The higher up you rise in an organization, the more likely you are to be given access to information that is not commonly known to everyone else in the organization. This can present a dilemma.
What do you share and what don’t you share?
It’s not as if people don’t know that there is information floating around somewhere that they don’t know about. They know. There is a saying in the facilitation world that goes “Where the attention goes, the energy flows.”
If I were going to change this saying to relate to information within an organization, this saying might go “Where information doesn’t flow, the rumor mill grows.”
A lesson I have learned is that there is virtually little that you can’t share with people. AND if there’s something that you can’t share, that doesn’t mean that you don’t talk about “it.” It means that instead of sharing the “it,” you just share that you can’t talk about “it” right now and that you will share it as soon as you can (AND you make sure that you do come back and share it when appropriate).
So, the question isn’t so much about what to share as much as it is when and how to share the information. What examples do you have of what, when, and how you’ve shared information with your team?
What have you learned about balancing informing with discretion? Where have you misjudged in the past?
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Kris Krueger, PhD is an Associate for a global strategy & technology consulting firm
She works with clients to transform their organization and deliver results
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