Inbound communication

Inbound communication is the best place to start because it is often the trigger for internal discussions. The manager's function with inbound communication is not to become the team's only conduit to the outside world, as this would create a single point of failure. It would also create a Dilbert-worthy caricature of a micro-manager! However, there is a significant role for the manager to play as a facilitator, interpreter, and, sometimes, moderator.

There are of course very legitimate reasons for some communications to go centrally through the manager of a team or project. For example, work requests can be triaged and shared with the team in a controlled way. This avoids duplication and confusion, which could ensue if the same work request is asked of multiple team members directly without everyone's knowledge.

One of the key inbound communication roles a manager performs is to facilitate the communication process so that the appropriate messages get to the team as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the manager also filters the less-appropriate distractions and not-quite-ready requests, so that the team can focus on what they are currently doing, on the important tasks that are urgent, and, overall, allow them to stay on task.

To be an effective facilitator for inbound communications, the manager must be able to actively listen. The goal here is to spot and, if necessary, debunk any misleading preconceptions. This is a difficult skill to master because even closely aligned colleagues can have very different assumptions about similar things. In an ever-busier work environment, more and more assumptions are made every day due to the pressure on teams to deliver quickly.

I have been on a conference call with international colleagues for 30 minutes before one colleague said they were confused. It turned out that they thought the "DR" meeting was about disaster recovery, as opposed to a dress rehearsal for a go-live date. In this particular global organization, both meanings are used interchangeably depending on context and geography. On this occasion, since the agenda was coordination for code deployment, there was an assumption that this context was understood by a global team who don't work together often. However, it wasn't!

A crucial part of being a manager is being able to discern fact versus opinion and truth versus fiction. This is different from the technical troubleshooting skills you have as a developer, where the answer lies in the code or a bug report, which are both fact-based artifacts.

When you are able to distinguish what and why certain things are being said, your responsibility and challenge are then to understand where the assumptions come from, so you can challenge them constructively if you feel that's appropriate. You can then also re-interpret the message if you need to and convey the right message to the right team members.

As a development team manager, I have encountered situations where a group of project managers all assume that they can secure the same developer to their project at the same time. As difficult as it was, this assumption needed to be challenged in order to avoid mass confusion. Following this, a constructive discussion can determine which projects have highest priority, while also feeding into the developer's view on what is possible.