then you, HR, get handed a symptom, which is communication issues, and you are asked to treat it like it's the entire disease. And that's just not the case. When you have a communication problem, if you back it up a few steps and find out why, it is normally because of something else. If the leader knew how to give feedback and felt comfortable with doing it, they would. If the leader knew what information needed to be cascaded down and how to share that, they would. If the executive team knew how to have structure around their decision-making and align on messages, then they would. There's always something else outside of the communication problem that's actually the issue. The communication problem is just the symptom. Let's look at something else. Let's talk about retention, right? Same pattern, different symptom. So somebody says, "We have a retention problem." What does HR do? They're tasked with figuring out this retention problem. They maybe do some stay interviews. They maybe try to add some new perks and benefits, maybe like a gym membership or something. We start to build engagement initiatives. Start to do a few more team buildings. Team building seems to be our answer to a lot of things. And people keep leaving. And what we don't realize is that the actual issue is not just retention. It wasn't the need for stay interviews, or it wasn't to enhance benefits. It's managers who shouldn't be managing people. Can I just say that out loud? There are managers who should not be managing people. Or maybe it's that there's no visible career path. Maybe it's that compensation hasn't kept pace with the market, and rather than looking at that, we just go and add gym memberships. Or maybe it's that workload expectations are simply unrealistic. Just like communication, retention is the symptom. The cause lives in business decisions and leadership behavior. Decisions about pay structure, about who gets promoted, about how work gets resourced. All of those are the issue. All of those are the reasons that lead to retention issues. Now, HR can absolutely surface the data. HR can name the pattern. But HR cannot fix a bad manager through a benefits package. And HR cannot fix an unrealistic workload by asking people what would make them stay, especially when they're going to say the workload is too much and nobody's going to be willing to do anything about it. Let me give you another example. Let's talk about culture for a second. So of course somebody says, "We have a culture problem." Now, this one is particularly frustrating because, first of all, I don't know that everybody knows what they mean when they say culture. I frame culture as employee experience, but I don't know that everybody understands that. So in a lot of businesses, it's like this ethereal thing, right? It's this thing that just lives in the clouds and we don't really know what it is. And so then when we think we have a culture problem and we want to go fix it, what do we try to do? Or what do leaders think we should do? They think we should just add more fun events. Maybe we add a recognition program. Maybe we have a whole values refresh and buy a new set of posters. And all of that, in and of itself, are fine activities, but they're likely not the thing that's going to fix your culture problem. Because the culture problem, the employee experience problem, is created by leaders who are tolerating poor behavior. Top performers are being allowed to treat people badly because their numbers are good. Accountability is applied inconsistently depending on who you are and who likes you. Imagine what kind of employee experience that's creating. No amount of events is going to fix that. Employee experience is not broken because enough programs weren't put in place. It's broken because leadership is permitting behaviors that directly contradict the culture they say they want. You cannot program your way, recognize your way, values your way into a healthy culture. Culture is set by what leadership tolerates, full stop. So when they say, "We have a culture problem," what they think is, "Fun, we need to figure out the fun of the company." But it has nothing to do with that. And everything to do with, what are we allowing? What are we tolerating? Who's getting away with what? And how do we build structures that make sure we are consistent and fair? Next, let's talk about recruiting. I want to give you two more examples. Recruiting's the next one. So somebody says, "We have a recruiting problem. We need to post more jobs, find better candidates, screen more applicants." But meanwhile, your compensation isn't competitive. Hiring managers are sitting on resumes for three weeks. I know somebody just said, "Uh-huh." The interview panel isn't aligned on what good actually looks like. They're all asking the candidates the same freaking questions, interview after interview. And the company's reputation in the market, on Glassdoor, on social media, in their industry, through word of mouth, it's working against every job that you put out. Recruiting is the messenger. And in this scenario, the messenger is being blamed for the message. HR can optimize a process. HR cannot manufacture candidate interest in a role that pays below market at a company that they know to have leadership issues. Last example I want to give you of something that we say is one problem but is actually something else is performance. So somebody says, "We have a performance problem." So then HR goes and they look at the performance review system. Maybe they create new performance plan templates. Maybe they change the whole review system. Maybe they go in and they create competency models even, right? Which is an amazing thing to do. And yet the performance problems persist. And you can probably tell me what the disease is here. If the symptom is performance issues and all of the things I just said don't fix it, you know what's happening. More than likely, managers are not managing. Expectations aren't made clear. Poor performance gets tolerated for months, sometimes years. Sometimes just for some employees, sometimes not for others. And by the time a performance improvement plan lands on someone's desk, the trust is already long gone. The relationship is absolutely damaged. And the outcome is almost always the same. They get terminated. Performance management systems do not fix manager avoidance. You can design the most rigorous process in the world, and it will not work if the manager