About communication in companies with Šimon Steffal

Šimon is a psychologist and long-time mentor in the field of communication and education. With his passion for learning and extensive work experience, he founded Mindset Mentors in 2019. He teaches teams to communicate respectfully, specifically, openly, and with a clear goal – to achieve better results and growth.

“Ego is just the beginning and the end of everything,” he says when we talk about how to give someone tough feedback in a kind way, and whether he’s ever had someone throw him out during a communication audit with the words “I’m not going to listen to this !”.  

Nowadays, the words coaching, mentoring, therapist are all over the place. Who doesn’t have a coach, as if they didn’t exist. But what is the difference between them, and in what situations should you choose which option?

Quite simply. As far as legislation is concerned, none of these practices have been legislated yet. This means that anyone can be a coach, mentor or therapist. Whether they have the qualifications for it or not. So for that reason alone, it is important to be careful when choosing and have a good decision-making matrix. Education is a good start.

In the case of a therapist, this term needs to be distinguished from a psychotherapist – the latter has accredited psychotherapy training of the appropriate length and a completed master’s degree is also a condition. I would ask the same question about coaching. Is it a coach who has certification? And with whom? Is there an international association behind it (ICF, EMCC)? If so, I know that the person has gone through a well-structured program, has supervision, adheres to a code of ethics, etc.

With a mentor, it’s much more complicated, there’s nothing like that. There, I would mainly look for the person’s experience. Do I want help in marketing? To know something about how to lead a marketing team?

Then I need someone who has, say, 10, 15 years of experience in marketing, has a track record, results, to advise me. In other words, there is simply a wealth of experience and knowledge that the person can realistically pass on to me. And not that I am being taught how to lead a marketing team by a person who has never led a team in his life and has been in the field for a year. That’s just nonsense.

So let’s summarize. The first thought should be where the person came from, what skills they have, whether they have been confirmed by some certification that is credible, and what experience they have.

Yes, and the second decision criterion is why I need it and what I actually need. If I’m in a difficult life situation and I don’t really know what to do with myself, it makes sense to choose psychotherapy. If I’m at a crossroads in life or just need to clear my head, I would reach for coaching. I need to gain some skills, a skillset, learn shortcuts so that instead of five years I can do the given thing in a year and get from point A to point B, I’ll get a mentor who really knows how to do it, has experience and will help me find the way.

That’s the basis. And the third thing is, and this is actually what I’m going back to, the first thing is, before I start anything, I think about it three times and check who I want to start it with. It’s really good not to fall into the traps of some swindlers and manipulators who take money from people.

Yes, that’s what I was actually kind of hitting on in that question. That almost anyone can claim to be a mentor these days. And it’s hard to tell who to confide in.

Of the three areas, mentoring is probably the most complicated. Coaching already has a relatively long tradition and there are some organizations behind it. Psychotherapy has a certified, accredited education system. It is ideal if the person is also a clinical psychologist or at least has a psychological education. The only thing that applies to a mentor is whether the person really knows what they are talking about and has the required experience.

And the second important thing when choosing a psychotherapist, coach or mentor is whether we get along as people. Just because the person has experience does not mean that it will work out for us as a person. But it is also dangerous the other way around. If we get along great as people, and they are just a manipulator who can’t do anything and is just taking money from us, it will be much more difficult to detect, because these people know very well how to build dependent relationships.

Now you have answered my next question. A relationship always develops between the client and the professional, trust is established. Has it ever happened to you that people started to confide in you about other things that were more for a psychologist? And how do you actually react to such a situation?

Such a situation happens in practically every helping profession and a proper professional will use a code of ethics at such a moment. Whether you are doing business mentoring or some other kind of mentoring or coaching, at some point you will establish a close relationship with the other person. And now I will digress a little, because one thing needs to be understood. It also happens to people who teach languages, for example – one on one. The principle is based on the fact that it is an environment where the other person is given full attention. And when does it happen to you today that you have the full attention of the other person, who is there only for you? That is an amazing environment. Especially nowadays.

That’s true. Time is a precious commodity these days.

And this happens when we sit down as people and it works on the professional side too. A confidential and safe environment is created very quickly. And as a result, people tend to start confiding and opening up.

And here two things come into play. First – at the beginning, the boundaries of cooperation need to be defined. And second – the ability to recognize those boundaries, bring them to light, let the ego retreat and say, I can’t help here, because it’s beyond the boundaries of what I do. In other words, to name the situation out loud. The longer we wait, the worse it only gets.

It’s either happened to everyone already, or it will definitely happen to them, and it’s important to be able to work with it. To be prepared for it.

