5 Biggest Reasons Why Information Sharing Empowers Team Members

Information is a power

It is obvious that having more information than others provides more advantages. If you have more information beforehand, you will be able to prepare more and be able to react in better ways. In fact, in "The Art of War" (孫子兵法) which is an ancient Chinese literature, it is written as "知彼知己者，百戰不殆", which means if you know yourself and if you know your opponent, you will not get into danger even if you fight for 100 times. This is the phrase which represents that information is crucial in any competitive situation. In addition, there is a theory called "Theory of Asymmetric Information", implying that if the person who wants to sell a product has more information than the buyer, there are more chances that the sales person will have a better deal. This is also an example of how information benefits others.

Is information empowering your team members?

Since information is a power, it can be used as a strong shield to protect oneself from getting fired from a company by monopolizing information. But if this kind of person exists in a company, the company must think whether information is empowering all team members or not. Fortunately, since information is not an object, it can be distributed equally and will not be lost. However, information can be outdated so that speed matters.

For our company, in our culture HENNGE Way, there is a statement to "Have Transparent & Open Communication". Practically, since we have employees from all over the world, it would be better to communicate openly to avoid miscommunication. But as a base of our company's culture, we believe that sharing information will lead to better results.

Personally, I believe in a quote stated by Steve Jobs at the interview of Wired in 1996, "Creativity is just connecting things." I believe no matter how brilliant ideas are, they are mostly a combination of ideas (or information). This means that if more people have information that can be connected, there will be more chances to be creative.

5 biggest reasons why information sharing empowers team members

Then, the question is how information sharing empowers team members. And, here are my 5 biggest reasons why.

1. No need to repeat

As a manager, I will have information which I need to tell other members. In fact, if there is a lot of information to tell, I will forget who I told the information to. Therefore, the best way to track which information is already told is to just share it with everyone at once. Telling the same information again and again is time consuming.

2. Build trust

People become suspicious if they find out there are people talking behind your back. In fact, "talking behind your back" literally means hiding some information from the person. Once a person becomes suspicious, everything starts to look suspicious to the person. On the other hand, if most of the discussions are done openly, other members could feel the inclusion that they are a part of the conversation. Once the member starts to feel that other members are standing behind, the trust will be built up.

3. Can be on the same page

In fact, setting goals for our team is always discussed openly so that no team members will have disagreements or suspicions towards our goals. We will have time to discuss and negotiate as we decide our goals. It might take some time to come to an agreement but since we took time to discuss in order to reach an agreement, everyone understands the reason why we set those goals and nobody will question it.

As for the progress of reaching our goals, since every status of progress is also shared, no one needs to question whether we are on the right track or not.

4. A way of training

Recently when I need to make a decision, I will try to be as clear as possible explaining how and why I made the decision. By showing how and why I made the decision, I believe (and hope) that our members can learn the ways of making decisions.

Other than that, I try to share my learnings as much as possible. Learnings can be from some useful articles or from movies I found on the internet. And sometimes, I also share my learnings from my previous experiences.

5. Less misunderstanding

Since I'm not a robot, it is impossible for me to repeat everything I said exactly in the same way. And choice of words during each conversation might leave a different impression to different people. This might lead to some misunderstandings between different groups of people. Plus, if there are questions coming from different places, I will need to combine and summarize all the questions I got, or else people will not have the same information. Hence, it would be beneficial to accept questions openly and share the answers with everyone.

Our way of sharing information

In our company, we use Slack as our internal communication tool. Our company has a unique rule that prohibits making private channels unless it is really necessary. Basically, channels we create need to be public channels. It was quite an astonishing policy when I started to use Slack. Plus I felt a little shy to discuss issues in channels where everyone can view. However, this was only during the beginning. I could see the benefit of public communication once I started using it.

First of all, a lot more information can be accessed if most communications are done in public channels. And, I found out that there are a lot of things that I can share. For example, since my position has been changed several times, some of my previous tasks are transferred to other younger members. Sometimes, I see conversations of them wondering whether their plan is effective or not. When I happen to find out that there are conversations where younger members are wondering, and if I have some experience on those, I will share what happened when I tried to do similar things. Since the business environment is different, the outcome might not be the same as how I experienced, but I believe information about what has happened in the past will help them to be aware of possible outcomes. If the conversation was done in a closed space, I wouldn't have noticed their struggles and I wouldn't have had the chance to share my experience.

Secondly, there are situations where members would like to react to some conversations. In Slack, there is a function to leave emoji stamps such as 👍 and 🎉 on the message posted. Let's say one of our members got a purchase order from our customer, not only our team members will put stamps to praise the achievement, but also many other members from headquarters will praise our achievement. I believe open and transparent communication provides more opportunities to acknowledge the achievement throughout the organization. And, I believe this kind of acknowledgement will lead to better employee engagement.

Lastly, being able to know the things going on without having to ask anybody is really efficient. If we know how others are doing, there will be less chances of doing things which are in a totally different direction. Plus I can utilize materials others have created to make my work more efficient. Moreover, I would feel a sense of achievement if other members used my findings on their reports. It shows that my findings were useful.

As I recognize other team members were helped by the information I shared, I feel more strongly that information is a power.