An Informed Team Works Better

Last week, I wrote about importance of building perspectives for a manager when communicating with the team. Managers have to communicate a very clear picture of where things actually stand (on project, initiatives and overall organization). Specially in difficult times, people want to know what their manager is doing, what is the actual status of their projects, where are we headed to, what mistakes we did in recent past, how can we improve, what are the goals for next week, next month etc.  People are on a constant look out for information – information from which they can derive some meaning.

People indulge in guessing game when formal communication on facts is missing. With these guesses, people tend to assign wrong meaning to things and move farther from reality. This, in turn, tears down the team fabric.

A manager’s primary job is to ensure that people are fed with right information. It pains to see managers who believe in “assigning” work and “getting” outputs without giving broader picture, sharing facts and right information.

Jurgen Appelo over at his blog  has an insightful post title “Great Managers Have No Secrets” where he writes –

“When people lack good information, they will invent some information themselves. When they don’t know how well their project is doing, they will try to guess. When they don’t know how other teams are performing, they will make assumptions. When they don’t understand what their colleagues contribute to the organization, they will invent their own reasons. And when they don’t know about their manager’s personal life, they will gossip about it. To prevent bad information from flowing through the organization you have to give people good information.”

Further he writes –

“Managers should strive to have no secrets. In our organization I made sure that a lot of information is available for everyone. They all can see who is working on which projects, which features, bugs and issues are being handled, and what the team members’ evaluations are of those projects. Our people’s personal time sheets are public for all, and so are the ratings they give to indicate how happy they were with their projects.”

While all organizations/managers may not be willing to share employee ratings or deeper financial details, one thing is sure – people need to be informed by their managers about core issues that can potentially impact their work.

One of the best strategies to share information and feedback on a constant basis is to do a periodic “One-on-Ones” with all team members. Periodic team meetings and informal information sharing sessions are also equally effective.

People are meaning making machines. Provide them with right input and they will derive right meaning. Fail to do that and they start speculating.