MC1-1 Great Team Communication

okay who's next that'll be me can i have great team communication yeah sure take a seat right how does that table look over there yeah this is a good spot right well thanks for joining me for the first episode of management cafe where we can consume some evergreen theories and models from our main menu and also consider today's specials those movements and trends that surround organizations today if we haven't met before my name is pilar ortie and in this management cafe i'd like to share the evolving role of the manager in organizations today mainly looking at what sometimes is referred to as soft skills those skills that have to do with interacting with others and which from being soft are actually very very hard so today i've ordered great team communication and if you want to see what else is on the menu you can go to virtualnotdistance.com slash podcasts where you will find the other episodes of management cafe as well as those for the 21st century work life podcast so yeah virtual not distance is the sponsor for this podcast have a look at our website and see whether we can help you and your team transition from working regularly in the office together or creating more like a virtual team because probably that's the way most of us are going and if you want to subscribe to this podcast you can do so via your podcast app hit subscribe or on the blog managementcafepodcast.com there is an option on the sidebar to put in your email and the episodes will come through straight to your email as they are released so managementcafepodcast.com oh there you are here's your order oh thanks a cup of great team communication sprinkled with some trust i'll start with a small apology or maybe a disclaimer i'm not going to tell you how to turn your team great in 20 minutes what what i would like to do is to dissect what communication in great teams might look like teamwork and communication are words that are often used vaguely we need better communication teamwork is important now what does any of that really mean so i'm going to share with you my favorite piece of research from 2012 on high performance teams where the authors present the communication patterns of high performance teams and i hope that this will help you to evaluate your communication processes and habits to see whether there's anything you might be missing or need to change now the research was done on co-located teams that is in those teams where people are in the office together but here as we now need to cover both co-located and virtual or remote or even hybrid teams bit of virtual bit of co-located i'll also share with you some thoughts on how all of this can be transported to the virtual world so are you sitting comfortably actually this is a podcast so it could be anywhere anyway so whatever it is i hope you're comfortable right a couple of years ago in 2012 i came across an article which made me say finally we can dissect great teamwork and now if you read regularly about leadership in organizations and specifically if you read the harvard business review then you've probably heard about this piece of research professor sandy pendland and his team at the mit media lab they gathered data which showed the patterns of communication in great teams so for a start it turns out that 50 of the variation between low and high performing teams is accounted for by these patterns of communication so i think it's definitely worth looking at so what did pendland and his team look at well by putting a gadget on team members they hang around their necks they were able to measure how people were interacting so if you can imagine the people they were doing the research on you'd be in a team and you'd be doing your work as normal around the office but with this gadget around your neck and some teams would have i don't have a clue how they did it but they would have these devices could tell whether they were speaking to someone in inside their own team or with people in other teams so it must have been quite fun research to take part in and it did um it did span over seven years so quite a nice big chunk so these gadgets that people were wearing measured the energy behind the interaction so they call it energy and this was the body language the tone of voice who you were facing so they knew as i said whether you were facing someone in your team someone outside it and who it was how long you were talking to them for and as i said whether they were in your team or not the one thing they didn't capture was the content of the conversations were really looking at patterns of communication not quality of data and information within those conversations so i will tell you what they found in a moment but i'd just like to pause and point out that these conversations included informal communication and by this i don't mean when we're just chatting away about non-work related things but also when we talk about work casually when i ask you whether you have met one of my potential clients before when i shout across the room to see whether you know when we're likely to receive the next report when you offer to help me with new software etc and this is an important reminder because i think it's unfortunately not unusual for people in offices to keep their heads down at work and if this happens no matter how many productivity tools we use or how many lists we make our team is not going to fly we're never going to be great we're just going to coast along so it's important that we don't lose those times when we are together when we interact in the corridors and that we give space to those informal interactions because they are important and if you are indeed in a virtual team or some sort of mobile setup then you have to be very deliberate about this and come up with processes that will make this easy and if you're a hybrid team this is even more important because if not you might easily get an us and them mentality as the people in close proximity