Setting communication protocols and guidelines doesn’t automatically mean they’ll work. Not without considering the most prevailing challenge most SaaS companies naturally encounter.

I say ‘naturally’ because it concerns how we operate as human beings.

My work experience showed me that most SaaS executives, managers, and professionals pay little attention to how they communicate.

We take our communication skills for granted. And when working in teams, we mostly rely on implicit practices based on unspoken assumptions and ambiguous standards.

As a result, there’s a surge of factors and issues that disrupt the exchange of information, ideas, knowledge, and skills between team members, as well as between brands and their audiences.

My purpose with this article is to highlight the often-overlooked lack of self-awareness in communication and how it impacts your SaaS company.

What’s Awareness? 

Awareness is the quality of observing and acknowledging a situation or a fact for what it is. For a deeper understanding of awareness, we can look at the definition provided by Rupert Spira, an English philosopher and nondualism teacher.

As Spira notes:

“Ultimately, awareness cannot be defined, but a provisional definition is offered here for the purpose of evoking an experiential understanding.”  

Spira highlights:

“Awareness is that with which everything is known and within which everything arises. In this first stage of understanding, we, awareness, recognize our self as the witness of experience, the knower of the known.”

In other words, awareness is not simply observing passively how things unfold. On the contrary, awareness represents the lens through which we perceive, understand, and interact with our surroundings, shaping our day-to-day experiences.

💛 Personal note: If you’re interested in understanding the essence of awareness, I recommend you read “The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter” by Rupert Spira.

What’s Self-Awareness? 

While awareness refers to observing and acknowledging external facts and situations, self-awareness indicates a special focus on thoughts, feelings, and actions that arise from within.

Being self-aware means making time and space for introspection and self-inquiry to identify and understand one’s:

• Beliefs
• Feelings
• Motives
• Desires
• Thoughts and opinions
• Actions and reactions
  

Self-awareness involves observing your inner world and acknowledging how you express yourself internally and externally.

What’s Self-Awareness in Communication? 

When it comes to communication, self-awareness implies observing and understanding how you engage with others. This process includes identifying your communication habits, styles, and patterns.

Let’s take them one by one:

→ Communication Habits

Habits are reactive routines people engage in without giving them a second thought. People may have positive or negative habits.

A negative habit is to interrupt others before they finish their thought.

Conversely, asking your message receiver, “What do you think?” each time after presenting your arguments is a positive habit.

→ Communication Styles

Styles involve ways in which people and brands express themselves, including elements such as voice, tone, gestures, and more.

For example, sales rep A can have an aggressive communication style, dominating the conversation, interrupting the prospects, and using confrontational language.  

On the other hand, sales rep B may display an assertive communication style, expressing confidence, choosing direct yet respectful words, and demonstrating assurance.

→ Communication Patterns

Patterns refer to recurring tendencies and behaviors someone shows when engaging with others. Usually, patterns form as the result of habits, external influences, and past experiences.

Over-promising or responding selectively to questions are negative communication patterns. Conversely, positive communication patterns are offering constructive feedback, keeping one’s word, or practicing active listening.

❗Messaging is another self-awareness topic, as people may overlook whether they craft efficient messages that are interpreted and understood as intended.

📝 Quick note: There’s a clear difference between communication habits and practices. Habits refer to automatic, almost reactive responses to stimuli. Patterns involve broader tendencies, usually encompassing multiple habits.

• Habit example: Interrupt your interlocutor.
• Pattern example: Offering negative feedback by interrupting your interlocutor, using offending or critical words, disregarding your interlocutor’s feelings, and leaving no space for improvement.
  

Whether positive or negative, only a few SaaS executives, managers, and professionals are self-aware when it comes to their communication habits, styles, and patterns.

Usually, people tend to operate on auto-pilot communicating without giving the process too much thought.

Why is this happening, especially in the context of SaaS communication?

Reasons Why We Lack Self-Awareness in SaaS Communication

There are personal and corporate reasons why SaaS executives, managers, and professionals lack self-awareness in communication.

Personal reasons

Self-awareness involves zooming out and seeing oneself from the side. Also, it requires people to be present and conscious of their communication practices.

That’s not an easy task, considering that introspection requires consistent practice. Also, self-awareness calls for additional effort, which may be insurmountable, especially when overwhelmed with information and work.

