How Great Teams Communicate

Teamwork is impossible without communication. Teams have to share information; they have to share ideas. Without communication, teams can’t coordinate tasks. They can’t help each other; they can’t do anything other than work alone in silence.

Since communication is so vital to teamwork, it’s no surprise that the quality of communication affects the level of performance of a team so strongly. Great teams communicate differently than average teams. So, it’s worth examining what high performing teams do differently in terms of communication. Fortunately, researchers have been studying those differences on teams large and small for several decades now.

In this article, we’ll outline four differences in how great teams communicate.

Great teams communicate equally

The first difference in the way great teams communicate is they do so equally. In mediocre teams, there’s usually one or two people who are extroverted and extra loud dominating the conversation. But great teams take care to ensure that everyone on the team speaks equally during meetings, and that everyone’s perspective is sought out in email or other text-based discussions. They don’t assume that silence means consensus, they actively seek out dissent or actively check for consensus before moving on from a discussion. Sometimes this is because…