Research 2024-09-30 Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager Vevey

Before a collective decision: what information should you share with your manager?

When a manager brings several functions together to make a decision, facts everyone already knows can dominate the discussion. The useful question is therefore specific: how can you work with your manager to bring in facts held by just one person, without turning every decision into an exhaustive inventory?

What the literature establishes

Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) experimentally studied collective decisions in which participants did not all have the same information. Discussions favoured information that was initially shared, at the expense of facts known to only one member. In this setting, discussion alone was therefore insufficient to bring out the information needed to identify the best option.

The distribution of information matters too

Garold Stasser and William Titus (1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) extended this analysis by varying the amount of information and the proportion of shared items. Their findings show that these characteristics influence the pooling of unshared information. The mechanism matters: a fact known to several participants has several potential entry points into the discussion, unlike a fact held by just one person.

Before a collective decision: what information should you share with your manager? — SHR, Vevey — Vaud

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that you should tell your manager everything other people do not know. These studies do not justify that rule: exclusive information is not necessarily relevant, reliable or decisive. The task is instead to distinguish facts that could change the choice from details that merely lengthen the briefing. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What these experiments cannot establish

These studies concern experimental groups, not the everyday relationship between an employee and their manager. They do not establish that a preparatory note alone improves a business decision, or that a fact, once mentioned, will be interpreted correctly. Confidentiality, competing interests and hierarchical power may also affect how information circulates.

A practical check in Vevey

In Vevey’s global food industry, group headquarters and Riviera SMEs, a decision may draw on facts distributed across purchasing, quality, finance and operations. As part of SHR’s « Construire une relation efficace avec son manager » programme, one practical exercise is to agree with your manager on a short advance list of relevant facts held by only one function, recording their source and their possible implications for the choice. Across the next three cross-functional decisions, measure the proportion of these facts actually examined before the decision is made, keeping a record in the minutes. This ratio checks whether the identified information circulated, not whether the decision was sound; it provides a starting point for adjusting preparation with your manager. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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