Effective team communication doesn’t happen by itself. This is one of the biggest mistake leaders make: they assume their teams are capable of communicating effectively.
I understand it’s a fair assumption to make, considering, you hire the best people with the best intentions and personal motivation.
The problem is individuals in a team communicate only from their individual vantage points. You job as a leader is to help them see beyond it. In addition , there is a number of barriers that stop individuals from engaging in true dialogue. Barriers like: past experiences, individual motivations, demographics, interpersonal relationships and histories, cultural norms etc.
This gap in communication is the root cause of performance issues, conflicts, missed deadlines and poor decision making in many teams.
As we are nearing the ned of the year, it is a good time to identify your team’s communication health so you can set that up for success in the coming year.
If you see these 3 warning signs in your team, it’s time you invested in a productive dialogue:
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The buck stops at you: If people in your team rush to you for every decision or problem, it’s a clear sign that your people are looking to by-pass difficult conversations and prefer relying on you to save the day. This is of course frustrating for you but it is also slowing your team down. Facilitating a dialogue around this pattern of behaviour and it’s impact can help unlock many new productive channels of communication and remove silos within the team.
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Slow or poor decision quality: If you find yourself saying : Why are they not taking action promptly” or “Whats taking so long to move forward with this?” beware. Don’t rush to judge their decision making skills or send them to a seminar. This is more than a skill issue. More often than not, teams show poor decision making because of poor or paralyzed communication. Remove the barriers, convert the monologue or endless discussions into a productive dialogue and you will set a culture of better, faster decision making.
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Over communication: This is counterintuitive but look out for this one. If you are noticing multiple mile long email chains, endless meetings, thousands of slack/team messages without progress, realize that your team is stuck. An effective intervention is to get this team of engage in a productive, well facilitated dialogue. Such a dialogue, can get to the root cause and help the team identify their own rules of engagement that works for them and their optimal performance.
If you are seeing these signs, stop immediately. Not prioritizing Dialogue can cause more harm, delays and performance problems.
You are the best facilitator your team can get and they will thank you for prioritizing their communication challenges.
Not sure where to start?
Check out my Dialogue Assessment to understand your team’s challenges better and find solutions: https://thirdlooplearning.com/assessment/
You can also schedule a preliminary consultation call to explore if I can help you:
