Hi Nie!

This week's Leadership Dispatch is about how to decide what news to share with your team and when to share it.
​
If you share every whiff of bad news with your team, they may become paranoid and paralyzed, preventing them from doing their work. But of course you will need to share bad news sometimes.
​
And what about good news? Should you just share everything you can? Sharing unconfirmed rumors could be counter-productive, but you do get a boost when you can share some good news.

So how do you decide what to share and when to share it?

Use the "Filter or funnel" framework to make those decisions easier and more strategic:

​Leadership Dispatch: Filter or funnel​

See you next week!

All the best

Josh

Filter or funnel

One of the most challenging aspects of leadership is deciding what information to share with your team and when to share it. In general, you should over-communicate so everyone is on the same page as often as possible, but you shouldn’t communicate everything to your team.

Here’s a rubric to help you decide what to communicate:

Filter hypothetical bad news; funnel confirmed good news.

You are privy to a lot more of your organization’s inner workings and machinations than your team is. And while you want them to be synced up, you don’t want them to be paranoid or possibly paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. You also don’t want them to be excited about something coming down the pike only for them to be disappointed when it doesn’t come to fruition.

When thinking about filtering, your threshold for sharing potential bad news should be high.

Here are some questions you might ask before sharing bad news with your team:

• How likely is this bad news to come to fruition?
• Will it even affect them?
• Is there anything the team can do to avoid the bad news?
• Will knowing the bad news help them prepare?

If the bad news is confirmed or at least extremely likely and it will affect your team, then you might want to get out ahead of it. If they can help prevent the bad thing from happening or at least prepare better, then you might enlist them once they understand the stakes and how they can help.

When thinking about funneling, be generous. Once you confirm the good news, then lean toward sharing it unless it may be a distraction or might better be saved as a surprise. Sharing good news is a way to encourage your team, bolster morale, and counterbalance the daily frustrations that come along.

Want to share this with someone? Here's a direct link: Leadership Dispatch: Filter or funnel​