Underrated Skill: Proactive Communication about Timelines

If you're leading a project with a bunch of stakeholders - there's a critical skill that can make or break a career: proactive communication, especially when it comes to timelines. This insight is often overlooked but is crucial for professional success.

No one enjoys chasing team members for updates. It's a frustrating aspect of management. However, the key to success isn't about always hitting deadlines perfectly; it's about how one handles the situation when things don't go as planned.

For example, consider you're working on an engineering team on a few shiny feature. Marketing is one of the stakeholders because they have to prepare site materials, reach out to influencers for their campaigns, deploy ad campaigns and more. Because of a regulatory issue that the legal team just informed you, you realized that your team needs to change the feature to be compatible, and because of it the release date needs to be postponed by 2 weeks.

While you're now working on it keeping in mind the revised release date, marketing still working with the old date in mind. Just a few days beforehand, you chat with the head of marketing about the release plans and mention the new release date. Now marketing is furious because they have to revise all their plans in line with the new release date. If they would have known it earlier, they would have had more time to prepare.

Here a failure to communicate changes to deadlines has resulted in unnecessary organizational friction. It has strained the relationship with the marketing team, and the next time a new feature is being released, they will be less trusting of whatever deadline you mention.

Building Trust Through Transparency:

Trust is the bedrock of any successful stakeholder relationship. When stakeholders feel informed and involved, they are more likely to feel confident in your leadership and committed to the shared vision. Proactive communication cultivates this trust by fostering a culture of transparency.

Regular updates, even when there are no major developments to report, demonstrate your commitment to keeping stakeholders in the loop. Sharing both good and bad news, even when it's uncomfortable, builds credibility and reinforces the perception that you are a reliable and trustworthy partner.

When you fail to warn your superior about potential delays well in advance, you're not just missing a deadline. You're eroding trust and making your manager look unreliable to their superiors. This eroded trust also makes you look unreliable, and in the future, your manager might shy away from giving you more high-profile projects to handle.

This single issue has derailed promising careers. It's not the missed deadline itself that's the problem. It's the fact that deadlines, which were promised, were broken. It's this unpleasant surprise that erodes the trust. If stakeholders know well in advance that a timeline has changed (and the reasons why), then they are more understanding of it. You actually gain more trust this way, since people know that if anything changes, they will get to know from you right away.

The solution is simple, yet often overlooked: Be proactive in communication.

How to proactively communicate on deadlines

Keep a tight grip on promises. If a deadline is slipping away, flag it early.

Give the manager time to adjust, to communicate upwards, to find alternatives. Not just your manager, but all stakeholders should know as soon as reasonable about changes to deadlines. This is one of the prompts Voohy's Manager Notes feature helps you with as one of the questions to ask in the AERIS Model.

It's a make or break skill

Delays and unexpected hurdles are part of the job. But how these situations are handled sets the great professionals apart from the average ones.

This is one of the important rules of stakeholder management. Learning to manage expectations and communicate proactively will put you starkly ahead of your peers. And failing to do so can make you lose opportunities in the future.