As a manager, the greatest factor in successfully managing a team is in his / her ability to cultivate emotional intelligence through empathy. What holds true for customer development, does so for building a sticky culture for your employees.

If you are a founder or early employee managing other employees, it is imperative that you remember what is what like when you first looked at the ugliness called “product”. Painful onboarding and moments of desperation should surface as you recollect the hell that was your initial foray into a bastardized (international and polyglot) codebase. Regardless of your level of experience, it is miserable getting up to speed on code that you have not written yourself, especially aging startup code that is full of deprecation flags, unused apis, and dangling comments like “WARNING: memory leak nearby…” or “TODO: only works on Tuesdays, make it work everyday” that couldn’t inspire confidence even in the most arrogant of software ninjas.

Empathy and trust is required to traverse such a violent experience. Err on the side of overly communicating and you will go far with a team. It is convenient to assume things, it is not easy to undo the bodies of work implemented upon those easily made assumptions.

The temporary peace and quiet gained from a tapering of communication is often disguised as a welcome reprieve from constant solicitation associated with an “experienced developer” reaching complete onboarding. However, a wise manager or team lead would be weary of silence, discard the shallow elation, and earnestly seek the relatively small annoyance brought by frequent verbosity so as to avoid larger significant setbacks associated with painful refactors / rewrites / rollbacks born from working under false pretenses.

ASS (outta) U (and) ME

If your team / manager is not a fan of verbosity and frequency of communication, send up a red flag to him / them. Although you may feel independent and autonomous in the short-term with a “hands-off” approach to communication, you will sow a culture of straining miserable misalignment in the long-term that can rupture relationships.

Be careful not to confuse verbosity with “excessive” communication from employees with junior status, it is an easy way to lose your best talent. Communication is the bedrock of any solid team, and you should target talent that can embrace this fact. Talent that cannot communicate leads to mortal corporate disfunction on multiple levels and devalues a company by tying IP to individuals instead of the company, creating much more enterprise risk.

Imagine your top employee is poached by a competitor or incapacitated by an act of God, if your blood pressure skyrockets, you need to change the culture of communication. When other employees are involved in the product and the business, it will amortize this risk of single point of failure as well as increase employee retention by improving team knowledge, growth, and expertise while boosting communication skills of the subject matter experts tasked with sharing their expertise.