sitting across the table is uncomfortable with direct feedback and has no intention of changing them. So there you go. Five examples of things that we call one thing, but they are actually something completely different. So then what do you do with this? What do you do when this happens? The first move that I have found is to really reframe the problem, especially before you go and accept the assignment of fixing it. So before you say, "Okay, yes, I'll send out an engagement survey," or, "I'll do this," really reframe the problem that they think they're bringing to you. So when someone brings you a communication problem, your job is to get to the source. And that means asking different questions before you propose a solution. One of the things that I train my team on, I've said from the very beginning, and they will tell you is literally like a core value of ours is, "We ask a lot of questions." And this is something I learned very early in my career as a business owner and working with small businesses, is that 9 times out of 10, the problem they're bringing me is not the problem. And I need to continue to ask questions to get to where the problem actually sits. So you have to be willing to continue asking questions and asking different questions before you go down a path. I have certainly had clients come to me before and say, "I think employees don't like our benefits." And I will keep asking questions and find out that it's not even benefits related. It's not even a benefits issue. The manager just thought maybe there was a benefits situation. Or they thought that the problem that had presented itself had something to do with benefits when it wasn't related at all. So if somebody comes to you and says, "There's a communication problem," rather than just running and trying to put solutions in place, you want to start asking questions. Who isn't communicating what? Who is not getting communicated to? When are they not getting communicated to? What decisions have been made that people don't know about? Where is information stopping and who controls that stop, right? What is it that is making you say, "We have a communication issue"? Give me examples. I love to ask for specifics and examples. One of my pet peeves is that somebody will come up to me and they will say, "Well, they say we are having a problem with X." Who is they? Who is they? Name they for me. I want to understand who they are. Because sometimes it's literally one person in a one-off situation, but whoever's reporting it to you makes it sound like it's 100 people. So who is they? That issue, when you get to where decisions have been made, what people don't know about, where's that stopping, that's not a training need. That's a leadership behavior conversation. And it needs to go back to the people who have authority over that behavior. The second move, once you kind of have asked your questions and you feel like, "Okay, yes, there's a communication problem, but here's the underlying issue," is to name what you're seeing without softening it. I think sometimes as HR, we don't want to be seen as the bad guy, or we already have a reputation of being the bad guy just by being in HR. And so we soften things. And I want you to not do that. So I want you to not say, "Hey, there may be some opportunities to improve how information flows." I want you to say, "The data is pointing at manager behavior, not a process gap." The fix isn't HR. It's with leadership. I know that's harder to say. I know it's going to land badly sometimes. And I want you to put it in your own words. You know your leaders and how they're going to be able to hear things. But it is so much more useful than spending six months building a program that's not going to touch the actual problem. Because what happens when you build a program that you spend six months building that doesn't touch the actual problem is then you get blamed for not fixing it. No one sees that that wasn't the actual problem unless you point it out clearly. The third move is to separate what HR owns from what HR is being handed. So HR owns the systems, the frameworks, the process design. HR does not own leadership behavior. You can inform it. You can coach towards it. You can measure it. But you cannot compel it. When I do leadership training, which I do all the time, one of the things that I say in the beginning of the training and at the end is, "Our time together in this leadership development is only as good as what you do with it after." I can give you all the frameworks. I can give you all of the ways to give feedback. I can give you how to cascade information. I can give you all of those things. And it's really good stuff. But if you do absolutely nothing with it after, then we have wasted our time. And when you, HR, accept accountability for outcomes that require leadership behavior change, you're losing credibility every time those outcomes don't move. So you can give all of the information. Absolutely. But your leaders have to be willing to execute. The through line across every example in this episode is the same. HR is being asked to treat symptoms that originate above their authority level. The work isn't building a better program, building another recognition software, building anything that you think is just going to be an activity. The work is being clear about where the problem actually lives and who has the authority and the obligation to actually fix it. That's the episode. That's the whole thing. I just wanted a quick hit on how do you push back on this stuff? Because I know you're seeing it. I know you're seeing communication issues that really aren't necessarily communication issues at their core. I know you're seeing retention issues that have nothing to do with better benefits or recognition. I know you're seeing these things. And so I wanted you to hear that, A, so are many, many others. And B, here's how you can ask really good questions. And then let's plainly say what the problem is and talk about who owns the authority to build it. If this one resonated, please share it with someone who needs this language or needs to hear this. If you are sitting on a version of this problem right now where you've been handed a symptom and asked to solve an entire cause, I'd love to hear about it. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or through our website. Even email me directly at hello@acasiahrsolutions.com. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.