Andrew Blotky
Founder & President of Azure Leadership Group and author
Andrew Blotky is an author and the founder and president of Azure Leadership Group, a consulting and executive coaching company focused on leadership, culture, and communications.
Andrew’s work focuses on helping leaders and the teams they lead in key moments build and evolve successful, inclusive, vibrant organizations, and on empowering leaders the most effective leaders they can be. His book, Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life, was published in 2019.
From 2013 to 2018, Andrew built and led the global employee communications team at Facebook, as the company grew from 5,000 to 30,000 employees during a time of unprecedented change and impact. There he led the company culture and internal communications across all teams and locations.
Andrew started his career in politics and public policy, as an intern in the White House Office of Presidential Speechwriting, and later as a communications leader for various elected officials in the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and the San Francisco Mayor’s office.
Before joining Facebook, he spent several years in Washington, DC building and leading the legal policy and communications program at the Center for American Progress, where he partnered with the Obama Administration and progressive advocates nationally on building groundbreaking education and advocacy campaigns focused on the U.S. courts and judges as a political issue.
He previously was also an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he created and taught University courses on effective advocacy in the political process.
Andrew holds a B.A. and a J.D. from Stanford University, is a member of the California State Bar and a graduate of the Modern Elder Academy. Andrew is also longtime student and teacher of Vinyasa yoga.
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Thank you for wisdom, Andrew. I have always believed that honesty, openness, and consistency were key in staying true to yourself. The lack of framework, as you have laid out, made it such that my thoughts didn’t get communicated as I wanted, and this lead to constant frustration. I look forward to making communication about finding common ground, and making sure my message is clear (by following your steps), all the while still staying true an honest with myself. This interveiw has truly opened the door to clarity, and removed the pressure around getting heard. Thank YOU!
I am so glad that you found this useful, thanks for the feedback. I love that you are focused on communicating by being honest with yourself, and hope a bit of structure can help you and those you communicate with. Let me know how it goes!
Thank you so much for the very insightful interview May and Andrew! This is one of my top two interviews I have watched so far. My biggest take-away is to treat each communication as an opportunity and step to connect and build a long-term relationship, instead of treating it as transactional. We all desire a deep relationship with everyone around us, especially with the ones we love deeply; however, our daily communication does not necessarily reflect our long-term desire and intention with the relationship. This is a great tip to keep in mind every day.
I am looking forward to reading Andrew’s book to learn more about the communication tools to help me speak more honestly and effectively with everyone around me.
Hi Fiona, Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate your tuning in and sharing what you found useful. I hope you enjoy the book — I suspect you’ll find a lot of similar themes in it, and probably a lot more! Feel free to share if you’d like and find it helpful.
You hit the nail on the head with “we often want to win the argument and be right” and fight or flight takes over during stressful conversations. Your technique in asking those two questions beforehand sounds like an incredibly powerful approach, I can’t wait to try it today on an upcoming difficult conversation! And one of the best things is that it’s seemingly not hard to do.
Having a North Star on what I want to get out of a conversation seems like a best practice that I hadn’t considered before now. It adds a level of optimism and presents an opportunity to have a positive outcome on many levels. Thank you so much for shedding a light on a great principle!
Hi Karin, Thanks so much for the comments here and for your feedback. Sometimes what seems super obvious or easy is exactly what we tend to skip over — so I find even reminding myself of these two questions and my real honest purpose helps me when I’m having a hard time. I hope it’s useful to you too.
I absolutely love the idea of COMMONication–finding what we have in common is so vital to good communication. The questions–who is my audience? and what is my purpose or goal?–seem to imply, at least for me, a need for vulnerability for both the audience and the presenter, a desire to find the common ground so we can move forward understanding one another better.
Thank you, Andrew & May!
Hi Nate – thank you for the feedback and for watching! And thanks for the great new COMMONication slogan! 🙂
So much inspiration. Job interview next week. I will bring the dots together. The most important tool I take with me today is to ask for feedback and be specific.
