133: The Introvert's guide to Communication for Project Managers
Project Management Happy Hour
Hosts Kate and Kim discuss the evolution of communication strategies in project management, moving from overwhelming over-communication to s
Key takeaways
- Information vacuums cause the human brain to default to negative assumptions, such as assuming a project manager is incompetent.
- Kim's early career lesson was that 'over-communicating' everything can be just as disruptive as not communicating enough.
Main topics
- The danger of information vacuums
- Strategies for over-communication vs. discernment
Notable quotes
Data without context is a minefield.
Conclusion
Effective project management communication is about mastering the art
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) The human brain is not nice. It takes lots of therapy and or meditation to tell yourself nice stories. Like, it takes active work to make your brain tell itself nice stories if you're in an information vacuum, because our brain wants to protect us from bad things happening. So in an information vacuum, it tends to be like, I have a lazy, useless, bad project manager, to which I'm like, no, you don't. Here I come with my reports and my reporting. I'm here to have them superhero in front of your face and so that you know that I am great. Stop. saying mean things about me in your brain. I'm perfect. Speaker 2 (0:34) Welcome to the Project Management Happy Hour. Our aim is to share frank and honest discussion about real-world issues in project management, but do it in a way that's not too dry, though it might get a little salty sometimes. Speaker 2 (0:54) So Kate, I was thinking about early days of my project manager career and kind of my hard lessons learned around communication back in the days when, you know, people use paper and those kinds of things. Speaker 1 (1:09) You did all your whole project pen and paper. Speaker 2 (1:11) Yeah. It was just after the stone days when we were chiseling in blocks of stone. But I remember I had this manager once and I was a young project manager just trying to figure it out. And this guy drove me out of my freaking mind. He kept telling me all the time, Kim, I want you to over-communicate. And it wasn't just me. His other project managers, mostly junior ones, he would just beat into us, over-communicate, over-communicate. And I just think, dude, you have no idea what you're asking for. I'll destroy you with my communication. I will drown you. You will come to my office and you will beg me, please. I'm drowning. Please stop. Too much communication. I can't take anymore. It's so amazing. Speaker 1 (1:51) So what happened? Did you learn how to over-communicate or were you like, did you learn it the hard way? Speaker 2 (1:58) Well, so I kept doing more and more and he kept saying, no, more, more communication. And so I think what ultimately what happened was I realized that my baseline, I was new as a project manager coming out of an individual contributor role. My baseline for what over-communication was or the right level of communication. Was way off. It was a hard lesson learned, but it's a hard adjustment because you're used to when you're an individual contributor, you do your thing, you let people know what you're doing, that's it. But when you're a project manager, communication is so much of the job. And it's not more communication is not better, but what we have as a baseline, usually when we start project management, it's a lot lower than it needs to be. Speaker 1 (2:45) I never worry about over-communicating ever. And I don't think I've worried about over-communicating since the beginning of my career because I think that's always been one of my strengths has been to over-communicate. One thing I have done badly is not communicate well enough to the people in charge. I communicate amazingly with my team, but it took me a long time to learn how to communicate up and out well. And I think some of that has to do with like when I was really early in my career, I was like, well, if I communicate out. I can communicate to everybody the same. And I very quickly learned you cannot communicate to executives the same way you communicate to your peers or people on your project team. But I've always communicated exceptionally well to the people on my team. So I don't worry about over communicating to them. But I don't worry because the way that I communicate is really intentional and thoughtful. So I think you deserve to know what I send you. when I'm communicating with you because I think so hard about it. Like communication is probably where I've spent all my time as a project manager. I didn't get better at estimation or any of the maths or anything else. I spent all my time getting better at communicating. So I'm like, it's all I do. I'm like, that's the whole job. Speaker 2 (3:54) No, that's not me. I'm kind of a natural introvert. And so communication is always something I've always struggled with. Speaker 1 (4:01) Oh. Speaker 2 (4:02) Yeah. I just wanted to go do my thing, right? And so then. being a project manager, I had to learn how to