A Culture of Communication

I had to present to my list of peers a list of initiatives  we had been taking in our group to facilitate communication and sharing of information. I felt some of the things we were doing would have been easily applicable to us. For a while I have been frustrated of the lack of communication within our group. We have so much in common:
- same job title
- same process to follow
- very similar challenges
- same base technology
In short we are all development managers within the same company, the only true difference was that we were working on different products.
We had no real communication or shared experiences. It was hard to feel we were working for the same company or worse, individual developers could not imagine being assigned to a different team.

So, I did the presentation, asked for feedback and nothing. I was a bit disappointed but then I thought about it. All the things we were doing within our group had been implemented over time and that it required quite a lot of work on my part to get people on board. It was not something we worked hard at until people saw the benefits and then we moved on to the next one. It was first thought as extra work that needed to be done in addition to anything else. It was a way to loose what made them special, the information they were holding onto.

Then I realized I was facing 2 things:
- resistance to change
- failure to understand that you grow by sharing information a lot more than by hanging on to it.
I remember trying to explain my manager 10 years ago we should have an intranet and him asking ‘why should we bother?’. Not everyone sees the benefit of creating a repository of the company’s IP.

What I probably need is getting support for their management so I can get them started on communicating and then hope that by doing they will understand the benefit of sharing. As we do it more and it then becomes a habit, the less of a chore it is and the more we benefit from it. I think it is one of those skills that you can develop by making it a habit. The more we communicate, the better we are at it and the easier it is. It dawns on me that we might not all be born communicators but it is something we can learn by doing. That is something worth thinking about.