From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Communicating: When to speak up

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Communicating: When to speak up

- What do you suppose is the biggest problem in any organization and in most teams? When I ask this, I always get the same answer, communication. By definition a team is a group of people who communicate with each other well and failure to communicate is a huge cause of problems and of stress and inability to achieve tasks in teams. It's really easy to assume that the others know what you know. I sometimes run team improvement days, when we all go off-site and think about how to work together more effectively. One of the exercises I sometimes use involves each person being given a part of the information needed to solve a puzzle. And amazingly, they nearly always get stuck for ages and the someone suddenly reveals a key bit of the information and all the others go, "What, why didn't you tell us about that before?" There they were, saying, "If only we knew the price of kangaroos," and one of the team is sitting there with a little card saying, "Kangaroos cost $50," and he doesn't say anything. Incredible! A common real life version of this is when one of the team, possibly one of the more quiet, cautious, thinking types, has a worry about the plan that they've all agreed. This person thinks that part of the plan might go wrong, but they don't say anything and then later, when inevitably, it has gone wrong, they might quietly say, "I knew it wouldn't work." Oh great, now you tell us. So the rule is speak up if you have useful information and speak up if you've spotted a flaw in the plan, even if last time you were accused of being negative. And also, speak up if you're unclear. If you didn't quite catch part of the instructions or you don't understand the plan, then it's your duty as a team member to say so. Nobody is going to know that you're stuck, so you have to speak up. There have been times when I've spoken up and said I didn't understand part of the plan and afterwards, everybody else said, "We didn't understand it, either." So, if in doubt, you should say so. And finally, you should ask for help when you need it. It's very tempting to keep quiet and hope that you can catch back up, but if you're having a problem you should confess it and ask for help as soon as possible, before it gets any worse and affects the rest of the team. If the others in the team aren't supportive, then that's a failure by them, not by you. We all have things that we're not so good at and times when we need help and the point of a good team is that you can ask for help and it will be given. So, make sure that you always speak up in the four situations, when you have useful information, when you've spotted a potential problem with the plan, when you're unclear about the plan, and when you need help.

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