How to Communicate more
At many points in our career we are required to give and receive feedback: “360 Feedback”, “Annual Performance Reviews”, “Check-ins”. This feedback is normally compulsory on all sides and may be taken into account for performance ratings, promotion decisions and bonuses.
These factors mean people often give the most comfortable and obvious feedback, rather than the most interesting or helpful. For neurodivergent people, this feedback can unintentionally poke at our sore spots and send us off to spend all of our energy on our weaknesses in response to poor feedback. This means we spend less energy on our strengths and end up making the problem worse.
One of the most common pieces of feedback is:
You need to communicate more about your projects
But in my experience of having seen this feedback a lot, what people usually mean is:
I don’t think you’re producing enough
No one wants to say you’re not being productive, but sometimes it happens. What people can say is that you’re not communicating about all the great work you are obviously doing! This is safe feedback, that won’t upset anyone, and is kind of true.
Unfortunately, we NDs are already nervous about their communication skills: it’s draining, requires organisation and can be incredibly scary. So we hear this and immediately jump into action to fix the problem. We are determined to not get that feedback again. We decide we’re going to become the best damn communicators at the company: maybe set a calendar reminder to send our weekly updates, find a mentor to help with the skills or write up a 10 point plan of how to cover all the different types of communication.
If you manage to implement this plan, maybe you won’t get the communication feedback again but people will find another polite way of giving you feedback about productivity, because the problem hasn’t gone away. Your communication was never the issue.
Even worse, these plans can sometimes consume a lot of our energy, which actually means you spend less energy in your strengths, and the situation actually starts to get worse rather than better.
So what do we do instead?
Acknowledge the feedback, move on and spend your energy on what makes you awesome.
Write more code, design more inspiring UIs, source more clients or land more deals. Whatever excites you. Let your work do your communication for you.
The Inevitable Nuance
Some level of communication is required, and this varies massively between role, team and project. Occasionally your communication really is causing your strengths to be restricted. However, this is pretty uncommon. Normally people’s communication develops well enough to do what’s necessary, and they avoid what’s unnecessary.
