Who Needs to Know This?

When I was managing a larger team, I started asking myself the question after every big “discovery” – where I learned something that I thought was impactful in some way – “Who needs to know this?” It took some practice to both make this a habit and to make sure I reached the right people with the right amount of detail, but eventually I started to get the hang of it. More importantly, my team started making better decisions and felt a greater ownership in what was happening.

Consider this: In an information vacuum, our minds have a tendency to fill in the gaps with assumptions. If your boss has been looking anxious, you may wonder if you did something wrong or if the company is in trouble. If your significant other seems grumpy, are they just having a bad day or could your relationship be more rocky than you’d realized? We have an innate desire to understand and explain which is key to helping us relate to one another.

It’s human nature to bring order and sense to what is happening around us. It gives us a feeling of being in control. And that was the lesson my team taught me once I started doing a better job at sharing information.

I got in the habit of leaving the weekly managers’ meeting and immediately doing a 15 minute huddle with my team. I learned how to pick out the important stuff, summarize the highlights and even to anticipate some of their questions. What I realized was that as I was hearing about things for the first time, I started to think about the impact to my folks and what they’d want to know. As a result, it made me a better participant in these discussions as I could anticipate issues and was a better representative watching out for my team.

Likewise, because I removed the mystery about these management meetings and shared what was discussed, I think my team came to see this as just the normal structure of how the company operated. There was nothing to be fearful about or to gossip around because there was transparency.

The question “Who needs to know this?” then started to bleed into other areas of my life. Our bank prompted me to change our account password? Make sure my wife knows. There’s a scheduling conflict for this weekend’s game with the team I coach? Make sure the families know well in advance. I need to cut down a tree on my property line? Mention it to my neighbor before I start chopping. The more we do to ensure that people have the information they need and minimize unwelcome surprises, the better off we’ll all be.

This all said, there will be times when you don’t want to be or cannot be as open and transparent as you may like. But most of those times, if you have a history of being open with people, I’ve found that they’ll tend to trust you when you acknowledge that there may be something you cannot talk about. They know that you will have their best interests at heart and will share if-and-when you can.

Taken more broadly, actively looking to communicate relevant information has the benefit of helping us regularly consider the impact to others. It places us in a position to look out for others, to see the broader perspective and to anticipate both questions and issues. By looking out for the interests of others, we also benefit ourselves.

So let’s recap with some helpful tips:

• If you learn something new, ask “who might need to know this?” by considering who might be impacted
• Be sure to make it a habit – maybe even schedule time – to share information in a timely manner
• Overcommunicate changes big and small, but summarize key details (and welcome questions!)
• Share information proactively rather than waiting to be asked… get ahead of water cooler talk
• Whenever possible, frame things positively (e.g., “Here’s what new!” rather than “You may have heard”)

Know that I’m pulling for!