Aviaja — thank you for commenting and watching. Best of luck to you in that job interview. I hope it helps you to be more fully and confidently yourself!
This was an extremely helpful reminder. There are times when all I do is rehearse and practice for a presentation which I find lands flat for my audience. The content is there but something is lost in the delivery. This reminded me of why it’s so important to create in the moment because I tend to speak while I am thinking about so many other things, such as “What is the audience thinking? Is this boring to them? Did I get my point across? Did I not get my point across?” If I create in the moment and really focus on those two questions, perhaps I wouldn’t sound so robotic and I could be more authentic they way you are, Andrew, in your video. Enjoy the rest of your day!
Ni Nerissa- Thanks for watching and for taking the time to comment. I have TOTALLY been there too – practicing and rehearsing so much it becomes almost mechanical or robotic. The irony is sometimes that’s easier than being really focused on what you’re trying to convey, and to who. After far too many times doing it in a way that didn’t feel satisfying, I learned that doing it in a way that was much more conversational took a little more work on the front end, but ended up being far more rewarding and productive on the back end. I am hopeful this is helpful to you — that’s why I wrote the book and love helping us all get better at this. Let me know how it goes!
I just re-wrote this comment because I just learned “Less is more”. Let me give your direct feedback as I respect your work : useful, relevant and very well explained, I was captivated. It does connect the dots with many other conferences of the week : find your purpose, be authentic, and be aware of your audience. We juste created a long-time relationship! 🙂
Wonderful to hear, Genevieve! Thank you for taking the time to comment here. I am hopeful it’s useful to you.
Hi Andrew,
This was phenomenal. I chose to watch your video interview excited to gain insight for a new department I may be helping to kickstart and came away with some great tools for a big job interview I have in a few days! Though I came away with so much practical, common sense insights, I would love to hear more about how this all applies to this new Zoom and Microsoft Teams world we are in – especially in the context of my impending Zoom job interview with two very, very senior executives! How can I best know if they understand what I am trying to convey when I can’t fully read body language and we are meeting for the first time? I suppose this applies to any video meeting.
Thank you for sharing your time and expertise!
Hi Hannah – thanks for listening and taking the time to comment here. It’s such a great question. Communicating virtually is in some ways harder since it’s harder to read body language, and there’s often a bit of a lag so can feel a bit robotic or artificial. At the same time, it’s more of an opportunity to practice communicating intentionally than we often get in just regular interactions, which is kind of a gift — we get to look more carefully and with more deliberate focus on how we communicate.
Meaning, we have to be MORE aware and MORE thoughtful about both how we listen and how we show up with others, and about how we speak and how we get feedback from others. In a virtual environment, it’s more important than ever to make explicit some of what we usually make implicit. So, where you might be able to read a room in person, now it might be important to more regularly check in with people. Ask if they are following you, ask where people might disagree with you, ask for feedback on how you can come across in a way that resonates more. It’s also important to be as aware as possible about your audience in a virtual environment. For most of us, it means we are more easily distracted by what’s in our environment and what else is on our screens, and it’s easier to check out or not pay as close attention. So this means being more aware than ever of your facial expressions and body language when you are listening, and being as crisp, clear, and focused as you can be when you are speaking.
Last point here: one huge upside about communicating virtually now is that it’s more acceptable than it’s ever been to be human. This means, if your child or dog interrupts your meeting, or the doorbell rings in the middle of a presentation, this in some ways makes us all more connected and come across as more human than ever. I say lean into it. At the end of the day, communication is about connection, and we can connect with each other by what makes us more the same than different — which is imperfection, and being totally just human. Hope this is helpful, would love to hear what’s working for you.
As a veterinarian I love that the topic of dog training was brought up, as there is so much you can learn about communication when attempting it with another species, that we so often take for granted when communicating with our own. A thoughtful owner gets powerful lessons about leadership (and even parenting, where relevant) from their relationship with a dog. One of my biggest takeaways is that you are always leading – your dog is always paying attention and learning from your actions and behaviour, not just when you are “on” during training sessions. Similarly you should always be looking for opportunities to provide positive feedback and rewards for good behaviour, not just when you are asking your dog to perform or learn something specific for you. Lovely to hear that you’ve adopted a dog Andrew, and best wishes on your journey together!
