How to improve team communication (also remotely)

To improve team communication you need to first step in your team’s shoes.

Go back to when you had just joined a new team — how was it to start a new project and being thrown into it with little to no guidance?

Yes, your manager sat down with you and gave you a run-down of what you needed to know — but how could you be expected know as much as people who worked on that same project for months?

The more you grow into leadership, the higher the chances are that you’ll be the one doing the explaining and setting people off to a great start — and you’ll be the one overseeing team communication as a whole.

There are good and bad ways of doing it and in this post we’ll look at what it takes to do it well.

Specifically, I’ll be sharing with you two concepts that will come in handy when your goal is to improve team communication efficiently in a time-sensitive setting — doesn’t matter if you’re in the same room or you are a remote team — these two concepts always apply.

Mainly, this is relevant for how you communicate with your team, and secondly, this will help you understand more the communication dynamics you see.

The first concept is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and the second one is called the Curse of Knowledge — fancy name, I know.

They are both a form of bias and they both have to do with how much you assume that the other person knows.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The story of the Dunning-Kruger effect is a fun one. In 1995 a man robbed two banks at gunpoint and without disguise. CCTV recorded him and he got caught to his complete astonishment. He could not understand how it was possible that the police found him.

You see, this man had a plan. He knew from childhood that messages written on paper with lemon juice were only visible after heating up the paper and the ink. According to logic then, lemon juice was effectively invisible ink, and if lemon juice is invisible ink, putting lemon juice on your face would make you effectively invisible.

If you completely lack knowledge and ability on any given topic, you will also be unable to recognize your lack of ability on it.

Because it was so absurd, people got curious about what went on in that man’s head. What they found is that not everyone is able to recognize his or her incompetence on one topic: only the people that already have a certain level of competence on something will have a meter to measure how much they do or do not know. So if you are absolutely rubbish at basic chemistry and bank robbery, you will not be able to understand how terrible the idea of using lemon juice as disguise is.

Back to our example, this means that your ability to get someone on board in a new situation also depends on how much this person already knows:

• if this person is completely new to the project, he or she will be less able to understand the full extent of the work ahead;
• if the person has instead worked on similar roles or projects before, he or she will understand you extremely well.

Strange, isn’t it? Especially if you think that the people that need your explanation the most are the ones less able to understand it and make good use of it!

The Curse of Knowledge

The second bias is called the curse of knowledge and it has to do with how much you assume that the person in front of you already knows. Thing is, you often unconsciously assume they know as much as you do.

This is why you will talk to them and describe the road ahead in a way that you think is clear, but it’s actually not. For example you may be using jargon or technical terminology that is part of your daily life: you have learned and absorbed the meaning of all acronyms and terms, and you unconsciously assume that most of them will be clear to the other person as well.

The more you know about one topic, the more difficult it will be to understand how little others know about it and act accordingly

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To read the rest of this story, head over to the original article.

Originally published at https://ebz-coaching.com on March 23, 2020.

Originally published at https://ebz-coaching.com on March 16, 2020.

I’m a leadership and communication trainer and consultant.

I offer Leadership Coaching, Leadership Development Workshops, Team Development Workshops

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