In most cases, SaaS executives, managers, and professionals aren’t even aware that they should self-assess and be more introspective about how they communicate.

📝 Quick note: For this article, I’m excluding those with malicious intent and those who fake lack self-awareness in communication to inflict pain, create misunderstandings, and increase confusion.

Corporate reasons

On the other hand, in most cases, the corporate environment doesn’t encourage introspection or self-assessment.

Some SaaS companies:

• Lack of strong leadership led by executives who struggle with self-awareness, unsure how to approach it.
• Don’t have explicit communication protocols and guidelines, letting people figure it out themselves.
• Encourage a culture of perpetual movement, where taking time for (self)-reflection may be seen as slacking off. And when people don’t have role models to learn from, they’re most likely to be oblivious about their communication practices.
• Aren’t consistent in empowering executives, managers, and professionals to cultivate self-awareness for better communication skills.
  

Overall, developing self-awareness for better communication may be wrongly seen as a waste of time in a world focused on reactive behavior and quick output.

Recognizing the Lack of Self-Awareness in Your SaaS Company

Do your executives, managers, and/or professionals need more self-awareness in their communication practices?

Multiple red flags will help you recognize this challenge within your SaaS company. Here are some of them:

🚩 Poor communication: People may overlook the importance of communicating their process as they unintentionally will withhold information such as:

• Task completion: This can be extremely frustrating, especially if the work of other team members depends on someone completing a specific task.
  

• Work-altering changes: Some executives may change strategic or operational elements without communicating these updates in a timely manner. As a result, their team will spend time working on irrelevant tasks guided by the older frameworks.
  

• Decisions: When managers make decisions without keeping their teams in the loop, they create a sense of exclusion and mistrust.
  

• Reasoning: Communicating the “Why” is as important as socializing the decision. Without knowing the “Why,” professionals can’t properly contextualize the decision, feeling disconnected from the overall objectives. As a result, they may lack the necessary understanding to accomplish their tasks efficiently.
  

• Challenges: Some SaaS executives, managers, or professionals won’t communicate the obstacles they encounter, delaying their tasks or project completion.
  

When working in a SaaS company with low interest in fostering self-awareness regarding communication, you’ll also notice circumstances such as the following:

🚩 One-way communication: Some of your colleagues may be focused on getting their point across without realizing the value of listening to other team members.

🚩 Reactive behavior: A reactive attitude toward constructive feedback shows a lack of self-awareness when communicating, as people may take things personally or feel attacked.

🚩 Confrontational attitude: Similar to reactive behavior, confrontational attitude shows that people aren’t open to accepting different perspectives. Instead of seeking understanding and collaboration, they may become defensive and argumentative.

🚩 Futile busyness: You’ll observe team members constantly “busy” without making significant progress. Not understanding and asking questions about priorities, goals, and need-moving tasks may stem from a lack of self-awareness.

🚩 Scripted responses reliance: Heavily relying on pre-existing scripted responses suggests a lack of authenticity in communication. In other words, your team members aren’t genuinely engaging with inquiries, questions, or feedback.

🚩 One-size-fits-all communication: Messaging and communication styles should differ depending on the end receiver (team members or audiences) and situation. When teams and companies communicate with multiple stakeholders using the same template, you can most certainly guess a culture based on low self-awareness in communication.

🚩 Over-promising and under-delivering: SaaS people may overcommit without fully acknowledging the capacity of their product or team. That’s highly frustrating and a big red flag for external stakeholders.

🚩 Messaging inconsistencies: Lack of self-awareness in communication also translates into disjoint messaging, mixed signals, and information discrepancies.

🚩 Stagnant innovation: Lack of self-awareness in communication may condition executives, managers, or even team members to dismiss each other’s ideas for improvement and growth.

🚩 Mistake cover-ups: Sweeping mistakes under the rug indicates a toxic work environment fostering fear and silence. This shows that people don’t discuss nor acknowledge how things can be repaired or improved.

Subsequently, all these phenomena result in painful business consequences such as decreased productivity, missed deadlines, increased operational costs, and high turnover.

Also, these circumstances translate into limited lead acquisition, lost deals, low customer satisfaction, and a high churn rate.

How To Bring More Self-Awareness To Your Team? 

While cultivating self-awareness company-wide is an extended and full-blown endeavor, you can start small and take specific actions to foster introspection.

What are these actions?  

