Best Possible Outcome

CHAPTER 9KEEP YOUR TEAM INFORMED AND COMMUNICATING

A highly effective team understands the environment they operate in and communicates clearly and effectively, both within the team and externally.

To manage risk, to deliver on strategy and to lead effectively, a team must, amongst other things, understand the competition. This knowledge is powerful. But some use information as a means of control, of consolidating power, often to the detriment of the organisation. Equally, sometimes the in-language of a team or an organisation can be exclusive, favouring those who speak the language and inadvertently disenfranchising those who do not.

This chapter provides examples of how information empowers and secrecy is dangerous, and how language can either include or exclude and isolate. A highly effective team must fight to remain informed, share information freely and communicate easily.

It was three years after those planes hit the towers in New York that I deployed to Iraq leading a team of 25 soldiers. I was a young cavalry officer, a lieutenant, comprehensively trained in everything from firing a rifle to planning and coordinating complex military tactics, from the technical aspects of armoured vehicle manoeuvres and gunnery to theories of human interaction, geopolitics and warfare. But I was unprepared for the human landscape of the environment I was entering.

There was a naivety, an innocence, in my professional attitude, bred from growing up in a peaceful, free, quiet suburb ...