It is said that 90% of a Manager’s time is spent on communication? This is true for anyone in a leadership role. So if you are a project manager or a project coordinator or a team lead, your role expects you to “talk” and “hear” more. The obvious next question is, are you?
Communication is key for any relationship to work, be it a professional relationship or personal. But most, if not all, issues in our lives can be attributed to a disconnect in communication.
Regardless of the situation or the environment, it is this leader’s responsibility to enable effective communication. In a family, for instance, it is the responsibility of the head of the household to ensure that problems are discussed and resolved immediately. Similarly in a work environment or a project, the Manager must ensure that the team follows the communication protocol set forth in the communication plan. Yes, there has to be a formal communication plan — one that talks about the point of contacts and their responsibilities, the communication workflow, the escalation process, tools we would use, dependencies, stakeholder expectations, etc. Unfortunately we don’t always have one and this leads us to assume and get confused, be misinformed, ego clashes… gradually leading to a communication disconnect.
So, what can we do?
- Assume Less, Know More! Can We?
- Who’s Listening, Really! Are You?
- SPOCs – The Change Agents
- Socialize Your Way Forward
In my upcoming posts, I will focus on the above 4 topics and share my thoughts on what we may be able to do to remove this disconnect in our work lives (not qualified to preach on my personal life yet) and I will touch upon some of the drawbacks. While I am at it, share you comments and thoughts on any or all of them and I will include you name in the credits for the next post. Deal?
Is there a communication disconnect in your project or at work? Why do you think it happens?
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This post has to be a good one. This is one of the main things that Ive noticed in almost organizations i’ve worked for. Everyone says that we need to do it. but we seldom do.
Every year we spend a couple of thousands in training and systems to improve communication amongst teams. Sadly, this doesnt really help.The openness in communication has to be instilled as a right to question and this has to be instilled from the top. Which comes to a related topic – the organization structures and the communication protocols within them. This could be different in case of Matrix org structures, flat structures and hierarchical org structures.
“a right to question” is an interesting perspective. I will include it in my upcoming posts…
How do you think communication can be improved with the different org structures?
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I work for @task and we recently introduced a new social project management platform called @task Stream. The idea is to improve the communication between project teams, project managers, and sponsors. You can see what I’m talking about by going to http://www.attask.com/stream. I’m interested to hear if you think that having social media tools inside of a project management software will help improve communication.