The worst thing that can happen is that we try in good faith to help in areas that we simply don’t understand. For me, that’s the road to hell. In this regard, I am a regular critic of coaches without psychological or psychotherapeutic education, who are simply not equipped to provide care for the soul and health. It is very dangerous and unreasonable. We may be trying to help in good faith, but the question is whether we are helping at all.

And the whole thing is underpinned by one big idea, which is that every helping profession basically has one basic goal – not to create dependent relationships. The goal is to make the client independent. If the client becomes dependent on me, there is a feeling of “I can’t do it without him”, which is wrong. My ability to act during such cooperation decreases instead of growing, and that is not right. But this principle is precisely used by manipulators and esotericists.

But a therapist, coach or mentor is not always in a role where they praise. They are often exposed to saying things that the other person does not want to hear. How do you convey something unpleasant to others in a way that they can handle? And have you ever had someone throw you out with the words “I won’t listen to this!”?

Well, of course. In mentoring, this is probably even more common than in coaching. In it, after all, the coaching process primarily creates space for the other person. A coach does not advise, does not tell us what to do. A coach offers tools, stimulates, simply creates space for the other person to find the answers themselves. A psychotherapist is a bit different, it depends on what therapeutic direction we are talking about. But a mentor’s task is to help the other person achieve their goals independently as quickly as possible. And one of the key aspects of mentoring, in my opinion, is that we do not lie, manipulate or deceive.

We do not flatter the other person that they are better than they currently are. The main thing for us is to give feedback that is kindly tough, honest and has the task of moving the other person forward. But whether they move forward or not is up to them.

And it is 100% true that I have had – I could count it on the fingers of one hand, and I am slowly getting closer to the other – that the other person cannot stand it. Because what we tell the person is so different from how they perceive the world, and especially themselves, their self-worth, that there is no room for anything else. And it is easier to reject it than to deal with it.

And hearing “Have you ever thought about to what extent is the way things are in this company at the moment your responsibility? And to what extent have you contributed to it?” is very difficult. It is a tough question. Especially when you talk all the time about how bad the others are, how they don’t work, how they don’t deliver what they have, and so on. Then comes the memorable sentence – “I didn’t pay you for this! I don’t need this from you! This is not what the assignment is about.” Defensive walls are built 😀

And it happens quite often that the assignment that comes to us for mentoring is: “I have some broken people here, come fix them for me.” As if I were a car mechanic. 😊 “Look, a gasket in a colleague’s head has burst, some pipes are leaking here, come and fix it.” That’s not how it really works with people in the real world. Each of us is embedded in a system and how we behave is reflected in it.

Can a person ever change that setup and perspective?

Yes, if they are willing to think about it, if they are willing to recognize their own ego. In this case, the ego is really the biggest obstacle to being able to work in the zone of restrained and conscious reaction. That is terribly difficult. I’ll give feedback that’s kindly harsh, and the other person will immediately start. And we’re already lost because emotions and ego have kicked in. At that moment, it’s best to stop, take a breath, take three steps aside, whether mentally or physically, and say to yourself: “I don’t like what you just said at all.” And try to think about why, ask questions, and have the courage to explore it. And that’s a tool we call the explorer’s mindset. It’s not easy to deploy and it’s active and conscious work.

Ego is simply the beginning and end of everything.

So, have you ever been in a situation where someone didn’t stand up to your criticism?

Sure. And it’s normal for that to happen. But at the same time, as a mentor, I have to ask myself – is there an alternative? Is the alternative that I lie? Or soften it? Or not tell the truth? But that’s not what I was hired for. I’m here to say kind, hard things because no one else will say them to the person in question. And if the collaboration fails, that’s okay.

And don’t problems sometimes stem from the fact that we don’t listen to each other enough? Communication is all around us, we have meetings, calls, we talk, we call, but we don’t listen to what the other person wants to tell us.

Yes. Today, there is a significant emphasis on communication towards others. How to manipulate them “well”, how to positively influence them, how to convince them, how to negotiate something. We are constantly influencing others. But in order to establish relationships and make them work well for us, we cannot do without listening.

And if there is one thing I often see, it is parallel communication. You speak, I hear you, but I actually wait for you to finish so that I can say something. Conversations and interactions run parallel to each other. It is really a completely typical thing for today’s communication. One person starts talking and the other immediately says: “Well, I…”. We pass each other by in this style and we certainly do not build relationships that way.

Active listening or, God forbid, empathetic listening – that is a higher level😊 – is a skill that pays off extremely, not in terms of profitability, but in the impact on relationships. And if something is 100% true, the vast majority of misunderstandings between people in companies or teams are not caused by people wanting to hurt each other and being in some kind of strong conflict. In the vast majority of cases, we simply don’t hear each other, we guess, and then we project, act, and make decisions based on our own assumptions.

