Datasheet

14
Chapter 1
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Establishing Project Management Fundamentals
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Make certain you define terms that are not familiar to the receiver.
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Leave negative emotions at your desk but take passion with you.
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Communicate the right information and the right amount of information to avoid receivers
tuning you out.
Receivers
On the receiving end of communication is listening. We’re certified marriage counselors in our
spare time (no, we never sleep). Based on several years of helping couples with their martial
woes, we can safely say that a large percentage of issues are communication issues. And of
those, listening tends to be the problem. When you ask one of the spouses to repeat what they
just heard the other say, what’s repeated is often different than what was stated. That’s because
the listener puts their own perspective and interpretation on what was stated without having
really listened to what was said. Sure enough, we’ve experienced this same phenomenon in the
workplace. One team member “hears” what a stakeholder or another team member has to say.
When you get them both in the same room and have each of them restate the issue, you usually
discover there was some misinterpretation or misunderstanding on one or both of their parts.
Guard against adding your own seasoning to what you hear and practice active listening with
the following techniques:
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Ask clarifying questions.
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Paraphrase what you heard in your own words and ask the speaker if you’ve understood
the issue correctly.
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Show genuine interest by nodding in agreement or asking questions about the topic.
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Maintain eye contact.
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Do not interrupt; wait for the speaker to finish.
Making Connections
If you’ve recently attended a child’s birthday party, you may have played the gossip game. All
the kids stand in a circle and someone whispers a secret into the ear of the first child. They
repeat the secret to the child next to them and so on until it goes around the circle. The last
child tells everyone the secret. As you know, it’s usually nothing at all like the original version.
This illustrates not only the importance of active listening, but also the importance of limiting
the number of participants in the circle, or meeting as may be the case. The more people in the
communication chain, the more likely misinterpretations will occur.
Figure 1.2 illustrates the lines of communications among 8 participants.
If you counted all the lines in the figure, you’d come up with 28 lines of communication
among the 8 participants. That amounts to 28 places for misunderstanding and misinterpre-
tation. If you prefer to do this mathematically, you can calculate the lines of communication
as follows:
n (n – 1) / 2 = total lines of communication
47178book.book Page 14 Wednesday, December 6, 2006 10:10 AM