SE Radio 580: Josh Doody on Mastering Business Communication for Software Engineers

Josh Doody, author of Mastering Business Email, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how software engineers can master business communication. They begin with an exploration of various communication modes, including Slack, virtual meetings, emails, and presentations. Josh shares several strategies to improve communication skills and cross-cultural communication, but if there's one key take away from this episode, it might be: "use positive language for any medium of communication; be kind and use positive words." Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.

Josh Doody, author of Mastering Business Email, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how software engineers can master business communication. They begin with an exploration of various communication modes, including Slack, virtual meetings, emails, and presentations. Josh shares several strategies to improve communication skills and cross-cultural communication, but if there’s one key take away from this episode, it might be: “use positive language for any medium of communication; be kind and use positive words.”

Show Notes

Related Episodes

• Episode 275: Josh Doody on Salary Negotiation for Software Engineers

Other References

• Book:  Mastering Business Email

• LinkedIn: @joshdoody

Transcript

Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.
This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number and URL.

Brijesh Ammanath 00:00:18 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host Brijesh Ammanath. And today my guest is Josh Doody. Josh is a former electrical engineer, turn project manager and consultant. He’s author of multiple books including Fearless Salary Negotiation and Mastering Business Email. Josh is a salary negotiation coach who works with high earners to negotiate job offers. Josh, welcome to Software Engineering Radio. Is there anything I missed in your bio that you’d like to add?

Josh Doody 00:00:45 Hi, thanks for having me. It’s really good to be here. No, I think that’s a really good summary. I think you got everything in there, that felt really good.

Brijesh Ammanath 00:00:51 Thanks. Josh is a repeat guest, having spoken to us about salary negotiation in episode 275. Today we’ll be talking about business communication. Josh, can you start by explaining what is business communication and how it is different from other forms of communication?

Josh Doody 00:01:07 Yeah, I mean in a lot of ways communication is communication. So I could talk about differences and I could talk about similarities. I think business communication though, when I think about communication, the first thing I think about is, the reason for the communication. What are we trying to communicate? And in business, usually trying to communicate something to help move some sort of a business objective forward, assuming that it’s not small talk or something like that. Instead it’s an email that says, hey, can you give me a status update or can you help me understand what the purpose of this project is? And so usually business communication is focused on how do we move a business objective forward and that’s the purpose of the communication as opposed to all those other thing I mentioned. So I think that business communication is focused on the business whereas other types of communication could be for any reason, which might not even have a meaning other than just communicating. So it’s focused, there’s a reason for it. There’s something that we’re trying to accomplish with business communication.

Brijesh Ammanath 00:02:01 Right. And in your experience, have you seen people use the personal communication style in a business setting and what have been the consequences?

Josh Doody 00:02:10 I have, I think sometimes it is pretty effective, especially when there’s a big difference between sort of like the person’s level in an organization with the other person they’re talking to. I think it can help to be more personal. So, if I happen to bump into the CEO of a big company in the hallway, I think it’s really helpful if the CEO is a personable person who’s able to talk casually and that could be beneficial to the working structure, the working environment. Whereas for people who are closer together, sometimes being a little bit too personal can obfuscate what the purpose of the communication is and can actually slow things down. So in other words, if a manager and their direct report are communicating in a way that’s too personal, direct report might not understand the urgency of a situation or might not understand the criticality of a thing that needs to be accomplished because it sounds like just a friendly request or communication.

Josh Doody 00:03:01 And so I think there are positive and negative things that can come from more personal versus more professional type communication styles. But when I think of the personal, I think it can be really helpful in settings where there’s a big gap in the org chart between two people and they’re not trying to accomplish something specifically business oriented. Whereas of course if the CEO is communicating with the company in an all hands meeting or something more professional is usually better, in my opinion, directed at the objective so that there’s no confusions so that everybody’s on the same page.

Brijesh Ammanath 00:03:30 Right. So like most things in life, context matters and it depends on where and whom you’re talking to and what you are trying to achieve out of that conversation.

Josh Doody 00:03:40 Yes, that’s a great summary. You summarized it better than what I said.

Brijesh Ammanath 00:03:44 Oh not really. We’ll move into the next section where we’ll dig deeper into the various communication styles and modes of communication. And let’s start off with meetings. What are the various types of meetings and how does one gauge what’s expected from a meeting when you get the invite?

Josh Doody 00:04:03 Yeah, there are probably sort of an infinite number of types of meetings. But in general even zooming out if I am scheduling a meeting with someone, first of all, before I do that, I want to make sure that I can articulate what the purpose of the meeting is regardless of what the format or medium is. And I think that’s pretty important. I know I’m kind of easy to find on the internet and so people reach out to me pretty frequently asking for meetings and it really helps me to know when they say–hey, do you have some time to chat? If they can say why, so that I understand the purpose. So the first thing is with any meeting, regardless of the medium or the location, I think it’s important to just have a specific reason for that meeting in mind.

Josh Doody 00:04:41 Time is really valuable, especially in engineering where flow is a really important thing. You want to have your schedule disrupted as little as possible if you’re trying to get into flow. And so I think that if I’m requesting a meeting or someone else is requesting a meeting, that it’s important that the purpose of the meeting be sort of stated upfront. As far as the types of meetings, if my mind first goes to individual, like one-on-one meetings and group meetings, prepping for those as much different. I think the more people that you have in a meeting, then the more important it is to make sure that each one of those people has some purpose for being there. Similar to articulating the purpose for a meeting upfront when you’re asking for it, it’s also important to say, well I’ve invited, 17 people to a meeting, do they need to be there? And they’re wondering the same thing.

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