I’ve heard it said that if you tell your team something seven times, half of them will say they’ve heard it once.
As the team’s leader, it’s easy to get frustrated at this. “I already told you! We talked about this, remember?”
Well, two days ago, I talked about the fact that when senior leaders make decisions, more information isn’t always what they need. Sharing more information isn’t always helpful when communicating upward in the organization. The same thing is true when you’re communicating downward to your team. More information isn’t always the answer.
Like senior leaders, individual contributors who are neck-deep in the technical challenges of a project are often swarmed by too much information. When you tell them new things you want them to know, it’s like tossing them pieces of knowledge like so many more tennis balls to hold in their hands.
What you want to do is give them a mental “shelf” to store the knowledge in, an index that they can use to file it somewhere for later retrieval.
Motivational speakers like Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar used to say that every person on your team is listening to the same radio station: WII FM – “What’s In It For Me?”
When you plan to share information with your team, see how you can connect it to something that they already care about. And if you can’t, then you might want to reexamine whether it’s information you need to toss at them in the first place.
If you’d like to explore your specific situation further, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.