No one will ever deny the importance of communication, be it between spouses, manager and their repartees, senior management to the company, However one thing lately caught our attention and turned out to be fantastic advice
You can read the original Article here
This was about Elon Musk sending a mail to all Tesla employees and telling them to talk to each other instead of going through the regular manager chain of command. Isn’t this like the most obvious thing to do ? Why do you need to write an email about it ? That’s when it hit us in our face. We are so attuned to working in the paradigm of communicating in the chain of command that we were blind to see than an alternate reality existed.
We jumped on it and sent a similar email within the Astarc Group companies. What happened next will blow your mind. (Don’t worry, it’s not clickbait). People did not have a reason to blame communication for lack of solution. Since communication as an excuse was no more allowed, the accountability for job not done either fell on the person or his counterpart if he did not respond. A visible change was seen, people started physically walking up to their counterparts to follow up or ask for help. It did break some of the existing processes but that’s what we wanted. Some KRA and SOP reconfiguration and Voila!! , we have the same outcome with better accountability and reduced turnaround time.
While this may be seen as a big company problem but the seeds are sown right from scratch. A culture of open communication is imperative to reduce information and product bottlenecks and hopefully prevents political power houses within fast growing orgs. An indirect effect is also that it breeds courage within the team to go out there and get the job done no matter the hierarchy. Go try it out now.
Let us know your experience in comments or drop a line at rijul@astarcventures.com
You can read more about the Nugget Series Here and the existing nuggets here
Tags: Communication, Culture, Nugget Series