Can you have too much of a good thing?

In partnership with

Ahoy,

It’s been a while since I last talked about this one, so I wanted to bring up something that is really a corner stone to what I believe good leadership consists of.

Communication.

I’m not talking here about how to communicate. I’m talking about how much to communicate.

One of the biggest pitfalls I see that impact day to day running, team moral and overall culture is a lack of communication.

Before we dive in I’ll start with this:

If you think you’re communicating enough, you’re not.

And if you think you’re overcommunicating, you probably have just hit the mark.

The concept of overcommunication was introduced to me by a General I worked with for a few months.

Traditionally within the military, the senior officers devise the strategy, and those lower on the rungs deal with the tactical implementation of that strategy.

Often you can find that the people executing on the tactical are not 100% clued in on the strategic.

As a result you have some really competent people delivering some great work but they don’t really know to what end.

You may even have it that the great work they’re delivering isn’t entirely aligned with the the strategy.

All issues caused by undercommunication.

On top of this, the impact on moral is huge.

I talk all the time about ensuring you have whole team buy in. A huge part of this, is ensuring people feel part of the team. And a huge part of that, is ensuring they know what’s going on!

I mean think about it, wouldn’t you feel more excited to do something if you actually knew it was for a good reason?

How many times have you done something with less than maximum effort because you didn’t understand why you were doing it?

This was all something I knew on a tactical level, but when this General started to introduce this from a strategic level, a light bulb went off for me.

There really is no limit to overcommunication.

At any level you can communicate down the chain of command what exactly is going on.

The more you try to hide, the clearer it is you’re trying to hide something, and the more frustrating it is further down the chain.

You may think you’re telling your people enough, but I can say with almost 100% certainty, you’re not.

Let’s look at it this way, significantly more harm can be caused by holding back information, or simply not communicating enough than by sharing too much.

Yeah there might be things you can’t always talk about, but you can open up more than you are right now.

So lets try something this week.

What are the goals for the week?

What big things are happening?

Have you got any information from up the chain that you could pass down?

Just spend the week really focused in on that and see what kind of difference it makes.

I’d love to hear what kind of impact it has.

And hey, if it all goes well, and people respond positively to it, why not extend the experiment out to a month…

As always, have a great day.

Reece