I have the bad habits to share everything with my team, expose my problems, ideas, advices anything through a public channel whatever tool we have chosen. However, I can understand that for some people, shy people, it could be a bit hard so I do my best when someone initiates a conversation in a private channel with me and take any excuse to move the conversation to the public channel. That is fine and is part of the process to build a team. What I wasn't expecting was that making all this information public could be overwhelming or even annoying for some people, usually people that hold high positions in the organisation.
I was thinking about that, about the reasons why it is so frustrating for these guys and the reason that it is gaining more weight is that they prefer to hide the dirty laundry. The motivations could be multiple but, in my opinion, it is an attempt to hide their own incompetence, if they are not able to fix the problems that arise in these conversations they choose to swipe them under the carpet.
Privacy is good, I am a big defender and a practitioner but when it comes to building a team it is really bad. Communication is key, in a remote team even more important and to hide information leads to misinformed people, and misinformed people usually make errors. I am not going to boring you with a long list of mistakes my team and I are doing all the time thanks to following strongly this bad practice but I am sure you know what kind of errors I am talking about.
The path to building a team is painful and frustrating and sometimes fruitless but it is worthy, so if you are in my skin right now, I strongly encourage for you to continue doing what you are doing. I believe it is a big improvement and remove some waste on the way but, don't fall into the same pits you are trying to fix, to give an example is a great mechanism to settle down a new practice, again communication is key, so be open with your team and all the people affected by this change, explain why you think it is important, listen to them and please share with us how is it going.
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