Someone about to start as a manger asked me recently what I thought about the strategy of overcommunication as a help to build relationships with peers. In their mind, overcommunication meant sharing the details of your accomplishments so that other people would know what kind of value you’ve produced.
I shared that I do believe that overcommunication can be valuable, but not in the way they described. Those who noisily advertise their successes can become annoying and even erode their own trustworthiness. The antidote is not to be equally vocal about one’s failures. But there is a useful alternative form of overcommunication.
The key is to overcommunicate in the breadth of your activity, rather than in the depth. Think about the dependencies your project has – in terms of both who you depend on and who depends on you. (A RACI matrix can help with this, showing you areas of Responsibility and Accountability as well as who needs to be Consulted or Informed.) As planning begins for each project, and as the risk profile of each project changes, broadly communicating those updates broadly to a wide array of interested people may often feel like overcommunicating – especially when the project feels more at risk.
But I’ve had far more people tell me that they wished they knew something earlier about a project that affected them than I have had tell me that they wished they hadn’t heard about a project’s status change.
If you’d like to explore effective communication about one of your projects, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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