Enabling Communication

Like many people, I've been reflecting on my experiences over the past year as we kick off 2025. What stuck with me the most was the value of communication.

In tech, we often see individuals rewarded and recognized for their technical capabilities, or a team for achieving an outcome. It is more rare to see people rewarded for their "soft skills", like communication, or leadership. Now, I also don't think they should be called "soft" skills because they are some of the hardest skills to develop... but that's a different conversation.

How to play the game

Have you ever played a game where you didn't know what the rules were, what the goal was, or what your position was? Most games have clear and concise instructions for the rules of play. They tell you what your objective is, and what is within or out of bounds for your position. Of course, you'll have to come up with your own strategy for success, but specific expectations are in place and clearly defined. How many of us could say the same about our jobs?

Too often, teams are being pushed to deliver quickly without really understanding what they're working towards or how the piece they're building fits into the overall puzzle. Priorities are changed quickly and projects scrapped, leaving team members scratching their heads and wondering what they should be focusing on. In order to create a productive environment, everyone contributing to a project should understand the problem they're trying to solve, the constraints they have to work within, and most importantly how solving the problem provides value to their customer and the company. Why would a team be motivated to work hard and deliver quickly, if they don't understand the value or importance of the work?

Many companies that have shifted to using a DevOps mindset have done so without resetting expectations for employees and their roles. In doing so, they've created teams that are confused about their responsibilities or not meeting expectations, which can lead to demotivation, poor product quality, and higher attrition rates.

Communicating with the other players

Many software developers and engineers are in the profession because we like to solve problems, so it should come as no surprise that when we encounter an issue many of us jump right into problem-solving mode... often without pausing to fully understanding the problem. In an engineering organization, this can lead to solving the same problem multiple times, in multiple ways, across multiple teams. From the outside looking in, it's easy to point this out and say, "what a waste of resources and time!" but in practice it's much harder to get these groups to communicate. Why?

"Why won't people just talk to each other?!" - Me, every day.

I've given this a lot of thought over the course of the past year, and I noticed some trends in barriers to communication based on my experiences. There are many more reasons why we fail to communicate with each other, but these are the ones that stood out to me this year.

• Ownership: figuring out who to talk to is one of the biggest issues I've seen. If teams don't know who owns what, or what other teams are working on, how are they supposed to know who to reach out to or if another team might have already solved their problem?
• Functional: often different functions within an organization, like product management, developers, and site reliability engineering (SRE) are managed independently of one another. If their leaders aren't communicating across functions, why should the rest of the employees?
• Geographic:
  • Workforce: many organizations have employees spread across the globe. Between time zones, and a mix of in-office, hybrid, and fully-remote workers, it's difficult to connect to the right person.
  • Culture: people in different countries have different customs and ways of doing business. Across the globe we think, speak, and act differently.
  • Language: for the majority of people around the world, English is not their first language. Language should also take into account your word choice, tone, and expression.

Breaking barriers

A wise person once told me:

"It is the responsibility of the person trying to relay the information to communicate it in a way that the recipient understands." - My Mom, probably.

We need to communicate better within our teams, and across our organizations. In order to do that we have to first consider:

1. Who is the audience? Or, in other words, who are we communicating with?
2. What are we trying to get them to understand?
3. Why should they care about what we're telling them?

The answers to these questions can (and should!) impact the way you approach the conversation. If you're trying to explain what you're working on to someone on your team who's knowledgable in the same areas, you might explain it differently than if you were talking to your CEO, or your non-techie friend. Each person would care about it for a different reason. Your teammate could be working on the project with you, deep in the details. Your CEO could be looking to understand the value this project provides to the company, and your friend might be curious about the new role you took on recently. Using the same approach for all 3 most likely wouldn't yield the results you're looking for.

Many of us forget to take this a step further to preempt some of the barriers we may have in communicating with our audience. Thinking a little deeper about who we're talking to can help significantly.

For example:

• Ownership:
  • Do you have the right audience for what you're trying to achieve?
• Functional:
  • What does the audience know already?
  • What might they need to know in order to understand your point?
• Geographic:
  • Where are the people in the audience from?
  • What might affect how my tone of voice, facial expressions, or word choice are interpreted?

Bringing intention into 2025

Communication goes beyond words. It is in the way we interact with one another, our posture, our facial expressions. Even the act of not talking to someone says something. We need to think about who we're trying to communicate with, and how we can do so most effectively. We need to consider the barriers in our organizations and how to help our teams overcome them... and we need to get people talking to each other.

After all of this reflection (writing is a great way to do that!), my biggest take-away from the past year is simply this: we should all be more intentional in the way that we communicate with others, and how we set up our organizations to enable communication.