Communication & Your Culture

Hey there, happy Friday. I hope you’re having a great week so far, and equally as important - a productive week.

You know, we’re heading into the weekend and getting ready to enjoy some time with friends and family, maybe have a barbecue if we can get the weather to cooperate. Fortunately though, it won’t be long before summer will be in full swing and we start to migrate outdoors for the summer, and I think we can all agree, the sooner the better.

Before we head into the weekend though, I wanted to talk about the importance of team communication. Now, I’m not talking about the weekly meetings you and your team probably have, or the formalized announcements that get distributed to your people.

No i’m talking about the communication that does more for your business and your team than just 'keep everyone in the loop.'

I’m talking about the communication that includes collaboration, transparency, and serves as the foundation for a lot of the trust that’s created in your organization.

I had an idea earlier this week, and to me it seemed like a great idea. I ran through it in my head a couple times, and shot an email over to my partner to see what his thoughts were on it.

Now at this point, once I got his feedback, it would have been easy to chalk the idea up as a win and then move onto the next stage of planning to implement it, but before that I did something else.

I shot a quick email over to two other team members that I thought could provide some valuable insight. Not only was I looking to gain some valuable insight from other members of the team, these inclusion motivated folks who really thrive on being included, would appreciate having ideas bounced off them, and it would go a long way with them. 

My idea for including these folks in the decision making process was one that was made with culture in mind, but best of all, they provided me with some valuable info. Both of them actually sent back ideas that I hadn’t even thought of, and ways to make my suggestion even better.

If that isn’t winning in your culture I don’t know what is. 

Running ideas past your upper management is great, but make sure to rope in some other folks in your decision making process. Not only will it do wonders for those inclusion motivated folks, but it will also give you valuable outside perspective from people besides the same group of decision-makers within your business.

That double benefit is one that will pay off tremendously for your business.

So give that some thought before we go into this weekend, and hopefully we'll be grilling, fishing, swimming and all that other fun stuff before we know it.