4 Communication Mistakes to Learn From

Bruce is the founder of ProjectManagementHacks.com, a resource for growing IT project managers.

  Communications Management  

Project managers spend hours communicating daily in the form of meetings, emails, calls and more. Given the importance of communication skills, we must keep working hard to improve. Taking courses and reading books about communication can certainly help, but I have a different approach to share.

Let's learn from communication mistakes that contributed to company problems, tragedies and disappointments. You'll be positioned to communicate more effectively if you can learn from these anti-examples.

1. Failing to Follow Up on Critical Information: Lessons From 1945
Our first example comes from the history of the World War II. In July 1945, the U.S. Navy lost the USS Indianapolis to a torpedo attack. Hundreds of people died.

The tragedy was initially blamed on the ship's captain. But years later, the truth was revealed—and the ship almost certainly could have been saved with better information.

According to Philip Di Tullio, author of No Room for Error: How a Breakdown in Naval Communications Led to a Needless Tragedy, several communication failures led to the event. Let's focus on one aspect of the story: the sharing of intelligence insights obtained through the ULTRA program.

"The relaying of [route information] is the first break-down in communication that led to the Indianapolis' sinking….Captain Samuel Anderson, who worked …

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