5 Rules to Assure the Right Level of Communication and Information Sharing

Often leaders and team members block or control communications as a means to maintain power. You've seen this before. I'm sure. Many studies showed a direct positive correlation between increased free flow of communication/information and team creativity, productivity, and overall effectiveness.

However, you might over communicate, too. You could overwhelm team members with less important or even irrelevant information, and you may confuse entities outside of the team with conflicting information. I've seen this happen, as well.

In 2000, I was in the midst of selling a company in Silicon Valley. Talk about being at the right place at the right time. That deal closed on January 26, 2000. The third biggest Dow Jones drop in history happened on April 14, 2000, less than three months later, followed by the dot-com bust. But that's a story for another article.

As the top leadership team of the company, we agreed and appointed me to be the sole negotiator with potential acquirers of our company. I've done that, until we got close to closing the deal. All of a sudden, the terms changed. I was puzzled. Fortunately, I had a good enough relationship with the executive I was negotiating with (at the acquiring company), who told me that the terms have changed because another member of our own leadership team engaged in the negotiations. Within a week, the deal almost died. We ran into internal conflicts, and the potential acquirer took some distance until we resolved things internally. After we managed to get our act together, I continued the negotiations, and we eventually closed the deal. There were obviously too many connections between our teams and the outside entity.

Over-communication can occur within the internal team, as well. I sat through too many board meetings (or committee meetings) where the information shared was irrelevant to me (or to the majority of participants in that meeting). It was shared because the originator wanted to update the team on the progress he/she made. They were proud of their achievements. Their need to share was bigger, much bigger than the recipients' need to know. This would typically happen in teams experiencing low trust levels, in which every member is worried that the others might think he/she are not doing their job if they don't provide a detailed description of their progress since the last meeting.

So, what is the right level of information sharing and communications?

I would answer it with the following rules:

1. Define the boundaries between the internal team and the external entities. Those boundaries must be very clear.
2. Appoint a single point of contact with the external entity. Make sure that the point of contact updates the internal team on communications and information exchange (in and out) with that external entity, but all communications with the external entity must take place through that single point of contact. This will reduce confusion outside as to who to communicate with. If someone inside the team feels that the point of contact hasn't communicated something externally, or communicated erroneously--they should inform that point of contact and let him/her correct it. There is almost nothing worse than communicating conflicting information to an external entity. Sometimes, you might need multiple points of contact with the external entity. That's OK, as long as it is clear which point of contact is used for which purpose, and what are the boundaries between them. For example, two companies may interact through two points of contact: one for engineering or operations, and the other for marketing or sales.
3. Inside the team, distinguish information sharing from information pushing. Make sure all information is shared internally with all team members. This means that if a team member want to access any piece of information--it should be available to them in an organized way. However, this information should not be pushed to all team members, as it might overwhelm them.
4. Information should be pushed to team members for one of only two reasons: (a) if the recipient needs the information to make decisions, or is waiting for it; or (b) if the information is a question that the sender needs the recipient(s) to answer. In either case, there is no need to push that information or question to the entire team. Only to those who are interested. Again, this information should be accessible by all team members. Just not pushed to them.
5. Make sure the team has a high-enough level of trust, to the point that team members don't feel the urge to share information that might not be relevant to the other team members (some or all of them) simply because they worry that they are not trusted. Trust in the team is important for many, many other reasons, but you already know that...

Follow these rules and you will be communicating at the right level, sharing the right level of information, and not over-sharing or over-communicating.