Scott Porad

I had breakfast last week with someone who works at a relatively big company.  He has a front-line job, and was telling me how he was reprimanded recently for spending too much time inquiring about the roles of his peers and the overall strategy for his department.  His boss, he said, told him that he just “needed to put his head down, stop asking questions and do his job”.

This got me to thinking about my earlier post on Managers and Executives.  One thing that went unsaid in that post was the importance of internal communications.  Almost everywhere I’ve worked has underestimated how important it is to constantly communicate to the team the goals and strategies of the business, and how the day-to-day projects that various teams are working on tie into them.

Jazz at the Preservation Hall, New Orleans

Internal communications are especially important in a world where executives are acting like executives, and managers like managers.  Without executive micro-management, managers are making decisions independently and need to have clear direction on how to guide their teams.  Likewise, employees make dozens of independent decisions each day, so without micro-managing mangers they need clear direction to guide these daily choices.

The bottom line is that managing–either for executives or managers–is a bit like jazz.  The band leader has to outline the framework of the song (i.e. the key and time), but the players have freedom to work within that framework.  Some songs (i.e. some companies or jobs) require the framework to be tighter and more coordinated than others, thereby the players have less freedom.

As a manager, it’s a really, really critical part of your job to make sure the players in the band know the framework, so that they can use their creativity and talent to play the best music possible.  As I said, I believe the value in this is widely underestimated, so I make an effort to regularly communicate to my team the path were on and how the project they’re working on fit into the plan.