Information Conduit

One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.

Easy, right? An e-mail shows up, you read it, and you decide it needs to go to one of your developers. So you forward it. Here’s the wrinkle: there’s vastly more information than you think; there are more people who need it than you expect; you’re going to screw up your assessment of who needs it more often than not; and you’ve got a lot of other essential crap to do.

First, let’s worry about the consequences of poor information management, because that’s how I’m going to get your attention.

So, a not-so-average day at the office. There are rumors of layoffs wandering the hallway and the rumors are correct. Now, there’s a Long Stare outside your office, and, of course, the first thing you do is invite her in so you can triage Long Stare’s issue.

“Why the long stare?”

“The what?”

[Denial.]

“You’ve been outside my office for two minutes staring at me.”

“I have?”

[Wow, total denial.]

“So, what’s up?”

“Um, am I going to be fired?”

Now, this is your best developer. She’s your rock star. She’s the one you throw the vaguest of ideas at and you know she’ll turn that hand-waving into a feature, a product. She’s done it five times and now she’s in your office wondering if she’s about to be fired.

What happened? How is it possible your single most valuable engineer believes she’s so irrelevant that she could be let go?

She’s starved for information, and in the absence of information, people will create their own.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Think back to your last layoff. What happened? Well, first you heard the rumor that “layoffs are coming,” which, as it turns out, wasn’t a rumor and was the last factual thing you heard for the next three weeks.

See, the management team was spending those three weeks trying to figure out what was going to happen and who was going to get laid off. But they didn’t actually know yet so they weren’t saying anything, which was precisely the wrong thing to do.

Everyone else was wondering whether they have a job or not, and in the absence of knowledge, they were making up some pretty crazy shit.

It’s the rumor mill, it’s the grapevine, and its existence is directly related to how well you, the manager, are communicating.

The creation of information is the act of creating context and foundation when there is none. Call it a rumor or gossip, but what it really is is a reaction to a failure to communicate. When I hear a fantastic piece of gossip, I’m listening for two things. First, what is actually being said, and second, what informational gap in knowledge is being filled by this fantastic fabrication.

Back to the rock star who thinks she’s about to be fired. Given that I know there is no chance she’s about to be fired, what am I hearing? First, I’m hearing, “I don’t know where I stand in the organization.” It’s not that she actually thinks she’s going to be fired—she doesn’t understand her value. Second, I’m hearing, “Given that I don’t know my value, I’m going to make up a crazy consequence, which isn’t actually likely, but boy, will it get someone’s attention.”

Gossip, rumors, whatever the creation is, it means that someone, somewhere in your organization is asking for help.

Starvation Prevention

You’re going to need damage control with the rock star. You’re going to need to sit her down and remind her of the five different times she created great products out of your hand-waving. You’re going to need to check in multiple times to make sure she knows she’s valued, but mostly, you’re going to need to figure out how she got starved in the first place.

Well, it started with you not conveying information, we know that, but the question is, why? Here are some common failures.

“Don’t worry, I’ll remember to pass that on.”

Perhaps the biggest loss of essential information is when managers rely on their brains as to-do lists. This is a common mistake made by green managers who haven’t figured out their conduit gig yet. They sit in a meeting and hear a to-do they need to pass on to one of their engineers and they think, “Got it. Remind Bob that Phil is going to break the build unless X happens. I can remember that.”

If that was the only item on the list, this manager would be in good shape, except he’s got four more meetings and ten other to-dos to remember before he sees Bob in the hallway and remembers, “Phil . . . something.”

Write it down. Keep a notebook with you all the time and anything that sounds remotely interesting goes in that notebook. This leads us to . . .

“I don’t think anyone needs to know that.”

Bill was a new manager on my team and he was just happy to be attending the staff meeting. My staff meetings are broken into two parts. Part one is the recital of all the information I’ve gotten from my boss’s staff meeting combined with my thoughts and opinions. Part two is quick status and relevant bits from each of the folks in the team.

There is a lot of redundancy in part one. How are products doing, who has been promoted, what were the latest customer wins. If you listened to it each week, you’d be bored, but I recite the same thing. Every week.

Bill picked up on the boring immediately and stopped taking notes during part one. When I asked him about it, he said, “I don’t think my team cares about customer wins for a product they’re not responsible for.”

“Really? Why don’t you ask them?”

The following week Bill was furiously taking notes. His comment: “Yeah, they want to hear it all.”

Especially in larger organizations, you need to pay careful attention to maintaining a consistent flow of organization information. It might feel like you’re passing on useless information, but the rule of thumb is that you never know what your team is going to care about. I had an engineer who faithfully kept a running diary of who our new customers were, and, after a few months, he knew more about our customer base than most of our sales folks.

I realize it could be a full-time job relaying every piece of information that you’re exposed to, and part of your job as a manager is to make judgment calls regarding what gets passed on. My rule of thumb is that if I’m debating whether to pass something on for more than a few seconds, I might not be qualified to decide, so pass it on and see what happens.

“My employees can read my mind.”

Maybe you’re doing a good job of relaying information. You’ve got content-rich staff meetings and a steady flow of forwarded e-mails. That’s terrific. I’m glad you’re passing on all the information, but the question is, “What are your employees hearing?”

The last VP at the startup did a stunning job of forwarding every single e-mail that showed up in his inbox. Every e-mail. It was great to be included in all the VP’s communications, but it was a borderline spam situation. What was worse was his cryptic brief additions to the beginning of each e-mail.

“Interesting.”

“We should.”

“Hah. Told you!”

More often than not, I could dereference his one-word thoughts based on recent conversations, but there were times I had no clue what I was supposed to do with an e-mail.

Simply because an e-mail or thought makes sense or has some interesting context in your head doesn’t automatically mean the insight is going to be obvious to anyone else. It’s a goal of mine to have a team that is working closely enough together that they share a common mind, but taking the time to give each piece of information that you’re passing on a bit of your personal context never hurts. It takes time, but it maintains the quality of the information while preventing a slow mutation into confusion.

The good news is, if you’re ever wondering what your team heard or read when you pass on your information, you can ask one of my favorite follow-up questions: “What did you just hear?”

Aggressive Silence

A structured regimen of information dispersion is the first step in keeping the team in touch with the rest of the organization, but you’re still going to screw up. Whether it’s one of the failures I described previously or a totally different failure, your job is to constantly assess what your team needs, and I’ve got really good news.

Your team is going to tell you what they need. Whether it’s gossip, rumors, staring, pacing, or yelling, your team is always telling you what they need to know. This means your job is not just to be an information conduit; it’s also to employ a policy of aggressive silence.

In my staff meetings, I throw in the occasional long pause. Maybe I’ve just said something controversial and received no pushback. Perhaps I know one person at the table is seething about our most recent discussion. So I wait. I fill the room with silence.

In this uncomfortable quiet, if they’re about to say it, they just do. Try it; just shut up and see what your team says when you’re saying nothing.