Communicate in Advance

Sean

2 years ago

I lead a team of millenials and centenials largely. These are individuals who are 20 – 40 years old. One of the things that I have to wrestle with are surprisingly some of the most basic things in professionalism but I also now understand the importance of clarifying even those things that are supposedly a given at work.

One of our core values is clarity which individuals in my team have to memorize and recite:

I know that communication is important and communicating clearly enables me to save time, avoid mistakes, and create harmony. Information is the package, communication is how you deliver it – will the package arrive on time, at the right place and received by the person?
“Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act. “ – James Thurber

I have never really given much thought about following up on tasks and work with certain individuals in my team – until it got to a point where it’s eating up too much of my time and processing capacity to have to routinely do so.

This became a realization as I was talking with my business coach, Michael Sonbert of Rebel Culture. He pointed out that this should not be the case and it is in fact a poor use of my time – and the time of my leaders in the organization.

Instead, people should communicate in advance when they are about to miss a deadline and take initiative to notify the affected individuals or parties and in doing so rectify their mistake/s.

With this, I instituted a new protocol which may benefit you, my reader if you are also leading an organization. Here is how the new protocol looks like:

Send an email to the affected parties with the subject line “I am about to miss a deadline” at least 24 hours before the agreed upon deadline.
Indicate how you understand the importance of this deadline given to you on the first paragraph.
Specify the supposed agreed upon deadline’s day and time.
Outline why you can’t make the deadline and if there are any blockers that you need help with.
Commit to the next best day and time (deadline) you can submit the work that is expected.

It’s something that is stupefyingly simple but at the same time extremely necessary especially with the landscape of the local workforce and its professionalism and maturity.

I hope this post has helped you in some way and if it did, please hit me up or leave a comment 🙂

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