There are still some that withhold information--integral information such as goals, ongoing efforts, data reports, direction, and reports about accomplishments, challenges, and need for betterment.
With regard to those who communicate regularly and authentically, I am so thankful for your regular share as your share empowers what I can do day-in and day-out.
For those of you who don't share much at all, I wonder if you realize that you open the door for conjecture, questioning, and even disrespect. When people don't know what's going on they become less and less a member of your team and their distrust grows. Lack of communication breeds lots of questions such as:
- What does he/she do?
- What does he/she value?
- What do the broader data reports say about our work--reports that some see, but others do not see?
- What is the long range goal? What does that goal look like in days, months, and years?
- What professional learning have you done? What have you learned? How will that impact your work and our collective work?
- How are you developing the program, connections, resources, and efforts with betterment in mind?
- What challenges are we facing as a team, school, grade-level, or system? How do we plan to meet those challenges in the days ahead?
- What are the goals for the year ahead, and is there room for greater distributive models of leadership and effort to establish and meet those goals?
I am a fan of communication that acts as an ongoing conversation of what we are doing now, what we've done in the past, and what's planned for the future. Effective communication is regular, targeted, easy-to-read, and typically communicates with visuals first if that will do as visuals are a quicker and more memorable way to communicate (thus the success of Instagram and Google's efforts to have everyone reading images rather than words to create a world-wide visual language). Good communication anticipates what the team will need to and want to know, and essentially creates the chapters of the story we create together and will continue to create in the days ahead.
When communication is irregular, untruthful, vague, not helpful, exclusive, sarcastic, incomplete, and/or demeaning, that communication does not support the team and the great things we can do together.
As I write, I realize that I can continue to develop my communication. I continue to read about this and make changes regularly in this area. It would be interesting to discuss this with other professionals to hear people's points of view. Perhaps I'll suggest this discussion at an upcoming Edcamp to see what people think. In the meantime, if you have ideas about this, please let me know.
