Intent

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We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.Stephen Covey, bestselling author, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything*

“Assuming good intent” has become a common recommendation for modern workplaces.* However, it poses some problematic dynamics in distributed teams, especially those that strive to be diverse and inclusive.

​caution​Asking individuals to assume good intent in written communications shifts the burden towards the receiver of the message and not the originator. When it comes to communication in distributed teams, what someone meant to say matters less than what was understood. This intent-impact gap can be perilous. No matter how well-intentioned, the wrong message can set a distributed team back significantly. Effective communication between two or more parties requires that everyone understands the message in the same way.

Your remote co-workers build a representation of you based on their interactions with your messages. They see how you gave feedback on their strategy document or how you replied to their email. They’ll observe the way you talk and interact with others in shared spaces, especially those that lack tone or facial expressions.

Distributed team communication requires the entire team to become skilled at clearly conveying intended meaning, and this can’t be replaced by using more or better tools. Communication tools won’t improve the quality of what you say; they can only make it happen faster or slower, or reach further.

Managers play a critical role in building practices to overcome the intent-impact gap, both stepping in to resolve communication-related conflict when it crops up, and giving team members clear feedback when their communication is ineffective, or worse, harmful.

​caution​Managers and executives must also conversely be aware of the outsized impact their own communications can have—an exec asking about a project’s status in Slack will likely be received very differently than an inquiry from a peer. Poorly written interactions, especially those from leaders, become part of the permanent record of a distributed team. These quickly erode trust, and can create damaging situations that are difficult to fix. See Team Integration for more on better communication practices for distributed team managers.