How have you found success managing stakeholder relationships when there’s a wide gap in communication styles?

I'm pretty flexible (loved ones may disagree) about how I work and communicate so it's never been a major problem but I think two principles can help guide everyone through this situation: 1) Be true to yourself. If you aren't upholding your own values, needs (personal and professional), and communication preferences at all, the relationship will ultimate crash and burn. 2) You have to expect them to do the same. That means finding ways that can be made to work for everyone. It's often really he ...Read More

This is a common scenario especially when you are talking about global teams, with members from multiple countries and cultures. I will share one example that hopefully brings to life my approach to this type of situation, when there is a gap in communication styles. When I worked in Europe, I realized I often had difficult e-mail exchanges with one of the regional sales leaders. As much as I tried to be clear and precise with my words, they were always met with misunderstanding and resistance. ...Read More

Success in managing communication gaps comes from radical empathy and strategic listening. Instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all communication strategy, I focus on deeply understanding each team's underlying motivations, success metrics, and communication preferences. This means sometimes presenting the same operational initiative in completely different formats - a detailed technical breakdown for engineering, a narrative-driven story for marketing, a pure ROI analysis for finance. The key is ...Read More

Managing stakeholder relationships across different communication styles is a learned skill—and one that applies to any function, not just RevOps. In an ideal world, every leader would communicate in the same style, with the same level of detail and clarity, but that is simply not reality. Some leaders are highly visual thinkers, while others prefer detailed written documentation before a conversation. Some need the ability to double-click and ask secondary questions, while others want concise, ...Read More

I’m not sure if this is in regards to a wide gap between how you communicate vs. the stakeholder, or a wide gap in how multiple stakeholders who you manage communicate.  On the first topic, seek out others in the business who communicate well with the particular stakeholder. Don’t be afraid to address it with them directly too. If you don't have someone else to learn from, trial and error works too. Sometimes I see people try the same type of communication over and over, even if it's not working ...Read More