🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

Who do you go to when you have a work-related question or want to bounce an idea off someone?

💡 Concept

Chances are you usually rely on the same people to answer your questions and provide feedback on ideas. And chances are you're having these conversations in private channels, like direct messages on Slack or Teams.

This approach may be quick and easy in the short term, but always leaning on private conversations with the same people is an example of proximity bias in action. As such, this style of communication can lead to some serious issues:

🕶 limited perspectives

🔗 lack of connections across teams or functions

☝️ increased likelihood of groupthink

🌑 uninformed decisions

🏝 information silos

🙈 exclusion of team members

If you want to improve decision-making, knowledge transfer, transparency, and inclusion in your team, default to public channels for communication.

🎬 Take Action

Here are some actions you can take to make information more accessible:

• Ask questions in public channels.

• Suggest moving conversations to public channels if the content is relevant to others who are not already participating.

• Participate in async conversations.

• Set expectations for defaulting to public communication channels with a Communication Charter, which is a document that outlines how and when your team or organization uses the available communication channels.

📄 Additional Resources

6 Reasons Your Team Needs a Communication Charter

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Set expectations for defaulting to public communication channels with the Communication Charter Template.

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.