It’s possibly the best advice for managers I've given so far. When you’re communicating with your team, lead with context and reassurance. Never message someone on your team, "let's talk when you get a minute". That's void of information and scary as heck!
I have to remind myself of this when I'm rushing. It's faster to ping someone to arrange a synchronous talk than it is to write out what I need to say and cover all the bases. But that doesn’t give me license to skip all the context. Broad strokes are okay. An information vacuum is not okay.
Accidental spookiness invites story-crafting. Minds race. Lacking information or context, we tell stories. They often aren’t happy stories, regardless of how good your relationship with the team. We humans are better at convincing ourselves to fear something (survival instinct) than the other way around.
Avoiding spookiness reduces the chance of people telling themselves negative stories. Context and clarity counteract reading the tea leaves and world building. Even more important, it prevents people from pre-gaming the conversation. That way, they don’t prepare for a conversation that happened in their heads, instead of one that’s about to happen. (Avoiding pre-gaming is important on both sides of the conversation, as it turns out.)
A corollary to “don’t be spooky” — deliver constructive but critical feedback as close to the “original sin” as possible. Receiving feedback that you did poorly weeks after the fact is disconcerting. It can lead the recipient to wondering what other things they’re doing poorly but won’t hear about until later. Which leads to story-crafting, and the whole negative cycle starts a-new.
Give your team enough context to pre-game conversation based on the real context, not conjecture. And don’t hold on to feedback for “that perfect time”.
