Improve Flow of Information

When you work in a big organization or for a big organization you are familiar with that. All the politics, office games, minor and major squeezes etc. When a client wants to increase a vendor’s stress level. When a boss wants to encourage his team to work after hours. When two different teams try to delegate thankless task to each other. It’s always a game of half-truths and basically-no-lies.

How to do deal with that? Shorten information chain in your organization or part of organization. Encourage openness. The more you know the better are chances you’ll detect those games, which actually makes them useless. When you improve flow of information you can easily cross-check most of news you gather and categorize them among “let us blame you, please, please,” “typical minor squeeze” and “Houston, we have a problem” levels. As far as everyone passes information to all interested people organization can act better both when it’s time to call it a bluff and when serious problem in on the horizon.

It’s just so easy. And if you asked me, I strongly prefer to tell just a truth instead of playing office games. Unfortunately usually it’s not me who sets the rules and I have to dance like others play. When I think about it I know just a handful of people who don’t play their games in business and (what a coincidence) our cooperation was always good, no matter what issues we had to resolve.

Think of it next time you’ll be about to try all those old tricks.