Effective Communication
If you haven’t had a chance to read the first three entries of this series, click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, and here for Part 3.
Your ability to communicate is an important tool in your pursuit of your goals, whether it is with your family, your co-workers or your clients and customers. – Les Brown
One thing that will help an organization as they navigate through a dense forest, aka the busy organization, is communication. Leadership must communicate effectively with everyone in the group to keep the team on the right path.
Leadership has many responsibilities that normally include generating reports and performing analysis showing their team’s progress toward meeting organizational goals. Unfortunately, these responsibilities leave little time to communicate with co-workers.
Here are 3 suggestions for enhancing communication that will improve the overall effectiveness and focus of the team.
- Conduct meaningful and effective meetings
If a meeting must be held, then the meetings should be considered by all in attendance to be productive and worthwhile before and after the meeting. As the meeting leader, conducting efficient and meaningful meetings boils down to a few principles:
- Always have a clearly defined, well communicated reason for each meeting.
- Set up an agenda that spells out who is responsible for providing information at the meeting.
- Send out the meeting invitation as far in advance as possible so everyone can plan for it.
- Be respectful of participants’ time by staying within the time set for the meeting.
- At the end of the meeting, summarize the action steps and write down who is responsible for the action as well as when it is expected to be completed. Use this as the guide to check the progress of each action.
2. Set up a weekly check-in with each employee
Scheduling time every week for a quick discussion between the manager and each team member will be beneficial to both parties. There should be a simple agenda that includes the status of each project or work-stream and any potential issues. It is also a time to discuss any changes from the management perspective that will possibly impact the team member’s activities.
Once these weekly meetings are established, they become very efficient, and they can reduce the number of surprises on both sides of the relationship.
3. Publish organizational performance results periodically
Placing a team member (preferably not Management) in charge of communicating the team’s results versus targets and metrics on a periodic basis. Knowing how well the team is performing against established goals and targets will provide motivation. Assigning a non-management team member to track and post the results in a graphical form, e.g., charts or graphs, sends a signal to the team that there is no ‘spin’ to the information being presented.
In today’s world, there are many distractions as well as a multitude of internal activities everyone on the team is expected to manage day in and day out. Hopefully the tips and recommendations in this blog series will help thin out your forest and make it a little easier to see where you and your team are going.
Photo credit: Depositphotos #33835739 by Londondeposit