Healthy Communication

Now that you are in this position of great responsibility as Chief Information Officer, what consistent actions do you as a leader take to improve team communications, daily, weekly, monthly?

I think there’s a few things to keep in mind. One, you need to be sort of authentic and transparent. I think you need to recognize that there are various different communication styles, various methods in which individuals or subteams receive and react and respond to information that they’re getting.
So you need to find, I think, different modes. Is it email? Is it Slack? Is it in person? Is it video? Is it not video? I think you need to think through the various tool sets that we have today and what makes sense either in different contexts or for different subteams or for different individuals.
But I think what’s very important is that consistency. You need to A, be open and transparent with sort of what is going on in the team, what is going on in the organization. But you also need to be creating a safe space so people that do have ideas, opinions, thoughts and feedback and share them without feeling like they’re going to be penalized for it or they’re going to be questioned about it.
So to me, healthy communication is all about creating that safe space, creating and modeling the behavior where differing opinions are actually sought out and encouraged. And the message is very clearly sent that there’s no sort of bad idea or sort of “Is this going to be a waste of time for me to even bring it up?” No, everything is worth bringing up. We are very open to hearing feedback, we are very open to hearing ideas and we will be sort of as transparent as we can in terms of what we’re doing, what we’re working on, what are some challenges we’re facing.
And that, I think, is some of the key things that as a leader I try to work on and that I encourage my managers and leaders to work on as well.