The Main Communication Issues Faced By Teams

Communication plays key role in team success. So if your team doesn’t have proper communication they wouldn’t able to finish their projects. Teams struggle so much to establish proper communication in teams. The following are the issues teams often face in communication.

Major issues that teams faces in communication includes diversity as people are located in different geographical locations they wouldn’t able to have face-to-face communication which is major issue in teams and leads miscommunication. Another important issue is teams bringing various cultures into the organization. Due to the culture differences people prefer to spend more time with similar culture people rather than with entire teams. Communication issues include people being not accountable for their mistakes due to their ego makes it difficult for others to fix the problems.

Another issue we often see in team communications is people being not ready to listen to other team members. This makes people learning new things from listening to others. One of the examples that I personally experienced was all of my team members are work from home. We had an issue that needs to be solved immediately one of our team members had all the information related to that issue. He had internet connection issues he couldn’t able to send documentation for the team to solve that issue earlier than we did.

From the examples in Exhibit 6-1 first example shows how important is documenting all communicated information and send it to all other workers to better assist. In the second example If both the teams FBI and SAIC communicated well enough to get information from each other and having trust on why SAIC has warned FBI about project should have prevented this issue

Groupthink often makes observing a decision from various cultures attitudes and personalities before making it final. Groupthink can lead to teams thinking stereotypically making everyone else different from their teams. It also makes people feeling wrong and scared to provide their input as everyone else in the team are on same point, so they just don’t want to be a spoiler on the team. If a person says his opinion about group decision everyone else will pressure that person to agree with them or just be quite. The above mentions symptoms makes teams to not encourage individual decisions about any problem.

As decision making key in success of any project, teams must focus on success rather than person’s opinion about decision. These decisions can be group decisions or individual’s decisions. Depending on the situation and problem we can choose which decision we can use. It has been observed that decisions taken by groups are more perfect than individual decisions. The only drawback with group’s decision making is if the problem has to be solved immediately there wouldn’t be any time to communicate with the entire team and make decision. As individual decision has it’s own drawback of a single individual would not able to look at the problem from all angles.