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Weekly UpdatesEXECUTIVE SUMMARY
No matter what level of co-worker yo're speaking with, there are specific strategies, models, and guides you can use to make communication more effective. Sharing technical and task information must be balanced with courtesy, comptence, and an understanding of your audience. Learn the common pitfalls and solutions to sharing progress reports and marking voice and effective.
In our roles as engineers, project managers, and technical managers, we need effective ways to communicate. Our jobs require us not only to speak effectively but to get others to listen and take action based on our communications as well. Our ability to talk up, down, and across our organizations has great impact on what we can get done and how we are perceived in the organization.
In this article, you'll learn about Sarah and her progress to her boss. She didn't get her points across effectively and was humiliated by this experience. We'll critique her report and offer a general outline for giving an effective progress report every time. You'll also learn about Bob and Sue and their game of phone tag. We'll guide you in this scenario to change the game of phone tag into phone catch.
A basic equation drives our design of communications:
Purpose + Audience = Communication design
This equation has its roots with Louis Middleman and Harold Kurstedt of Virginia Tech. The equation means that we must and should articulate the purpose of the communication and the audience for this communication. Together, the purpose and the audience guide the design of the communication. Business reports that ignore purpose and audience usually get ignored--or worse, they create confusion, increased uncertainty, unnecessary job stress, and poor decision making.
First things first
If you don't know who is supposed to do what as a result of information, you don't need that information. If your information does not support decision making or action, the information is simply not needed. Your purpose must be considered together with the audience for the communication. Why will they be receiving this report or listening to your presentation? And who are they?
Write down your purpose. Then read it aloud. Does it make sense? Is this what you will be doing? Does it sound good when you read it aloud? Now instead of hiding this in your own mind, put your purpose front and center in your presentation or up front in your document or tell the person what your purpose is ("We need to crash the project because ..." or "I am seeking a raise."). Clearly, you must consider your audience when developing the purpose. We will have a different purpose with top management than with our project team when briefing the project. With top management, our purpose may be continued funding for the project. With the project team, our purpose may be to identify key problems and brainstorm solutions. These will be entirely different presentations because the purpose varies greatly based on the audience.
Consider the audience
Formally examine the composition of your audience. How can you best describe the audience? How many people constitute your audience? What is their interest in your communication? What are their backgrounds, experiences, education, common traits, or values? What will they be looking for in your communication?
Communication deals with three fundamental types of organizational environments (from the top down): strategic planning, managerial control, and operational control.
Strategic planning focuses on situations that are wide in scope and aggregated to a higher level. Strategic-level managers deal with the future, and information does not need to be up-to-the-minute. The information can be estimated with lower accuracy because the information will not be used repeatedly.
Operational control is at the other end of the spectrum. Decisions and their corresponding communications need to be well-defined, detailed, and narrow in scope. Operational information is primarily historical and needs to be kept current. information at this level has a high degree of expected accuracy and is used frequently. Managerial control falls in the middle of this spectrum, with varying information characteristics depending on the topic and organization's structure.
So once we have identified the purpose of the communication and have considered the needs and questions of our audience, we can design an effective communication. The following two scenarios show what happens when purpose and audience are neglected. The accompanying critiques and advice provide guidance to design and deliver more effective communications.
We look in on Sarah and Bob. Sarah hasn't done a good job analyzing her audience or planning her communication. Bob has lapsed into using traditional voice mail procedures and etiquette. There are lessons to be learned from both scenarios.
Scenario 1: Don't just tell a story
Whether in the form of quick updates or extended project documentation, the progress report is one of the most frequently used genres of industry communication. Done well, it can enhance one's credibility and image as a professional; done poorly, it can make even capable project managers look disorganized and foolish, as illustrated in the following true story,
Sarah is a junior manager at Mulder Gizmos, a small, privately owned manufacturing firm, and she's currently working on a project to streamline the packaging line. Currently, each size and type of Mulder's gizmos gets its own box, resulting in 66 different boxes required for packaging the various product lines (24 different sizes, each with variations of printing setup and opening detail). Sarah's project would greatly reduce the total number of box sizes to six, would standardize the printing setup, and would make inner packaging the major variable.
Sarah needs to get information from carton manufacturers, printers, and inner packaging vendors as well as company data on product sizes, weights, types, variables, and markets. The project is scheduled to take four months to complete, saving the company approximately $120,000 in the first year, and $280,000 each year thereafter in materials, storage, and handling costs. It was considered a coup for a newly hired junior manager such as Sarah to be given the lead on this project.
Sarah-s sitting at her desk stewing a bit over her inability to get the product details and data she needs from Harold, Mulder's plant manager. She has called Harold, sent e-mails and written notes, slopped by his office often, and let him know it's urgent she get the details only he can provide, but to no avail. Harold has her pegged for a junior manager with little pull, and hell get to it when he wants to.
Suddenly, Sarah's boss, Norm. who is senior manager of sales, pokes his head in her door and asks her to come to his office to give an update on the packaging project. A bit flustered, Sarah follows Iron back to his office, where two other people are already sitting. She knows the woman, Marie, who's a manager in purchasing, but the older man in the corner is unknown to her, and Norm doesn't offer introductions.
"Well " begins Sarah, "I'm really excited about the packaging reduction project, and I have been working hard on this project for the past two months. I've met with all the carton vendors, five of them. To weren't any good can't make the needed adjustments--so I narrowed it down to three and then worked with all of those. I really like the team over at Northern Packaging; I've met with them, umm, three--no, four times, including last week--and they're going to be the most competitive bid along with being the most responsive to our needs. Next week, I'll complete the calculations based on their data. I'm still waiting on some information from Harold out in the plant, I've asked him many times for it in the past six weeks, but he's really busy, I guess, and it just hasn't been provided. Our whole goal is to streamline our packaging lines by reducing carton and printing variables based on product details, so I really need that information to finish up. I've got all the inner packaging information I need, so I'm almost done. The next thing I need to do is write up some reports and then run them by purchasing."
At this point, the older gentleman in the corner interrupts to say testily, "Young lady, you're wasting our time with details we don't need and not giving us the information we do need. How much money are you going to save my company, and when can we expect this project to be done? And if you need some help getting information from someone, why don't you ask for it?"
Much taken aback, Sarah realizes the unknown gentleman must be John Mulder, the owner of the company Her justifiable pride in the excellent progress she has made on the repackaging project is quickly deflated. Needless to say, Sarah feels foolish, humiliated, and unprofessional.
In giving this progress report, Sarah did some things right and some things wrong. Let's look at the positives first: Sarah did report on real progress made, gave some conclusions drawn from her research, mentioned some constraints encountered, said the goal of the project, and indicated some steps still to be taken.
But Sarah didn't do several other things that would have easily made her progress report reflect the professional she is. Specifically, she failed to organize her information in a logical pattern, and she failed to remember our crucial equation: Purpose + Audience = Communication design. Because Sarah didn't know exactly who her audience was (company owner John Mulder), and thus didn't know his purpose for listening to her progress report, she might have initiated an introduction with him before starting. Saying hello to Marie, whom she did know, and then offering her hand to John Mulder, saying "I'm Sarah and I'm here to fill everyone in on progress in the packaging project," would likely have provided some insight into her listener's identity (and hence his purpose). Then she could have asked herself the questions and used the very adaptable structure below, which works virtually every time.
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