Don’t wait to be asked—speak up: proactive communication as a crucial workplace skill
As AI tools become more prevalent, many technical jobs might be replaced, but soft skills like communication cannot be fully replaced by AI.
Before going on maternity leave, I started communicating with relevant colleagues about project handovers two months in advance. Several important projects were at critical stages, so I created a detailed handover checklist that included project progress, meeting notes, design file links (both the latest versions and all historical versions), meeting recording folders, and more. Whenever the colleague taking over couldn’t attend project meetings, I would record them, upload the recordings to our shared folder, and send a message through Slack to remind them to check the meeting notes and recordings.
Additionally, as the user experience designer representative, I attended a bi-weekly meeting. However, the final meeting conflicted with one of my important projects, and I couldn’t attend. Since I was going on maternity leave afterward and our team was already short-staffed, no one else could cover for me. Instead of simply saying “I can’t make it,” I emailed the meeting organizer, copying my manager, to let them know that my manager would be the point of contact for any follow-up questions. The meeting organizer replied: “Thanks for letting us know—you keep us informed, as you always do.” My manager also picked up the thread, saying that she would organize follow up meetings to learn about their needs.
Being thoughtful is important at work. I can’t just think about my own situation—I need to consider my stakeholders. Otherwise, if I leave a gap, how would they know who to contact?
Looking back at these experiences, I’ve come to realize that proactive communication is an essential workplace skill.
What is proactive communication?
Proactive communication isn’t about talking more—it’s about actively sharing key information at the right time and in the right way. It involves three aspects:
Advance notice: Before starting something, let relevant people know your plans
Progress updates: During the process, promptly sync on progress and any issues encountered
Results feedback: After completion, actively report outcomes
My husband is also excellent at proactive communication. His manager once described him this way: “I always know what he’s working on.” This sounds simple, but it reflects the true value of proactive communication.
Communication in cross-team collaboration
Cross-team collaboration is probably one of the most complex communication scenarios in the workplace. I encountered this situation when I first joined my current company.
I joined a team working in a domain completely unfamiliar to me, and I started in May but needed to deliver a redesigned system interface by December. This project involved four different backend engineering teams, each responsible for different modules, while I, as the designer, needed to integrate these modules into a unified user experience.
The frontend and backend coordination was somewhat chaotic at the time, and the project lacked proper management. If I didn’t take the initiative to coordinate, this project would likely spiral out of control. Think about it—if I had just focused on my own design work without communicating with other teams:
I might have discovered at the end that my design couldn’t be implemented because the backend APIs didn’t support it
Each team would develop at their own pace, and by integration time, nothing would align
No one would know the overall progress, and project delays wouldn’t be flagged in advance
Worst case scenario: come December, we would end up with a patchwork half-product
So I proactively took on the role of a part-time project manager. Besides quickly learning the technical knowledge in this field, the first thing I did was meeting with the key project leads (product manager, engineering manager, frontend tech lead) to understand their progress and challenges. I then organized several brainstorming sessions to have them “dump” everything in their heads about how users would use our product and the workflow steps.
After that, I discovered they hadn’t established clear module delivery timelines, so I organized another discussion session. I created a timeline working backwards from the launch time: if we needed to deliver in December, what needed to be completed in November and October, all the way to the current month. During the discussion, I shared my screen the entire time so everyone could weigh in on any timeline item. I also learned which modules I needed to track while designing and which code freeze periods to avoid.
I also suggested weekly check-ins so everyone could stay aligned on task progress according to this timeline. Later, the frontend engineer team made a tracker for their task schedules based on this timeline, helping us maintain better consistency in user interface delivery.
This proactive communication and coordination really worked. We delivered the project on time and with high quality, and in subsequent improvements, the system design held up well with excellent extensibility. Years later, when one of the engineering managers and I were chatting and this project was mentioned, he said: “You saved our project back then.”
Hearing this made me happy, but I wasn’t surprised—when I delivered high-quality work and proactively took on communication and coordination responsibilities, I began building trust within the team. And once this trust was established, its impact was far-reaching. In engineering-focused tech teams, user experience designers can easily be overlooked, and I often found myself excluded from important meetings. But through proactive communication and high-quality delivery, I gradually moved away from being marginalized. Recently, an engineer (I’m no longer on that team) reached out to me, saying they were reorganizing their technical documentation and thought I might have some insights, so he sent me the document to review. I realized that once I had established influence, even after leaving that team, people would still think of me and actively seek my input.
Communication in managing up
“Manage up” means a person should not only manage themselves well but also “manage” their supervisors. This might sound strange, but it makes perfect sense.
Generally, a manager oversees at least 3-4 people, and in large companies, possibly more than 10. They simply cannot know what each person is specifically working on. If employees don’t proactively report, managers can only judge their work based on impressions. Worse yet, when problems arise, they might be completely unaware until it’s too late to remedy the situation.
How exactly does managing up work? Simply put, apply the proactive communication model mentioned above:
Before doing: Tell them what you’re going to do
While doing: Tell them what you’re currently doing
After doing: Tell them what you’ve completed
This way, managers can stay informed about their team’as work status without having to micromanage like a parent.
I have a 30-minute one-on-one meeting with my manager every week, and I always prepare my topics in advance in a shared document. When the meeting starts, if he has something to discuss, he goes first; if not (which is most of the time), we go through my prepared items one by one. This way, I’m essentially driving our conversation rather than passively waiting for his instructions.
Also, when facing work challenges, I proactively seek help from my superiors. For example, we once worked on a metrics report that was very useful but extremely labor-intensive—the first time I led two other designers through it, the three of us each spent about four weeks on average, and we all had other projects to work on. This was unsustainable long-term.
So I held a discussion session with the other two designers to document all our pain points in creating the report. Then I met with my manager and skip manager to discuss options to simplify it. As a result, the next time we created the report, we successfully cut three weeks. While not huge, it was a step closer to being sustainable. If we had just powered through the second time, we could have completed the report, but I knew I would have felt extremely frustrated during the process. Rather than endure those feelings, I chose to proactively seek change. As it turned out, we spent less time and achieved good results.
Why is proactive communication important?
Behind proactive communication is actually a sense of ownership. When I treat projects as my own responsibility rather than “tasks assigned by the company,” I naturally want to be part of the big picture and ensure all components run smoothly. This mindset shift is important—from “I’m only responsible for my part” to “my part also affects the success of the entire project.”
This ownership mentality is what drives me to proactively coordinate timelines with various teams, thoughtfully plan maternity leave handovers in detail, and challenge existing workflows for team efficiency.
I’ve found that lacking proactive communication leads to:
Work achievements being overlooked and efforts going unrecognized
Fighting battles alone when facing difficulties, missing opportunities for help
Inefficient team collaboration with duplicated work and frequent misunderstandings
Being marginalized during organizational restructuring or project adjustments
This is very different from school and family life. In school, teachers provide guidance; at home, parents offer reminders. But once a person starts working, their career development becomes entirely in their own hands. By proactively taking charge of communication, I can build influence within projects and better control my career trajectory.
Moreover, as AI tools become more prevalent, many technical jobs might be replaced, but soft skills like communication cannot be fully replaced by AI. In countless situations, work still requires human-to-human communication to move forward. These soft skills are incredibly valuable—they not only help us do our jobs better but also enable us to build our own influence at work. And this influence is one of the most precious assets in our careers.