Surface Ripples

Leaders as 'Gateways'

Thanks to technology, information sources are growing almost exponentially.  Not only are we faced with the ‘channels’ of TV and what is still available as printed media (e.g. newspapers), but also growing numbers of unofficial news sites,  opinion blogs (this is one of them! ) and social media.  Add to this, internal and external emails, and it’s easy to find ourselves overloaded with information.

As business leaders, one of our roles is to act as ‘Information Gateways’.  By this, I don’t mean that we act as censors in the way that some governments do as they limit to which channels their populations have access.  I mean rather that we can, to an extent, filter, summarise and distil incoming information for our team.

I see (and have been the victim of) frequent cases of leaders forwarding emails received with a ‘Kind Regards’ or ‘FYI’ without necessarily reading the content to decide whether their team needs to see it, which bits of it they need to see and why, or whether it could just be summarised in a regular, face-to-face Team Briefing.  

This necessarily imposes more workload on us, which I suspect is why we simply hit the ‘Forward’ button.  At times, this may well be all that’s needed if the content of what we’re forwarding is straightforward and requires action from some/all team members.  In this case, a simple ‘Please action as necessary by [deadline]’ may be all that’s required.  

Another case in which we may well be guilty is forwarding an email requiring some kind of action to several parties without thinking about to whom it actually should go.  The risk here is that everyone to whom it was forwarded may think that one of the others will action it and that no one does.  This is a classic case of ‘Anybody, Everybody, Somebody, Nobody’.  

Part of our roles is to agree and set channels, conventions and rules for sending and forwarding communications for the team and (in a broader sense) the business.    Done properly, this saves time, targets the communication at the correct team or individual and results in less value destroyed.

I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management.  I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.  For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.

Labels: Leadership, Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork

posted by William Martin @ 08:57