5 Minutes on Communicating Organizational Information
I love teaching the supervisor competencies I include in my trainings. There are 15 of them and I thought we’d take 5 minutes to dive into one - communicate organizational information to the team.
As a supervisor, you have information from other teams, other departments, and other levels of the organization that you need to disseminate to your employees.
The goal is to be able to get this information to your team in a clear and timely manner.
Seems straightforward enough, but let’s dig into where it can go wrong and some simple steps for improvement.
There are two traps you can fall into when it comes to disseminating information to your team.
Do you tend to hoard or overshare?
Sometimes we inadvertently hoard information.
We hang on to things because the time doesn't feel right to share it, we aren't sure how to communicate, or we are so busy with other tasks that it slips our mind.
In this case our employees might not have information they need to do their jobs or might simply feel out of the loop.
Other times we communicate too much.
Too much, too often, too disorganized.
Passing things along the minute we can without the thought or context that might be necessary.
This can lead to overwhelm or confusion from our supervisees. Too many emails or messages that eventually start to get ignored.
Whether you tend towards hoarding or oversharing (or go back and forth), there are a few simple steps you can take to make sure you're getting organizational information to your team:
Make it a regular agenda item of your team meetings. Whether weekly or monthly, the agenda item will be a reminder to you to gather and organize any information that needs to be shared.
Get organized. It could be a reminder on your calendar to pull the updates together, a folder where you keep everything, or a shared document in the cloud, the goal is to figure out a system that works best for you and implement it.
Get clear on what's important. Does the information need to be sent out immediately or can it wait for the team meeting? Ask any clarifying questions you need to before you share the information.
Avoid being a bottleneck. Look for places to encourage cross-sharing, and identify communication that doesn’t need to pass through you. It will help the flow of information and take some work off your plate.
Take a few minutes to reflect.
What help do you need in this area?
Where does it often go wrong for you?
What are you doing really well that others could learn from?