Communicating With Honesty To Create Quality Work

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Exposing the heart of your project is a rather special category of communication!

Compact teams and small projects bring people close together, but you certainly wouldn't open up about your vision to just any random character. There needs to be a certain level of trust in the person you decide to bring into the fold, and you both must have a foundation of mutual respect.

However, once you have found a trustworthy team member or a project partner, a very useful communication channel has been opened.

Being shown the core of the project presents an opportunity to focus one's work in the exact direction that would make the biggest difference. Team members and partners now know what to do to direct their efforts to empower the exact values that you want to be highlighted in your branding.

A good example of this is the problem between creativity and efficient industry. If, say, a team member prioritized a complex creative presentation during content creation only to find out later that the values of the project are about a particular kind of simplicity and minimalism, the efforts were a drain on the project's resources.

This is avoided with transparency and trust. The trust you give out will reward you with work making the image of the project more believable because its values are reflected in the work being done.

The communication channel that your trust has opened has benefits for you also when it runs in the other direction.

Comments regarding the sensitive core components of the project carry a different sort of weight than that of light suggestions about more surface-level elements. Of course, the idea here is not to follow and implement the content of these heavier comments right away, but to consider what might have inspired them.

In other words, simply looking at the core building blocks of your project may not reveal what really works about them or what needs changing. Rather, it is how your team and your collaborators react to them that tells you more about what your foundation is.