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ManagingYour Team 141

Let’s compare the costs of under- and overcommunication.
Undercommunication leads to lack of information, which in turn
leads to mistakes. It also hurts the morale of the team when mem-
bers are out of the loop and feel alienated. Even when we think
we’re saving time by not passing on information, we often end up
having to play catch-up later on.
Overcommunication generally costs less. Yes, busy executives
get annoyed when you give them too much information, but the
cost of that to the organization is low, unless it takes overcommu-
nication to an extreme. The marginal cost of including additional
people in the information flow is small, especially given the ease
of modern communication tools such as E-mail, voice mail, and
intranets.
Moreover, the costs of overcommunication are mostly “oppor-
tunity costs”: executives who could be performing value-added
tasks have to spend incrementally more time filtering and assimi-
lating information. Compare this with the value-destroying poten-
tial of undercommunication—clients or customers lost, accidents,
lawsuits—and you can see why we say that more information is
better than less. Of course, there are limits to this hypothesis, and
you should assess each situation carefully. But in general, if you
must err, do so on the side of overcommunication.

IMPLEMENTATION GUIDANCE
What specific steps can you take to improve communication in
your organization? First, formalize listening training. In our survey
of McKinsey alumni, we found that, in general, their new organi-
zations offered considerably less interpersonal skills training than
McKinsey does. Granted, not all companies are in a knowledge
industry per se, but corporate training is increasingly becoming a