The topic of poor communication can trigger me, because project managers and business solutions experts sometimes get held responsible for everyone’s communications.

Communications plans are a simple solution, if your business will change its mindset about team communications.

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STORY TIME:

Given my background, I like to think that I am fairly good at communications. I graduated with a degree in English, with an emphasis in Business Communications and Professional Writing, and then worked as an Executive Assistant, an Operations Manager, a Special Projects Coordinator and Project Manager to effect Organizational Changes for a number of companies. English Majors don’t enter the workforce as Managers, but often become Managers out of necessity, largely because of their communication skills.

Out of college, I had thought that my communications skills would help me, but I had no idea how greatly. The problem is most workers are not good communicators. Sometimes employers think they can hire one person who is good at communication to be the communication expert for everyone else on the team. I have found that many specialists don’t value this skill as much as they should and don’t realize that communications are a two-way street. It’s not necessarily about increasing communications, rather it’s about effectiveness of both parties understanding one another.

When managing projects with technical experts I have usually found their focus to be on technical aspects, rather than equally important aspects of managing communication. Some of these teams take communications for granted so much so that they don’t see the need for a communications plan. They assume that effective communications will happen naturally. One person I worked with strongly asserted that I be “nosey” and “nag” others for missing details and claimed that that worked for that person. I guess that could be one way to do it. I maintain, there are bad, good, better, and best ways to do things.

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Talk with all stakeholders and team members. Learn what types of communications work for your teams and individuals. Hopefully, your organization has already determined some communications tools to choose from (Emails, Message/Video Chats, In-Person, Status/Comment Boards may all serve different purposes for different levels of work and communication or may serve the same purpose just in a different format.) and supports good practices that spread across members of your teams.

Chart out a plan for what (communication type), who (initiator & audience), how (method/channel), and when (time/frequency). Make sure everyone on the team understands how you will carry out formal (at checkpoints) and informal communications (as needed in between).

The transfer of information between hands in a process should be a simple matter of passing the baton of inputs and outputs to the next person in the process whose actions are dependent on the other’s outcomes. Some of these status updates can be done during meetings, but if a team member accomplishes a task that they are assigned to, they should be the one to initiate conversation with the next appropriate person in the process. And then it can be reported that the task is on track in meetings.

The project manager should follow up with a task, whenever they suspect something went wrong (maybe it didn’t move between desks when expected). There’s a good chance information was dropped between hands in the process, when no other problem was reported, but even when a task is said to have been done by one person and work passed on to the next person, the information may be inaccurate or incomplete. The experts involved should be the first line of defense and you should train them to communicate these handoffs between them effectively.

Whatever you do as an organization, you should not assign a third party (such as a project manager) to be held responsible for all communications between other hands, because a third person handling “the baton” will likely cause more confusion than assistance; it will set a poor expectation, and members of your team will become reliant on others to perform communications they should be making. You can hold a manager “accountable” to hold their team “responsible” to their parts in the communications plan. But know the difference between those words, and do not assign any one person to be responsible for everyone’s communications.