"Communication breakdown, it’s always the same
I’m havin’ a nervous breakdown, drive me insane"
- Led Zeppelin
I just finished managing a large project with multiple components and nearly a dozen stakeholders and was reminded about how challenging team communication can be, even with (or because of) the numerous tools available to us.
A few tips that saved our team a lot of time and sanity:
1. Don’t communicate everything to everybody.
TMI is real and it desensitizes people to your communications. Tell only the people who need to know. Also, it’s a thoughtful favor to remove people from an email cc list, if the discussion veers away from their area. Pro tip: You can also change the subject line on a “reply” to make that more meaningful on the next go-around.
2. Take a beat.
Just because we CAN communicate fast doesn’t mean we SHOULD. In most cases, a message doesn’t need an instantaneous reaction. Process the information and write a thoughtful response. You will probably save a few back-and-forths if you can be clear and complete the first time.
As we love to say at Broad Cove: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
3. Beware of communication-channel confusion.
Do you use Slack, email, text messages, phone calls, project-management-tool chat, AND face-to-face methods to communicate? It’s challenging to know which channel is the most important to pay attention to and when. And different channels can have conflicting information. Establish one or two best ways for you and the team and make them the priority. I bet you will move faster.
And while we are talking about multiple communication channels…
4. All of those interruptions are, well, interruptions.
It’s hard to stay in the flow when you are constantly bombarded by pings and whistles. Silence your devices when you need to crank out some work.
5. Build shared trackers to manage progress on tasks and expect your team to keep them updated.
Also, train the team on how to self-serve for the info they need. Do they need to ask you the status of that contract, or can they look it up themselves? Project-management tools do this very well, but so can Google sheets with drop-downs, for example. Anything but email.
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