communicate. And then through getting it beat into my head, realized that my baseline of communication was too low. I would be running, you know, running dark, so to speak. And so my stakeholders wouldn't know what was going on. And I would think when you're, you're dumb, of course, things are fine. Otherwise I would tell you they're not fine. Speaker 1 (4:26) I did used to think that way. Yes, that was also me. I'd be like, why are you reaching out to me? I will tell you when there is a problem. Why would you think things aren't done? But that made me so angry that I learned how to communicate back out because I was like, stop asking me questions. Like we have an episode on the perfect status report where I talk about percent complete, where Kim's like, I hate it. I'm like, if it gets them to shut up, I don't care. Like so much of what I do, what I communicate is like, how can I get you to know that everything is great so I can just get things done unless I need to engage you and get you to be. an engaged sponsor, then I'm think a little bit more cleverly about what I do to try to get them engaged. It's really different for disengaged versus engaged sponsor. But let me ask you then, would people say you're running dark? Like what's an example of a time something like that happened? Speaker 2 (5:10) Oh, I would get an angry stakeholder that would come up and they say, well, what's what's going on? What's even going on with this project? You haven't told us anything. Are things that bad? Bad, Kim. Of course not. Things are going just fine. And they would. get really upset sometimes, or I've had stakeholders working with customer facing projects. My customers in the vacuum of information, they make up their own information and they think, oh, must be off track, must be going wrong. And then, so I I've had several occasions where the customer would go to my boss. This is early on in my career customer go to my boss and say, I'm not getting any communication. I don't know what's going on. Your people are terrible. And they just, because they're telling themselves stories because I gave them an information vacuum. Speaker 1 (5:55) Yes. And the human brain is not nice. It takes lots of therapy and or meditation to tell yourself nice stories. Like it takes active work to make your brain tell itself nice stories if you're in an information vacuum because our brain wants to protect us from bad things happening. So in an information vacuum, it tends to be like I have a lazy, useless, bad project manager to which I'm like, no, you don't. Here I come with my reports and my reporting. I'm here to have them superhero in front of your face and so that you know that I am great. Stop saying mean things about me in your brain. I am perfect. Speaker 2 (6:28) How about you? Your approach. Speaker 1 (6:31) This is so silly. My approach is to treat them like their project is in dog daycare. Speaker 2 (6:40) Doggy daycare. Speaker 1 (6:42) Doggy daycare. So if you take your dog to doggy daycare, usually there's a camera. that you can check at any time and it's live streaming the floor. So you can check in on your dog at any time. And when you come back and pick up your dog, you get a report card and it can be like, your dogs were so good. They played with these people, right? And here's the thing. I, as the stakeholder, the executive sponsor of my dog's boarding trip, I want to know that my dog is okay. I'm not worried about my dog the entire time, but when I'm worried about my dog, I want to know where I can go to get an update on my dog. I think about dog daycare in this example is like there is no project manager over my dog, but there is the live stream that I can go to. And then I know that once I get back, if I have any questions about how my dog was, I'm going to get a report card that answers all of my questions. So I treat my executive stakeholders like I'm in. I am the project manager over their dog. We have a project in doggy daycare. So. When I get a project, I assume that they want it done and that they don't really want to think about it. And it's my job to craft the story that they are telling themselves about the project. So I say, thank you so much for project. Your project is so cute. I love projects like this. I have one just like it at home. I've had one of these projects for five years. His name is Dan, right? And then I give updates, right? They get a report card, right? We've talked about the perfect status report for. But if we think about the live stream, right, where can they know what's going on at any point in time? Depending on who I'm working with, and this is very dependent on who I'm working with, I think about what their version of the live stream could be. Is it going to be, I love Slack channels. I work with a lot of ADHD freaks, respectfully as one myself, who can't be bothered with email. So I tend to create a Slack, or this would be Teams if you're using Microsoft, but a chat channel where... At any time, you can hop in and ask questions about what's going on. I post the status updates there. I would probably leverage Notion if I was doing something