Communication Excellence in Project Management

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?

In the December 18, 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review, there is a good article on the four elements of IDEO's wildly-successful employment engagement formula. The four elements are:

1. Permission to play - employees are allowed to experiment in a collaborative environment to test out new ideas while building productive relationships.
2. A common purpose, tailored - everyone is aligned around a common purpose but also understand how their particular role fits into the common purpose.
3. A social contract - a shared set of values that takes the place of managing the employees' behavior and efforts.
4. Bottom-up innovation - ideas percolate upward from employees. The purpose of management is to incubate the best ideas.

How close does this sound to good project management? What is the project management team engagement formula?

I’ve recently started researching the connection between employee engagement and communication. Now, I know that many of you are thinking that there is an obvious connection between engagement and communication and probably a significant factor (if not the most significant factor) in engaging employees. I agree. 

Even so, I wanted to dig deeper and understand just exactly how communication connects to engagement. What is the role of communication? What types of communication work better than other types in fully engaging employees? Communication is a broad concept and the communication field has numerous theories. Just what is it about communication that compels engagement in employees?

In researching communication and engagement, I came upon the concept of “quality of communication experience” (QCE). Formulated by Leigh Anne Liu, Chei Hwee Chua, and Gunter Stahl (2010), QCE is a construct first used for understanding intercultural negotiations. QCE consists of three parts:

Clarity – “the degree of comprehension of the meaning being communicated.”
Responsiveness – “the norm of coordination.”
Comfort – “a condition of positive affect [sic] of ease and pleasantness when interacting with each other.”

After reading these definitions, I thought that these parts are also equally applicable to employee engagement. To test my assumption, I am currently analyzing government employee workplace surveys for the United States Federal government, the United Kingdom national government, and the UK National Health Service. After my initial analysis, I will do a factor analysis of the survey items to validate a QCE Index.

I also plan to create a QCE survey instrument to be used with project management teams. First, I want to measure the overall engagement of the project team. Then, I will administer the QCE survey to determine if there is a correlation and how strong the correlation is. The final step is to do a quantitative analysis to determine if a causal connection between engagement and communication does exist and the strength of that causal connection.

In upcoming posts, I will update you on my findings and research.

Reference: Liu, Leigh Anne and Chua, Chei Hwee and Stahl, Günter (2010) Quality of Communication Experience: Definition, Measurement, and Implications for Intercultural Negotiations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95 (3). pp. 469-487. ISSN 0021-9010
 

A colleague recently sent me two articles on employee engagement. The first article was from Forbes magazine with the provocative title – “The End of ‘Employee Engagement?’” You often see these types of articles whenever a new management method or trend is perceived to be nearing its end. The author used the alleged decline of total quality management to argue that the same pattern is happening to employee engagement. The hype; the overnight rise of a consulting industry; the lack of immediate, significant results; and the eventual disillusionment. Gartner Research famously calls this the “Hype Cycle.”

The second article comes from a regular contributor to the Association for Talent Development’s website. This author disputes the Forbes article by pointing out the elephant in the room – the 70% of the workforce that still reports being disengaged. Instead of bemoaning the fact that employee engagement has become a check-the-box activity, Kevin Sheridan calls for a renewed effort to hold managers and leaders accountable. For the organizations that did the work, TQM was a transformative success. So can employee engagement; if the organizations put effort into it. 

In my research, I have seen a link between good organizational health and robust employee engagement. A healthy organization rallies the employees around a common purpose; provides the employees with the tools, training, and support to accomplish the common purpose; and continues to build capacity for sustained performance. I’ve also noticed a trend that the healthier organizations also seemed to be the ones that are more accomplished at project management. In full disclosure, I do not have actual empirical evidence for a link between project management and organizational health. Even so, there is something in my preliminary analysis that calls for further study. 

According to much of the engagement research, highly-engaged employees share three characteristics.  

1. employees who have a clear sense of purpose about their work
2. employees receive frequent feedback on their efforts
3. employees can see how the customers will use the products/services created from the employee’s work.

Highly engaged employees are also given much autonomy and are encouraged to master their skills. This sounds like how project teams routinely operate. Also, good project managers practice servant leadership and frequently communicate with their teams.  Another example of how common project management practices are inherently built for employee engagement.

So, let me ask you: do you think that good project management is inherently good employee engagement? That training functional managers and senior managers in project management could increase the managers’ employee engagement skills? That project-based organizations are healthier and have better employee engagement than functional and matrix organizations?
 

Part of my engagement research involves the relationship between the quality of the workplace communication environment and employee engagement. There are several definitions of communication quality but they tend to include the elements of trust, comprehensibility, and an action-orientation.

For example, Eriksson (2000) lists five criteria for communication quality:

C1 - Communication with a relevant and comprehensible information content
C2 - Communication with a relevant and understandable action aspect
C3 - Comprehensible communication
C4 - Trustworthy communication 
C5 - Communication that can be criticized, controlled, and defended

Notice how comprehensible is part of the first three criteria with trust being the fourth criteria. What interests me is the fifth criterion which Eriksson relates to the sincerity of the communication. What aspects of project communication have the necessity for being criticized and defended? The initial project plan? The work breakdown structure? The communications with the stakeholders?

Eriksson refers to his model as the "generic communication quality criteria." I believe these criteria relate to project management communications but I also want to add two other criteria.

C6 - Communication that supports the project planning process and project control process

C7 - Communication that contains risk detection and mitigation information content

What do you think? How would you measure the quality of the project management communication environment?

Reference:

Eriksson, O. (2000). Communication quality: Towards an intersubjective understanding of quality. Reports on Business and Informatics.