Communication Excellence in Project Management

"What does research reveal about how project managers can communicate with their teams more effectively?" My latest work is a feature article in The Public Manager.

One-hundred and forty-one years ago, a charismatic but, vain leader made a bad decision that cost him his life and (almost) all the lives of the people who served under him. General Armstrong Custer decided to fight a force of 2,500+ Indian warriors with only 210 men under his command. John Hollon, well-known HR guru, has argued that we should memorialize June 25th as a cautionary warning of the perils of bad management.

What made Custer's decision so wrong? According to Hollon, five factors:

1. Refusing to listen to others.
2. Arrogance.
3. Didn't focus on the goal.
4. His opponent had a better strategy AND people that could be trusted to execute the strategy.
5. Bad luck.

Personally, I am not sure that the fifth factor wasn't just a natural result of the first four factors. Even so, when I've seen projects go off track and even ultimately fail, I bet you could trace one or more reasons back to one or more these factors.

As a project manager, take time on Saturday to reflect on Custer's Last Stand and think of how you can prevent your current project from being your last stand.

Good article in HuffPost Business about beating task saturation with operational elasticity. I didn't know the actual names of these two terms but, I certainly know feeling of being overwhelmed with tasks and not having the organizational resources to lighten the load of too many tasks.

Task saturation can lead to employees shutting down or hyper-focusing on a single task. Task saturation can not only harm employees, it can destroy organizations.

"Task saturated employees may often start to shut down and channelize on one problem. . . . Some channelize to a point where they are dropping some of the most important elements that can keep your jet in the air or in business, keep your business alive. Agility is lost and if an issue comes up and is not in the channel they are dealing with at that point in time, they are going to ignore it. . . . With zero to minimal operational elasticity you often find teams having high stress levels, pushing back, starting to take more time off, basically - shutting down. As operational elasticity decreases, performance decreases and executional errors increase."

There are five ways to increase operational elasticity and prevent task saturation:

1. Build a pipeline of talent.

2. Set clear expectations and have frequent performance debriefs.

3. Establish agility in the organization.

4. Recognize employees for their work and contributions.

5. A coherent, consistent, and communicated strategic narrative.

Task elasticity may be more of a problem for project teams because of the heavy schedule and resource constraints. In the above list, there are three methods in which communication helps to build operational elasticity. Good project managers already know to set clear expectations, recognize project team members, and deliver a compelling [project] strategy narrative.

So, what does operational elasticity look like in project teams?

If you have been in the work environment long enough, you will probably take one type of personality test or another. There is the Myers-Briggs, the DiSC, and many others. At the end of the test you end up with a letter code, color code, or some type of neatly-defined category. The idea is that if you understand your co-workers' types, then you can communicate better.

In a recent Forbes article, we have another set of types that explains why you and your boss don't communicate well. He or she might be analytical while you are personal . The key is to speak analytically to your boss while your boss learns to speak personally to you.

These types may have some explanatory power but, is this the whole story behind miscommunication? We all know that people communicate differently given the context of a situation. For example, I speak differently to my friends when I am relaxing at a restaurant then when I am in a business meeting with colleagues. Also, most of us are easily adept at adjusting our communication styles to speak to different people.

It is my contention that communication styles play only a small part in miscommunication. The reason that miscommunication occurs is not a fundamential communication style mismatch; it is the inability to communicate effectively so as to engage the listener's attention. This may be because speaker didn't form a good message and/or the listener may be distracted by external factors.

Thus, I believe miscommunication is a matter of engagement and not a matter of style.

What do you think? Is there a valid personality test that explains miscommunication?

Recently finished Caroline Webb's How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life. In this book, Ms. Webb shares the latest neuroscience findings to help you become more personally productive and work better with co-workers.

One piece of advice that I found especially useful for project teams was the "discover-defend axis." The idea is to shift people's behavior from being defensive to being open to discovery. The key is to build a safe place where people can freely explore without feeling the threat of loss or failure.

I've seen this with project teams where project managers have created a culture of defensiveness (often unintentionality).  By intentionality creating a culture of discovery, project managers can realize greater innovation and productivity from their project teams. There are some great strategies that can project managers build a great culture for themselves and their teams.