Welcome to this month's edition of Plumtree Perspectives, and whether you're new here or returning, thank you for being part of the Plumtree community!
Each month we share new ideas, practical tools, and simple frameworks focused on how R&D teams can collaborate more effectively, thrive in complexity, and deliver faster for patients.
The highest performing teams do not communicate more. They communicate with greater intention.
They make it easier to share information, ask better questions, surface risks early, and align around what matters most. They create simple habits that reduce assumptions and help everyone stay connected, even as the work becomes more complex.
When communication becomes a shared team capability instead of an individual responsibility, work moves faster with less friction and better decisions.
What we're noticing
Communication is one of the biggest sources of tension we see across the teams we work with.
That is not because people are unwilling to communicate. It is because they are communicating from different perspectives, different thinking and learning styles, different levels of context, and at an increasingly demanding pace.
People leave meetings believing they are aligned. Then the work begins, interpretations differ, priorities shift, and important context gets lost.
What we rarely see are explicit team agreements for how communication should happen. Most teams never define what information should be shared, when it should be shared, how risks should be escalated, or what level of context others need to make good decisions.
Instead, communication is left to individual preference. Everyone is doing what makes sense to them, but not necessarily what helps the team.
The insight
The challenge is not communication itself. It is the lack of shared communication practices.
Teams often skip the step of agreeing on what needs to be communicated, how they will communicate it, who needs to know, and what should be communicated within an expected timeframe.
Without these agreements, people spend valuable time interpreting information instead of acting on it. Decisions slow down. Work gets repeated. Risks surface too late. Teams unknowingly create unnecessary friction because everyone is working from a different set of assumptions.
Research continues to reinforce the value of intentional communication. A recent McKinsey article found that teams with above average communication are three times more likely to outperform their peers through greater efficiency, stronger innovation, and better results (article link).
Communication quality predicts team performance far more strongly than communication frequency. More meetings and more messages do not help; clearer ones do.
The Plumtree Perspective
The teams that communicate most effectively do not rely on individual communication skills alone.
They build simple, repeatable communication habits that everyone agrees to use.
Recently, we worked with a team that introduced a simple “swirl” hand signal whenever a discussion started going off course. Another adopted a shared habit before raising issues. Frame the problem. Explain the impact. Prioritize it.
Neither solution was complicated. Both created greater awareness and made conversations more focused and productive.
We then help teams to embed these frameworks into their everyday ways of working. They can be built into a Microsoft Planner board, a Slack Canvas, OneNote, or whatever collaboration tool the team already uses.
When structured communication becomes a shared agreement across meetings, emails, and collaboration tools, the right information is shared at the right level and at the right time. Over time, these practices become embedded habits that improve alignment, reduce unnecessary back-and-forth, and help teams move work forward faster.
What you can try
Creating a communication matrix.
When we work with teams that have not made their communication practices explicit, we co-create a communication matrix. It is a simple way to establish shared expectations.
WHAT will be communicated? What type of information is being shared?
TO WHOM? Who is the audience?
WHY will it be communicated? What is the expected outcome and impact?
WHEN will it be communicated? What triggers communication? How frequently will it be done?
HOW will it be communicated? Which communication channel will be used and what will be the format of the information?
WHO will communicate? Who is accountable for doing this?
The framework is intentionally simple. It creates consistency, reduces assumptions, and helps teams spend less time trying to understand the issue and more time solving it together.
Ron Friedman explores what separates exceptional teams from average ones, drawing on research across business, sports, and science. Rather than focusing on talent alone, he shows that sustained performance comes from the habits and conditions teams intentionally create every day.
A few ideas that stood out:
High-performing teams are built through intentional habits, not exceptional talent alone.
Small, everyday interactions shape trust, learning, and team performance.
The best teams continuously reflect, adapt, and improve how they work together.
If you're leading teams in complex environments, Superteams offers practical, research-backed ideas that reinforce an important truth: sustainable performance comes less from having extraordinary people and more from intentionally designing how those people work together.
Want to learn more? Click the image for the Amazon link.
Until next time!
If your R&D team is navigating complexity and you want support getting aligned and moving faster, we’re happy to start with a conversation.
Plumtree is here to help teams and organizations work together at the speed of science.
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