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Easy Management Insights - Keep Your People Informed

Written by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: When you talk to your employees, you build relationships. When you tell them what's going on in the workplace, you'll find they respond with support and ideas...

Easy Management Insights - Keep Your People Informed

It's pretty easy to understand. If you enlighten your people with the information they need to do a great job, they are likely to do it. Much more so than if you keep them in the dark. "People will make reasonable decisions if they are given proper information."

Thom Serrani, Mayor, Stamford, Connecticut

You see, it's amazing how resourceful employees are!

They have within them a wealth of capabilities, some that you know about and others that, for one reason or another, get lost beneath the surface.

When we help them find their lost talents, we can be amazed and even humbled by the qualities they have within them, so it's up to us to help them, by giving them the information they need and then letting them get on with it.

We make decisions every day, many of them minor and others much more important. As managers, we often have as much information we need to make the best decisions - and sometimes even then, they don't work out quite as we planned them!

When we hold back information from our people, for all sorts of reasons, often surrounding our own insecurities and beliefs, we ask them to make decisions with limited resources to hand.

And that is likely to hold them back and make failure a real possibility, doing no-one any good at all. In fact, in some circles, doubters amongst employees might feel they are being under-informed is a tactic, to help them fail!

When we show our trust in our people and offer them everything we have, however sensitive that might be, we create a space where they can be much more creative and productive with their decision-making processes.

Which in turn leads to their greater success; their growing confidence; their skills development that are so, so valuable to you in many other ways than the issue at hand.

Holding back does no-one any favors. It stifles capability development and means further attention is often needed to redress problems that then happen.

Keeping information inside, so often means a manager is thinking more about their ego than the consequences of the secrecy they think is of value.

It rarely is. Indeed where managers resort to secrecy and witholding the information that their people may well need to make reasoned judgments, it's much more likely to be value-destroying than value-creating. It can be that dangerous.

Give them the information - trust yourself to trust them. You know it makes much better sense!

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Article Tags: communication skills, information, informed employees, management development, team building



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