One thing I struggle with when communicating feedback in the workplace is putting too much emphasis on considering the context my coworkers are operating in, and letting that get in the way of providing direct feedback. I’ll too often preemptively “explain” to myself all the things that probably got in their way during the day that prevented them from being able to do the tasks I assigned to them, overempathise, and either fail to have the feedback conversation assuming the performance issues were situational (until they snowball), or become too concerned about their possible emotional reactions to be direct enough and pursue that North Star until a resolution is reached. I had an excellent leader once who could directly and emotionlessly correct my performance and start a constructive conversation, but for other people her communication style was too intimidating. This is probably where a long-term relationship with a consistent communication style would shine through.
Hi Peta — I love this comment and question. I think you have a kind of super power that you can use to your own advantage here. Based on what you’ve said, it sounds like you are quite empathetic. And if you can remember that approaching feedback conversations that’s important. So, it might be easier in your case than in some for you to share positive and affirmative feedback, which is usually in short supply. And, when you are delivering constructive feedback, it’s good to be aware of the context or possible explanations, but it’s STILL important to share the feedback. If you come at it from the mindset of it’s a gift you are giving the other person, or if you do it from a place of wanting the person to get better, you’re almost doing a DISservice to them by NOT sharing the feedback b/c of your own understanding of the context or excuses. For one, your impression of the person’s experience could be right, but it also could be wrong. Second, we all have blindspots, and so it’s important for us to have people who are supportive and empathetic (like it sounds like you are) to help us see those blindspots and make improvements. For me, I’d say use the emotion and empathy to your advantage to help the person receive the feedback — because by not sharing you’re almost hurting them, and it’s also not investing in the longer-term relationship in the best way that you could, which may only lead to more communications issues down the line. Last point here: the more we have hard conversations, the easier they are. If we don’t do them, they become big deals in our own heads and we almost overplay it. We also let the issue fester and get worse and bigger, where we could just deal with it in the moment when it’s smaller, and course correct. And the more we have them, the more we get used to being in a relationship where that’s common and expected and so starts to feel much more comfortable than if we avoid and then are forced into it. Hope this is helpful!
Thank you Andrew. It is sometimes difficult to see empathy as a superpower in an industry rife with compassion fatigue and burnout, and reliant on the ability to generate a profit from the medical care of pets – so I am grateful to learn where it may be helpful. This constructive feedback muscle has also been difficult for me to develop due to the fast-paced work environment (frequently meaning missed lunchbreaks and staying late on a daily basis), which requires additional sacrifices to be made by both parties to carve out the time to have these conversations privately and fairly. By reframing it as helping someone else to achieve their work goals, and investing in the long-term work relationship, you’ve helped to fortify me to overcome these barriers. I deeply appreciate your advice and insight and have printed your reply to refer back to!
Thank you so much for this extremely insightful interview, May and Andrew. The interview example Andrew gave was so valuable, and the biggest part I took away from this was to be yourself. Seems like the most easiest and natural thing we should do, yet it’s so interesting that it’s also the hardest! I wonder why that is!
Hi Seema, thanks for watching and for taking the time to share your feedback. From my perspective, you hit the nail on the head — be yourself. We spend so much time constructing barriers to simply being our self that we end up getting in our own way and then the communication we have in any context becomes more muddled, more performative and can almost intimidate us. It’s hard because of our conditioning — from how we were raised, the systems in which we came of age and live today, and because of so many other things that aren’t our “fault” or even the result of our doing. But the good news here is that by recognizing it and naming it, we get to be in a place of choice. We get to choose how we show up and we get to choose whether to keep repeating those thought patterns and habits or whether we want to make a change.
Thank you, Andrew! That is beautifully said. Your thoughts are much appreciated and helpful.