A challenge that every team face in some point of it growing, is get used the good habit of a fluent and effective communication not just inside the team, it is also with the rest of the organization.
Along my career, I had the opportunity to work with different teams (multiculturals, multidisciplinaires and in multiple time zones) and. I could see that issues to implement a fluent communication inner team it is not because the lack of commitment , the lack of technical skills or the low engagement of the team with the project, as I could see, it is due the fear to say something wrong in front of the team or something that can sounds obvious to the rest ones, the pressure from organization to set an open communication among teams, sometime set by commands, increase the stress in the team on their constant pursuit for deliver value and avoid errors, this factors make us keep quiet when we should talk.
Advantage of fluent Communication
A fluent communication in the team helps to solve conflicts and forecast possible issues that can affect our commitment to deliver value to the product, also a proper communication strategy help us to avoid risk , misunderstanding and conflicts that can take us away to meet the business goals.
It also helps in the transparency, continuous improvement and increase the team’s performance, the fluent communication can clean any blurring that avoid visualize all the achievements and show their progress and commitment to the organization culture.
So, What to do ?
As every team is different, it’s difficult to design an “error proof” strategy that include process and procedures to guarantees success for all the teams of the organization, but in our constant “pursuit of happiness” we could set small goals that give us “quick wins”, and increment them along the journey, these will take us by the good path on this journey to achieve a fluid, solid and effective communication in the continuous improvement of the team.
The continuous learning by experience results , will give us the data to adapt/change our draft “original” strategy in order to improve it. Fosure not all the results can be considered success but we will learn from it and we should adapt and embrace the changes on this fantastic journey.
So, will see some possible actions that could help you in this adventure, as I said above it is not “error proof” and is your call to adapt it or use it as base to build your own strategies or maybe simply to see what should dont do.
Play role as Lead Meeting
One of the biggest challenge as Team Lead is to make the team member participate actively in meetings where needs share updates, give details of impediments or take decisions. In that way an strategy that I found useful to let the team members get confidence and start to participate is to play the role as Lead meeting, as lead meeting he/she will direct the discussion, setting the agenda, and summarize it in a shared page, this role can be set randomly per week or maybe for specifics meetings and we could have a mechanism to avoid duplicity.
Along the meeting we should support actively to the lead, overall the firsts times, aftermath we should have a quick sync to prepare the update to management team by reports or as required.
Share knowledge by Team Training program
Along my career working with multidisciplinary teams I learned that every team member have valuable knowledge and each of them specialise in specific topics, together they work as a machinery perfectly synchronized but sometimes fails due lack of communication. I think the knowledge and experience should be shared inside the team, but keeping the same referents for some critical points, it can become real trough an fluent and effective communication. An tool that I found very useful and fun for the team was to schedule fast trainings, kind of presentation, by each team members.
A first stage the presentation can be shown to the team, get inner feedbacks, and later once gain confidence and polish some things from feedbacks it can be done to another teams related with our team area even to some members of management team. It will open a channel of communication from our team to the organization, it will wide the influence of our team how it contribute to the product and the organization.
As you can imagine there are different strategies and tools that we can use and test with our team gradually in order to meet the ones that actually fit our team and return the results expected.
Once our actions start to get good results we will see how the transparency of the team within organization improve and the imagine of our team change positively.
I hope this post helps and mainly enjoy the journey with your team.
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