So how should companies organize their communication? Where should they set the rules?

Just ask yourself questions like – where do we send urgent messages? By email, Slack, by phone? How many communication channels do we have? More than ten? That’s how crazy it gets. The more channels, the bigger the team, and the more people in the hybrid work mode, the greater the chance that information will be lost and interpersonal tension will arise, which is not fundamentally a bad idea.

Here’s an example from reality. You have a meeting. There are five of you, two people are online, we forgot about the third and didn’t send him an invitation. One of them, who was online, wasn’t actually online because we didn’t notice. Of the five, two came late, and one left early. And now we have a number of things that were said at the meeting, not everyone was there at any one moment, there is no record because it is useless. Then some people write direct messages privately to each other, and the result is chaos – we only see who will do what, by when, and in what state it is in retrospect (and often too late). That is a picture of my experience in modern times, of how we live and function in many companies today. But this is already a systemic matter and it is necessary to solve it at the system level.

So at what size should a company start solving internal communication? When does the moment come when we have to set some rules, and a WhatsApp group or one channel on Slack will no longer be enough?

The number of relationships between individuals grows with each added member. There is a formula for this (R = [N x (N-1) / 2]. When you add another person to a group, the number of relationships in the group increases quadratically.

In other words, a group of about 8 people can function without any information system. In a group of 6-8 people, we are all able to know everything if we work in one space. In a hybrid system, there is already a bit of a problem, because information is scattered in two spaces. And of course, it is scattered further when we start using other online channels and tools. We start to lose track of who is talking, WHERE, and what they were talking about. It is logical that teams start to form with the increasing number of people, and at the same time we start to lose track of where what information is and who has received what information.

But the biggest turning points are about 20, 50, 150, and 400 people. From 10 to 20, it is a really brutal jump, from 20 to 50, it is dense, from 50 to 120 or 150 is crazy, from 150 to 300 or 400 it’s a mess, from 400 to 1000 it’s not even possible and from 1000 to 1000 it’s not even possible, because the systems are already scaled so much that they work for really large groups and more or less for any number.

And what changes in communication should a growing company focus on?

It’s important to really build communication gradually as you grow. So that when we’re 20, 40, or 150, we’re not… . Typically, you need to start thinking about what information we need to send to the whole team and what information to just someone. Who is in charge of communication in which department and who is our contact person. How do we work with communication filters, what transparency means, where do we collect information. And that’s how it all comes together and what we call communication management is created.

As the number of people in a company increases, it is necessary to start addressing the differences between different cultures, countries, etc. And from around 60 people, political culture begins to develop in parallel with communication and cultural management. That is, “who knows”, how power is distributed, who has what under their thumb, who has leverage over whom. In corporations, politics takes up roughly 40–50% of the time of C-level people and people on the board. Who will enforce which strategy where, who will fire whom. It is already a big game, not just of communication.

You have been working in corporate communications for more than five years. How has it changed over that time? Is it possible to observe a trend? Are companies improving in some areas?

Gartner, Gallup, HBS and others claim that communication is much more complex. There are more channels. Communication is faster, there is much more information, it is duplicated, some of it is irrelevant or flows to an irrelevant audience, some of us are overwhelmed by it… everything is more complex, more complicated and a little less understandable. Jamais Cascio summed it up very aptly in his BANI framework, describing the modern world. A world that is overwhelming, often incomprehensible and causes anxiety in many people.

And we see this in the data from companies. In satisfaction questionnaires, communication has been in the top three for the last 50 years in the column “What could the company improve”. One would think that we would have it perfectly smooth, but it is not. 😀 Then when you ask what people actually mean, you find out that the answer is not so simple and needs change in time. It is not simply a unified message “communication is a problem”. It is – communication is too much, it is not enough, important things are not communicated, details are not communicated, why is not communicated enough, how is communicated too much, there is too much criticism, there is too little appreciation…

In other words, it is such a complex topic that it cannot be simply framed in a black-and-white answer. That is the problem of any complex topic. It would only take us a weekend to define all the terms so that we understand each other and could have some sophisticated debate.

But what we can definitely notice is that communication between teams, which used to be purely physically in one place, so that information primarily flowed between them informally and possibly through some extension in digital form, typically by e-mail, has spread much more into the digital world. Some companies have gone fully remote, some are hybrid. Some teams are online, some are in person, or it alternates and overlaps in different formats. Everything is mixing together and it turns out that at a time when we have an extremely complex work system, work organization and structure, it is more important than ever to have clarity about when, where and how we talk to each other.