Communication for teams
Clear communication enables collaboration
We talk a lot about collaboration when we’re working with teams, and there are lots of tools and techniques you can use to make collaboration easier. One thing your team needs to think about is communication. It’s much easier to collaborate with other teams if you can help them understand what you do, and how your work overlaps with their work.
The problem is, they’re as busy as you are. They don’t have lots of time spare to read loads of documents.
So you have to do the hard work to make your team easy to understand.
Create layers of information through layers of communication
(More about using layers)
Try to explain your team in a series of simple layers of content. You start brief, and add detail later. Detail should never be the first thing you expect other people to read about you.
In practical terms:
Try to sum up what your team does in a sentence, or a paragraph at most
Now expand that to a single page.
Gather all the detail into one place, like a single folder.
Those things are the first version of your layers.
Use the single-sentence summary everywhere, all the time. Put it in your email sig, at the start of all your presentations. Treat it like a brand. The more you repeat it, the more people in your organisation will remember it.
Use the 1-pager as a follow-on, whenever someone outside your team explicitly asks for more info.
Save the detail for anyone who really needs it. But make it easy to reach.
Find ways to talk and publish
This is one of the hardest things to do. In most large hierarchical organisations, communication up and down the hierarchy (particularly from top to bottom) is easy; it happens automatically.
But communication sideways, between teams, is much harder.
It works best when there are simple platforms teams can use to:
chat informally with other teams
publish information about themselves that other teams can easily find and read
It works even better when teams are explicitly and proactively encouraged by management to use those platforms.
If you’re a leader in an organisation like that, one of the most effective things you can do is be clear about what you want to see: empower and encourage teams to use platforms like that.
Think about your audience and what they need
Documents that already exist within your team will rarely be useful for people outside your team.
Those existing documents are too full of assumptions, jargon and insider-knowledge. Other people outside your team won’t know any of that stuff - so you have to write something else for them.
Assume outsiders know nothing: start simple, and build up
Assume they’re in a hurry: they don’t need to know everything, all at once, at the start
Make it easy for them to find out more: give people options, email addresses to contact, buttons to click. If they do want to know more about you, make it really simple for them to take that next step
Think about what they already know: don’t repeat things that are common knowledge, or already published elsewhere; link to them instead, if possible
Write for humans: write like you speak. Write the things you would say if you were talking over coffee. It’s possible to write like this and still sound authoritative, influential and confident. You don’t have to weigh your words down in formality.
