Communications

Articles for the Communications category follow:

Too Busy to Think 

By Sarah Gilbert

Overloaded managers run the risk of making bad decisions and alienating themselves from important information

Everyone has had a conversation with someone who clearly wasn’t listening. You know the signs. Maybe their eyes keep drifting toward their computer monitor or they keep making faces at people in the hall. This person probably thinks they are multi-tasking, a favorite pastime of the overbooked, but mostly they are just absorbing less information and being rude at the same time.

Running from one meeting to the next or spending lots of time responding to e-mail and voicemail actually can be a recipe for becoming more out of touch. It seems like a paradox, but using all this new technology to stay in touch, might be sending the wrong message to people who really need to speak with you. And it’s probably not giving you much time to really process the information, either.

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On Communication and Coordination
By Raymond Posch

Probably the single most important thing that is needed in managing a project – especially any large project – is communication and coordination. I treat them here as one activity because, in a project, the purpose of communication for the most part is not just to send information in one direction, but to solicit responses and to coordinate actions.

So “communication and coordination” is the core activity that a project manager does, day in and day out, to make a project happen. Now that is not to say that communication and coordination should be the only thing. A project without a plan is merely unorganized activity and is doomed to fail, at least by most measures that should be applied to business projects. (And believe me, there are lots of “cowboy” types that think they can just work it out as they go. Yee hah!) So planning is also absolutely critical.

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