Two Ears, One Mouth

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

We know a project manager must be able to express clear goals to team members, define scope, delineate tasks and report status to stakeholders. But it is your ability to receive communication — to listen — that gets to the heart of pressing issues and reveals solutions.

This is the fifth article in an ongoing series on project leadership and communication that seeks to inspire good project managers to become better project leaders.

Read any article or book on project management and they will tell you that communication is one of the most important skills that a project manager needs. But what the heck does that mean? What is communication? When I ask that question to a group of students when I am teaching an introductory course on project management the answers are usually geared around things like: providing team members with clear goals and objectives; explaining the project scope and deliverables and reporting status.

On the face of it, these are admirable responses, but they are all focused on delivering communication —the “mouth” part of communicating. They aren’t focused on receiving communications, the “ears” part. Communication most definitely needs to be a two-way street, and as project managers we need to spend much more time listening and consuming messages than we spend delivering messages.

Working with your team

Let’s start with a fairly simple …

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