Team Talk

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  

It’s not just project managers who need to be strong communicators. Team members must be willing and able to communicate with each other, but many may lack experience or training in this area. Here are some simple tools and techniques to help them connect with each other.

As project managers we hear a lot about how important it is for us to have strong communication skills, but we also need to consider the importance of communication for our team members, and that’s an area that is often overlooked. Effective teams should be able to communicate well between all team members — not just when the project manager is involved. But that’s not going to happen by chance.

While an ideal situation may be to provide all team members with communications training, that’s not likely to happen, so I want to look at some of the basic tools that we can provide our team members to help them to improve the effectiveness of their communications. This involves a lot of the same concepts that we have learned as project managers — which should make it easier for us to convey them — but with some slight tweaks to the way that they are applied to our teams.

Allow natural team development

I’m a great believer in teams and team members, and one of the things that I have found consistently in my career is that if you create an environment where …

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