Whether you’re a SaaS executive, manager, or professional, you can:

• Develop your own self-awareness, improving how you communicate
• Set up and socialize your expectations and communication standards company or team-wide
  

Let’s discuss each step separately.

→ Develop your self-awareness in communication

You can do that by asking the following questions before or during your interactions with team members or external stakeholders:

• Is my message understood as I intended?
• Are recipients of my messages taking the desired actions? Am I clear and persuasive in my communication?
• Do I have negative communication habits that make others uncomfortable, unheard, or disrespected? If so, what are these habits?
• What’s my communication style? How can I improve it?
• Do I generate misunderstandings and ignite conflicts? If that’s the case, why is this happening? How can I avoid it and become a better communicator?
  

You can also add your questions to the mix.

These questions will prompt valuable self-reflection, allowing you to identify inefficient communication habits, styles, and patterns and cultivate desirable ones.

When reflecting on these questions, journal your answers or discuss them with trusted colleagues for further insights.

❗Important: Ask yourself these questions consistently. Cultivate your self-awareness by creating time and space for observation and introspection.

→ Encourage self-awareness in communication company-wide

Lead by example.

I discovered Almanac’s Company Handbook some time ago. Almanac is a SaaS company that offers a wiki and team workflow platform.

The CEO User Guide is a topic in the Almanac Handbook. This section explains how Adam Nathan, co-founder and CEO at Almanac, operates. I recommend reading it as it’s very insightful regarding work management and human-to-human interactions.

Besides showing incredible self-awareness, Adam highlights how team members should communicate with their CEO for higher efficiency.

For example, under the Style sub-headline, Adam encourages Almanac’s professionals to:

• Go straight to the point
• Keep it short
• Follow up with supporting information
• Use analyzed data and frameworks for arguments
• Communicate more frequently if there’s a misalignment
  

Here’s a screenshot:

By setting up and socializing these communication standards, Adam shows high self-awareness. Also, with these guidelines, the Almanac CEO fosters an environment for conscious interactions to ensure strong collaboration and higher efficiency.

In other words, whenever Almanac’s team members interact with Adam, they become more self-aware of their communication practices, removing the fluff and focusing on the essentials.

That’s a first step towards becoming more and more aware of one’s communication habits, styles, and patterns.

I encourage SaaS executives and managers to create brief communication standards, setting up the right expectations for everyone regarding team engagement.

SaaS professionals can also foster self-awareness in communication.

If you’re working in a SaaS department or team, you can reflect and identify your communication preferences most aligned with your company’s workflow. Next, you can document, publish, and socialize these standards.

For example, your communication standards may include things such as:

• Encourage clear subject lines and short emails for higher efficiency.
• Share success and challenges with your team to advocate for open and transparent communication.
• Set specific response times for emails and messages. This way, everyone will know that you’re answering emails each morning before 10 a.m. or each afternoon after 3 p.m.
• Ask team members to schedule afternoon meetings only to avoid communication fatigue in the morning.
• Promote regular team check-ins, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding ongoing projects and tasks.
• Create a request template for your team members. For example, if someone wants to ask your help with something, they should fill out a brief form that includes relevant details.
  

By doing so, you’ll present a clear example of self-awareness, encouraging your team members to be more intentional when communicating with you.

On the other hand, you may spark an entire self-awareness movement, nudging colleagues to become more aware of their communication practices.

Final note

Cultivating self-awareness in communication is an ongoing process. You can’t just fix this challenge overnight using quick hacks.

Leading by example is the most efficient way to cultivate self-awareness. You can also engage in one-on-one or group conversations about self-awareness and communication practices.

You can share your experiences and how you’re applying intentionality to your communication habits, styles, and patterns.

It’s worth noting that self-awareness will dictate the success level of your SaaS communication strategies and tactics. Only when people are self-aware of their communication practices can they:

• Create impactful messages that translate into desired actions.
• Ensure high clarity, eliminating uncertainty and dissolving doubts.
• Craft messages based on accurate and truthful information
• Connect (for real) with other team members or external stakeholders
• Be open to sharing their knowledge and skills with team members and external stakeholders
• Achieve maximum coherence and send consistent messages
• Abide by company’s communication protocols and guidelines
  

Self-awareness in communication is directly related to your SaaS company’s growth as it encourages people to improve their practices and interact better with their team members and audiences.