The ability to communicate well, both orally and in writing is a critical skill for project managers. Planning project communication upfront enables project managers to choose the appropriate type of communication for sharing different messages (Portny et al., 2008). In this week’s blog assignment, I have been given three different communication modalities that include email, telephone, and face-to-face to interpret each one, address factors that influence my perception of the message, discuss the form of communication that best conveyed the true meaning and intent of the message, and write what I have learned in this exercise that will facilitate my effective communication with members of a project team.
Dr. Stolovitch (2009) discusses some key points in communication that include diplomacy, avoiding ambiguity, and documenting everything. When using diplomacy, you are communicating your opinion, needs, wants, feelings, and beliefs to others in a direct and honest manner, without intentionally hurting anyone’s feelings (Bezroukov, 2011). Avoiding ambiguity means your communication should be precise for the intended message to be relayed. In my opinion, the email contains clear purpose of the message that includes possible solution as well as specified that a response was required as soon as possible and has friendly and respectful tone. The face-to-face message was also concise and straight to the point however, the facial expressions and gestures made the message more personal.
Basically, the three communication modalities have common message that Jan was trying to put across. Thus she would like Mark, who was a bit busy to send her the ETA on the missing report. Receiving the above document will enable Jan to meet her own deadline. Further, the following are the factors that influenced the way I perceived the message relayed through each of the three communication modality; email, voicemail, and face-to-face. These factors include tone, body language cues such as facial expression, gestures, background noise, eye contact; it gives me insight of how important of the message.
The form of communication that best conveyed the true meaning and intent of the message depends on each individual. Personally, I preferred the email as I could read each word by myself and interpret it in my own words. Since each project team member has his/her personality, agenda, and experiences of a project, any of the three communication modalities could affect them in one way or the other.
The implications of what I learned from this exercise is that the three modalities of communicating such as email, voicemail, and face-to-face could be used effectively with members of a project team, however either of them could affect the team members both positively and negatively as the information could be interpreted differently due to the different learning styles as well as the individual differences.
References
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Stolovitch, H. (2011), Video Podcast: Communicating with stakeholders. Laureate Education, Inc. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=4744647&Survey=1&47=6523831&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
Bezroukov, N. (2011). Diplomatic communication. Open source software educational society. Softpanorama . www.softpanorama.org
