Comment by b3lvedere
5 days ago
"Be Clear. Painfully Clear.
You think you’re being obvious. You’re not. Spell out expectations. Over-communicate. Set goals in plain language."
Lots of managers i had the pleasure of working with, missed this memo entirely...
Yes, and setting deadlines is an important aspect of it. If you don't like how close the deadline is, then it's even more important to communicate it to your IC.
You might think that saying "I need this done by the end of Friday" will make your IC sad. No, what will make him or her sad is you coming for the deliverable on Friday when they have just started.
Lots of short deadlines make people very frustrated, because it feels the manager just violently yanked them out of their (comfortable) working zone. Nobody likes that and there better be some huge reward for this very annoying disturbance in the force.
Continously demand short deadlines of the team and they will not get frustrated anymore but very much deathly hate management. Rewards will not cut it. Ever. The line has been crossed and there is not much that will repair this.
Sure, the manager may just only get their assignment that things need to be done asap, but it is also their task not to transfer that frustration to the team. You would be amazed how much respect a manager can get if they just tell 'No' or negotiate a differebt deadline and honestly tells the team just that.
This is a really tough one isn't it? On the other hand I personally don't like when leaders or managers are over communicating (contrasting to this article). Of course I never say it, so the author can claim that nobody has criticised managers for over communicating, but I do despise too frequent check ins, meetings that are going too long, people who talk for too long when I just want to get started already. Managers who repeat the same stuff, talk overly verbose, speak 5 paragraphs of something that could be a sentence, etc.
They are not bad people, but I do personally feel annoyed by it, and I do feel it drains me of energy and flow. I feel like there are too many 1 hour meetings that shouldn't have been there at all or could have summarized in 5 minutes.
Overcommunication is a failure to provide appropriate context, with a side of bad delegation and overinvestment in process.
Without context, manager communication is noise. It's a waste of everyone's time and is functionally sabotage because it disempowers people. Worse, the problem can compound itself when a team gets demotivated and the manager tries to solve "lack of ownership" by spending even more time trying to direct behavior.
Good managers give their team appropriate context and tools, and then trust the process. Good organizations train and support managers in doing that.
You can both speak the exact same language and still have misinterpretations on what needs to be done. I've witnessed that multiple times. Management team holds a meeting and agree on what needs to be done. Single manager meets his team and tells them something, but not totally the same thing on what needs to be done. Each team member just nods and starts working. Everybody gets annoyed. Somewhere in the communication line something went horribly wrong.
The article also forgot: don’t make communication synchronous when it could be sent as text. People generally can read faster than you can speak.
Lots of people speak instead of write for no reason other than they are bad at typing.
It’s not that annoying or burdensome to be repeated to in text.
Some people don’t read, but those people can be special cased with meetings and talk.
Fully agree. Instead of verbal repetition, put things as a DM or in a doc in order of priority, organize textual information well and you don't have to verbally repeat this. That is how I consume information the best, but could vary from person to person.
sounds like they have a hammer (the sync, in-person meeting) and go around looking for nails. I don't think the key is simple repetition, but reinforcement. This means the appropriate channel, content and timing - all influenced by the situation and clear understanding of what exactly is the motivating problem for the communication.
Instead of repetition I would prefer written information organized well by priority. You don't have to repeat if I can revisit the information, easily find it when I need it, if I was to forget it. And with text I am happy also with overcommunicating as long as it is done once, not frequently to break my flow. When you ask me to do something always mention priority and the expected due time, do I have to drop other things or no. If you have a question, tell me by when do you need the answer.
Repetition is critical.
Especially if you've said something verbally (including on a call or even async text like Slack), it's important to follow up with a written record, ideally email, so that they remember. Also so you have something to point back to if they don't do it.
People will start to tune out things you don't repeat enough very quickly.
Leople will also tune out repeated things because they're often unidirectional conversations.
Cool that you want this done today, but "we" are not doing that. Tell the client it's going to take another day instead of planning a scoping meeting and interrupting my dev time
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