Improve Team Communication
12 weeks · 4 milestones
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Milestone map
3 milestones
Communication problems in teams manifest as specific, observable failures: decisions revisited after they were made, the same question asked in multiple channels without a canonical answer, people learning about decisions that affect them after the fact, meetings that exist to share information that could have been async. The baseline must name specific failure patterns with evidence — not general impressions — and connect them to a specific structural gap in how the team shares information or makes decisions.
Proof required
Submit: (1) a communication audit covering 4–6 weeks: at minimum 5 specific communication failure incidents, each dated and categorised (information-not-reaching-the-right-person, decision-not-documented, wrong-channel-for-the-stakes, async-information-treated-as-sync); (2) a root cause diagnosis (200 words minimum): the dominant structural gap in the team's current information-sharing or decision-making system, with the audit incidents as evidence; (3) a pre-committed structural change and expected outcome: the specific change to meeting cadence, async norms, escalation paths, or decision-logging — written before implementation begins.
What gets checked
- Audit incidents are specific and dated — 'people don't communicate well' is not an audit; '2026-06-15: the backend team spent half a day implementing a feature that the PM had already decided to de-scope in a Slack channel the backend lead was not in' is an audit incident
- Root cause diagnosis identifies a structural gap, not a behaviour pattern — 'people don't speak up in meetings' is a behaviour; 'the team has no canonical decision log and decisions are communicated informally, making it impossible to distinguish between live decisions and superseded ones' is a structural gap
- Pre-committed change is specific enough to implement — 'improve communication' is not a change; 'add a weekly 30-minute async written status update replacing the current Monday standup, with a read-receipt requirement from all team members' is a change
Resources
Enroll free to unlock learning resources →Mastery
Google re:Work — Team Norms and Communication
Go further: the research basis for why specific communication norms predict team performance.
Unlocks after completing Foundation + Depth