who are more likely to have informal conversations maybe if they like each other or when the people in close proximity get stronger as a sub-team while those away from the office might not so even more difficult and by the way i'd love to know how you encourage informal communication in your team or just how it happens or how it doesn't happen which is also interesting so do let me know through the blog managementcafepodcast.com and look for episode one i'm not sure of the slug yet for that url because it's a wordpress.com blog so it does all sorts of funny things on the url i haven't published yet so managementcafepodcast.com episode one right let's carry on with the research so the data from sociometers was grouped into three components energy which i already touched on how team members contribute to the team engagement sorry how team members contribute to the team's communication engagement whom was talking to whom and exploration how much team members talk to those from other teams and as i mentioned before it's probably not surprising that in the lower performing teams the contribution of some people to this communication was much larger than others and we're talking about contribution mainly in face-to-face meetings and interactions so let me just stop for a moment here think about the times when you meet with your team informally or even formally say at the coffee machine the water cooler on the way from the office to the car park or the train station who contributes more to the conversation quite often those further up in the hierarchy might be given more space to talk so if you are one of those which you probably are listening to this management cafe podcast although you can also be an aspiring manager or just a team member who really cares anyway if you are a person with some hierarchy in your organization or team just be aware that people might just by default be giving you more space to speak so the informal energy we bring to the group seems to be important as does how even this is throughout the team the other thing measured in the study was engagement again that is whom is talking to whom so especially in new teams we have to be aware that we don't always end up having conversations with the same people that we establish a relationship with everyone in the team and i love this study because this is stuff that we we kind of know either through instinct so we just you know it makes sure it makes sense that uh if we're in a team if we're all talking to each other then of course we're going to have a better team but this is data they show the data here that is quite interesting so once more this is especially important if you're in a leadership position because just make sure not just that you interact with everyone in equal measure but that people don't end up talking just to you how many times have you observed in a conversation people talking just to the chair of a meeting or the manager or the teacher in educational settings i know this is quite a bit mainly in training situations we might be having a discussion um but i might have the focus being in the highest status role and so many people tend to direct their thoughts and speech at me whereas it's important that they distribute their eye contact amongst everyone else and well in these cases you have to directly ask them to share their thoughts with everyone else or you can do this actually like i did just with hand gesture which reminds people to open up to everyone else and once one person does it then other people tend to follow but this is just something you might be wanting to bear in mind the third factor that affects team performance is exploration how much teams look outside for inspiration information and connection and the most creative teams in the study seems to seek information and inspiration from a range of outside sources not just when they needed help or advice but constantly so again it's something that we probably know that if we want to be creative we have to reach out we have to allow thoughts from other places to come in and we need to be looking at what other people are doing but again a reminder this is what they found and very interestingly also what they found in these teams is that it seems like teams couldn't do both they couldn't be paying attention to the internal patterns of communication and external so sometimes there was more exploration and sometimes there was more energy and engagement and you really had everything at the same time so as a reminder sometimes we need to focus on how we are operating as a team and sometimes we need to be reaching out a lot more so some kind of balance so if we are in charge of structuring team processes or let's face it if we just care about our team and want to do something about making it better then maybe these are three things that are worth looking at energy by which again we don't mean that everyone is moving their arms around and speaking really loudly very bouncy but rather what people are bringing from themselves to the conversation that quality of the interactions so we might think of energy engagement and exploration and even though this large study which was carried out over seven years ago in a range of organizations even though it was carried out in the co-located environment where team members were together in the same location there are still some very valuable lessons we can take to the online space to the mobile space to the flexible working space you name it for example people like communicating in different ways formally some people through agendas in meetings through structured emails or informally in the corridor over coffee on a chat with emoticons what's your preference now this is really important because we're only human so we tend to organize communication around us in a way that suits us most but if you really as a manager or person or just person who's really looking after communication in the team but if you really prefer structured conversations