Communicating at the Right Altitude

Ensuring your message lands at the right level

Photo by Linus Mimietz on Unsplash

I remember sitting in on an executive review where a Product Manager was talking about the recent launch of a major product. As someone who worked far away from their team, I had a really hard time parsing what they were trying to say. I walked away confused and frustrated, because it was not clear to me who the product was for, or why we were working on it. It also made me feel a bit out of the loop, since I had no idea what acronyms like NDCG stood for, or why they mattered. It felt like a laundry list of metrics without any context, and as a leader in another org, I felt like it would be overstepping to ask. 

However, that was when I realized that I had been doing exactly the same thing throughout my own career. Whenever I was really close to something, I would assume that everyone else had exactly the same context as me. I would plunge into detailed descriptions of obscure things without explaining what they stood for, who they impacted, or why they were important. I felt like everyone needed to know all the small details to understand what we were trying to do. And now I understood that I had been doing it all wrong. 

Often, the difference between a good leader and a great one is altitude. Being able to navigate at the right level for the conversation, whether you’re doing a deep dive into the details with a colleague or discussing high-level strategy with executives, is a rare skill. But it is also crucial to hone in order to be successful in the workplace. 

This is a delicate balancing act. Too detailed, and you are seen as being too “in the weeds.” Too high-level, and you are seen as “lacking detail orientation.” Knowing exactly where you want to fly in a given conversation is critical to landing your point. 

I was once terrible at this. I remember telling my coach Katia, “I feel like I'm squinting in meetings, trying to figure out what people are looking to hear.” But altitude is not just about reading a room. It's about understanding the level at which you should communicate to different groups of people in order to achieve your goals. 

Dexterity in altitude can yield huge dividends. So how do you get it right? 

Flying high

Sometimes it's important to know how to set the table for those who are several levels up. A few common settings for this include:

• Board presentations: Board members only spend a concentrated day or two every quarter on the companies they advise. They have broad context, but they often lack knowledge of the day-to-day inner workings of a company. Many are experts from other industries, so they may not be well-versed in your product on a granular level. Without clear context, you l will lose your audience, since they are jumping in and out of company conversations every few months. 

• Executive presentations: Most executives of a company see the teams and their work in broad strokes, but lack an understanding of areas outside their own function or teams. It is important that you are educating while persuading. Many executives, like I did, feel ill-prepared to comment on the finer points of a team’s work if they are too detailed. It is important to help them help you by giving them a holistic view. 

• Product reviews: When I sit in on product reviews, I am always pleasantly surprised when the content is digestible for a broader audience. I used to trade company-level product reviews with peers, and we would use it as an opportunity to flag jargon and other things that were hard for an outsider to comprehend. This made our output stronger and more engaging. 

• Town halls and all hands: When you do team- or company-level presentations, flying at a high altitude sets the table so everyone understands (and follows) what you have to say. Bring people along with you, and make them feel smarter and more aligned for having heard what you had to say.  

The key to flying high is to focus on the message you want to land, not the words you're saying. For every level higher than you that your audience is, for every notch broader their perspective gets, focus on taking your content higher by one level. I have even given advice to take it up three levels, just to be completely sure that it is understandable. 

If the people in the room don't have a good grasp of your points, they will have a very hard time understanding what you're trying to achieve and sharing rich feedback with you. I use the mantra, "Give them something they can react to,” but that means speaking at the right altitude—even if you have to go broader than you’re used to. 

Setting context

Oftentimes when we speak, we expect everyone to have the same level of context as we do, whether about the problem, the product, or the market. But laying out your content so other people don't have to guess what you're talking about is critical.

For example, in our preparation for board meetings, the board materials are sent out several days ahead of time. This ensures that everyone has at least a baseline level of context before the meeting even starts. It’s important that those materials stand on their own, even without someone there to explain them. Don’t assume you will get a chance to shape them with a talk track. Assume your presentations or six-pagers will be sent around to others. If they're not clear, you're asking people to connect a bunch of dots and guess what you're trying to say. 

One thing I like to do at Ancestry is to start the board deck with a “board letter,” which gives context to the materials and explains the agenda for the conversation. This sets the tone, but it also frames the discussion we hope to have. It is the tl;dr for the content, which gives more color to what the board is about to read and hear. This is an important part of context-setting for our discussions.  

Remember that your audience probably won’t have the same context as you. Make the implicit explicit (even if it seems obvious to you), and give them a chance to get caught up on the background. Your presentations will be better for it.

Diving deep

All that being said, setting the right altitude doesn't always mean just giving high-level context. It also means diving deep when necessary, and engaging on a day-to-day level.

Teams want to know that you understand what they're going through—whether that means understanding their struggle to ship something or the processes that make their jobs harder. One of the things I did when I joined Ancestry was to take on a couple projects of my own. I sought to unravel why certain things were stuck and seemed to be taking a long time to ship. What I learned from that process was not that people didn’t care about these issues, but that there was not a clear owner or path forward. This also allowed me to understand the dynamics that would frustrate many employees. It required us to get more clear alignment on themes and single-threaded ownership around key initiatives.

Often, we think that when things get stuck, it's because someone is at fault. In reality, many times it's a result of the process, the culture, or a lack of clear ownership. By getting hands-on with the problems, I could feel the frustration and difficulty that someone would experience trying to drive things forward. I also had the opportunity to help fix some of those things as well.

Sometimes, having the right altitude means flying low. It means getting into the weeds to iron out an issue and experience it in a way that helps you problem-solve. 

The big takeaway 

When you're an individual contributor or a manager of a small team, you spend 110 percent of your time thinking about the set of problems you're trying to solve. But you need to understand that sometimes you're talking to people who are spending maybe one to five percent of their mindshare on your area. If you are trying to get their support, you need to give them the tools to understand the importance of what you are doing, why you are doing it, and to whom it matters. 

Knowing how to speak at other people’s altitude, and giving them the tools to connect the dots, is important for helping them find ways to help you. Before you go into a meeting, think about what they're most likely to care about. For example, if the biggest issue at your company is monetization, what is your team doing to contribute to it?

Before going into any meeting, prepare yourself by answering this list of questions:

• What message am I trying to land? 

• Where is the audience relative to this message? Are they also experts, or are they a broader audience? 

• What does this audience need from me to understand that message?

• Do the materials and my talk track achieve what I'm setting up to do?

Be thoughtful and intentional—not just with your message, but with whether you’re speaking at the right altitude to make it land with your audience. Having this dexterity will shape your impact and influence in untold ways.  

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Communicating at the right altitude, whether in an email, a review, or a presentation, is critical to your long-term success, as well as that of your team and your product. By taking some time to consider what altitude you want, you can transform your relationships and see greater levels of success. 

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