Clear communication is the key to effective group coordination.

According to Forbes, five essential group communication strategies are as follows.

• Purposeful communication. Keeping communication purposeful—focused on the goal at hand, with a clear purpose for each interaction—helps ensure that no important information gets lost among less-important casual conversation. If your group activity is a social outing, for example, like coordinating dinner plans, this might mean keeping jokes outside of your group text so all the important information is easy to find. If your group activity is a company meeting, it might mean creating a separate communication channel for each specific need to make sure nothing gets buried.

• Productive meetings. When planning meetings, it's very important to make sure they're tangibly contributing to your group's progress. This mean setting and sharing an agenda in advance, as well as setting clear expectations for a meeting's outcomes—"by the end of this meeting, we'll have the fall schedule in place," for example.

• One-on-one interactions. As the group leader, be sure to remain open to one-on-one interactions as needed. Someone in the group may need your help with something they don't feel comfortable bringing to the collective conversation, and it's important that they always know the door is open.

• Effective channels. To ensure everybody is getting the right information at the right time, take care to use channels of communication that meet the needs of everyone in the group. Sometimes, this is as simple as deciding whether to text or to email your friends about your weekend plans. Other times, it might mean choosing the software that will most successfully network a team of 100 employees.

• Progress updates. This one is somewhat self-explanatory. In order for everyone to work toward the same goal, they should be kept apprised of the collective progress toward that goal. Tangible goals and milestones are important for pace-setting, synchronization among all group members, and morale.