and don't pay attention to the fact that your team rarely gets to have informal conversations then you're going to miss out on important communication and not all your team members might be engaged so it's important to have a broad range of communication and ways in which people interact so how about this carry out a small audit of the types of communication you have in your team and you should also do this even if you're working in an office-based team because we still communicate in very different ways and you can do this now over coffee even just in your own head how do your people exchange ideas in real time and asynchronously so i think what could work is if you're a virtual team or have a mixture of work patterns then try to have a healthy combination of video audio and written communication for example in the office you can have structured meetings but how about also leaving time for new conversations to emerge and you might have to make an effort to make sure that there are opportunities for informal communication too and how about engagement we've spoken to whom here think about how communication is flowing through your team both when you're together in a meeting for example and when you're just getting on with the work does everything go through you do all help requests go through you and i suppose the easiest way to formulate these questions would be are people in your team talking to each other now while i don't want to put all the responsibility on you to enable this there are some things you can do you can encourage people to work on tasks together you can in fact structure tasks so that people have to work together or you can help to break down projects in ways that mean that team members have to share information or solve problems together and by the way all this stuff i'm talking about that's what team building is about that's about getting people working together in different ways to strengthen the team and get better results so if your team has some sort of flexible setup or if you are in a virtual team it becomes even more important to talk about your communication arrangements and you need to make sure that everyone can get hold of everyone else at some point so that people don't start communicating with the person who's always available which in a lot of cases ends up being you so have you got an instant messaging system or if your people travel a lot are your communication systems or platforms mobile friendly and finally and i've already talked about it is there a way for people to communicate in different ways to make sure that nobody is being left out of the loop just because they're finding communicating in a certain way difficult for example if you have people who struggle with writing in the language your team uses to communicate then make sure you have video calls often or if some people in your team need time to reflect on their thoughts and prefer to put them in writing make sure you have an easy to use collaboration platform and that it is being used so i don't know here you will have to lead by example and even broker some relationships finally exploration don't forget to look outside of your team for inspiration how are other teams in the organization operating who is responsible for what in the organization who can provide you with useful information how are people in your industry innovating and as a manager you probably have access to a range of people in the organization who can help you not just when you need to reach out but also who can help you to see things differently and if your team is dispersed or not located in the office then you might need a strategy to continuously encourage your team members to explore to use petland's terminology what other people are doing so communication how many times have we heard that things went wrong due to lack of communication so we've broken down team communication here into energy the quality of interactions engagement patterns of communication in the team and exploration the connection of the team to the outside world so if you want to review how your team is doing then maybe that's a simple framework you can just double check whether your communication ticks all those three boxes excuse me can i clear this away yeah sure but if you have a bit more time i'm sure it's okay for you to stay at this table and if you would like something to read and i recommend a team of themes by colonel stanley mccrystal which is all about creating an organization where transparency and ongoing communication is the norm and well mccrystal shares the process of how he had to change how they operated in one part of the u.s army to keep up with terrorists in iraq so yeah it's one of my favorite books not just because of what it's saying and what it's advocating for but of how he says it it's one of wonderful examples throughout the story of management and finally comes to the conclusion that we're better off trusting people to do their best work i can't leave you with a better thought than that can i so i would love to hear your thoughts on this episode i'd love to know what other topics you'd like me to cover in this podcast so if you want to say hello or if you want to subscribe to this podcast go to managementcafepodcast.com and you can find me there twitter is also a good place to connect i'm at pilar or t and finally if you are making the transition to virtual or hybrid then check out the website virtualnotdistant.com and the 21st century work life podcast and i might as well say this now virtual not distance has indeed been set up to help managers and team leaders of virtual teams or those in transition to training coaching and team facilitation so my little management challenge for you today is to observe how people are talking to each other within your team and outside it and to see whether there's anything that you can all do to improve communication let me know how you get on and i hope you'll join me for another coffee soon Thank you.