The Communication Factor

SHARE
Request to reuse this
Add to my favorites
Topics: Diversity, Organizational Culture

Organizations are collections of people. Each of those people is unique in some way or another. Salespeople have skills and experience oriented toward customer relationships, negotiating and so on. Engineers have their own set of skills and experience, as do people from each functional area in the organization.

It's hard to make generalizations that some people can or cannot do something because the wonderful diversity of humanity creates varying levels of skills across the organization. For example, you may have a janitor that is far more adept at negotiating than your best purchasing agent; you can't automatically assume that a janitor knows nothing about negotiating. However, it could be dangerous to assume the converse as well.

The very same thing is true for projects. Projects vary all over the board and can range from a new software program, a new bridge, a new wing for a hospital, etc. In each case, a diverse group of people will be brought together to make the project a success and to turn a dream into reality. What you as a leader in the project must realize is that to leverage the diversity in the various teams, stakeholders, and so on, you must tailor your communication methods to each group to be effective.

Stakeholders
Stakeholders are people and/or functional areas with interests in the project. What we must not forget is that the stakeholders aren't just …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.