Communicate and beyond!

Abstract

Project managers spend an inordinate amount of time communicating (with the project team, stakeholders, customer and sponsor), hence, classic project management reads reinforce this statement and propose proper communication as vital to project success (CII, 1997; Sanvido, Grobler, Parfitt, Guvenis, & Coyle, 1992; Thamhain, 1992).

Communication is a broad subject and involves a long-standing substantial body of knowledge in other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology and this only makes it even more difficult to decide, among the abundance of information, what is pertinent (and of practical use) to project managers.

With organizations becoming flatter and increasingly projectized, project managers’ roles have grown to accommodate the ever-changing complexity of the business environment. This has only added a number of dimensions to the already complex web of relationships brought about by the stakeholder focus. With such changes as the implementation of PMOs, portfolio management, program management and project-based organizations, project managers are now called upon to interact with a very diverse pool of stakeholders.

Given “…comments on the Project Communications Knowledge Area of the PMBOK^® Guide - Fourth Edition…” (PMI, 2012 p. 469), the 5^th Edition of the PMBOK^® Guide goes beyond communication and states that project managers must “… actively work to ensure an appropriate level of engagement of stakeholders in the decision making and activities of the project” (PMI, 2012 p. 469). Stakeholder management is now a separate area of knowledge and the processes related to managing stakeholders have been expanded, two of which refer to the concept of “engagement” (PMI, 2012) and the question of the day is now: “What is engagement? And how does one foster it?”

This paper attempts to shed some light by documenting the history of the concept of “engagement” and then presents a variety of reference models that can prove both inspirational and helpful to the development of communication skills for project managers in their quest to meet this new challenge.

Engagement

“Middle English, from Anglo-French engager, from en- + gage pledge, gage. First Known Use: 15th century”

(Merriam-Webster, 2013)

As we know, the idea of engagement is not new. Long before the concept was imported to the project world, many organizations had focused on building customer and employee satisfaction, trust, and loyalty. Engagement was managed much like a tangible asset. The underlying thought was that increased customer and employee satisfaction would lead to reduced turnover and training costs, positive word of mouth, higher premiums for services and greater share value which all lead to higher profits and faster growth.

Even the briefest search reveals that, in modern business terms, the word engagement now refers to the “emotional bond” or “attachment” stakeholders develop during repeated, ongoing (preferably positive) interactions with a business. This bond is defined over longer time periods by specific behaviors and attitudes. In some instances the concept can be enlarged to deeper emotional levels to encompass descriptive narratives such as “being emotionally connected, passionate and aligned to the business’ values and beliefs…”

In effect, the term “engagement” seems to have come to the business world from early 1920 studies on “morale” or “willingness” of employees (or groups of people) to accomplish organizational objectives. This concept was later developed during WWII research to assess battle readiness before combat. It is during the post war mass production years that the term “employee engagement” grew in popularity to describe the individual worker's emotional attachment to the organization, colleagues and job (Wikipedia, 2013).

More recent history explains why the concept of employee engagement is so popular since the 1980s. Prior the ’80s, employers typically offered lifetime employment and, in return, expected loyalty. When global competition increased, organizations needed to be more flexible to survive and gradually changed the original understanding or what has been referred to as the “psychological contract” binding the employer/employee relationship. Plants were closed, businesses became global and wages and benefits were increasingly controlled to compete. Workers were laid off and jobs were frequently exported or outsourced to other countries where the cost of labor was less expensive. Loyalty was no longer rewarded and those who still had a job were asked to do more with less. Within this context, workers tented to be less loyal and became increasingly demotivated (Welbourne, 2007). As research demonstrated that engaged employees tend to be more both more loyal and more productive, the popularity of the concept grew as a possible solution.

Along with this increase in popularity came the numerous studies on employee engagement and many different behavior and attitude questionnaires, surveys and scales to document and monitor the level of engagement. The onus of fostering and monitoring engagement typically fell upon managers. Among the numerous recommendations to managers and leaders, three main conditions seem to surface in order to create, nurture and maintain employee engagement (Welbourne, 2007):

• Leaders themselves need to be engaged.

• Leaders need to clearly articulate how each role helps support the business strategy.

• Leaders need to create an environment where jobs and employees are valued.

In 2012 Dale Carnegie published the results of a study done on 1,500 employees. Their goal was to look at the functional and emotional elements that affect employee engagement. The conclusions point to the fact that there are three key drivers to engagement in the workforce:

• Relationship with immediate supervisor

• Belief in senior leadership

• Pride in working for the company

According to this particular study, other factors that drive engagement are being treated with respect and that the organization cares about its people. The general findings showed that about one-third of employees are totally engaged and about one-third are totally disengaged. The “fully engaged” group was mainly composed of senior managers under 30 or over 50, with a college degree, employed in large corporations and earn $50K and more. Conclusions highlight that with recruiting costs running approximately 1.5 times annual salary, the ability to engage and retain valuable employees has a significant impact on an organization's bottom line and the question of the moment is: “how to ensure that managers interact with individuals to generate an engaged workforce?”

Given that a caring manager seems to be one of the key elements it has become a real concern that supervisors develop a range of soft skills that show they care about employees’ personal lives, take an interest in them as people, care about how they feel and support their health and well-being. Much rests on a manager's ability to build strong individual relationships as well as strong team interactions and lead in a “person-centered” way.

Another interesting study done by Towers Watson (2012) surveyed over 30,000 workers and revealed the same results as the Dale Carnegie study in terms of number of highly engaged (one-third) and disengaged (one-third). This study suggests that on top of the traditional engagement model, organizations need to fill two important gaps: “Enabling workers with internal support, resources and tools” and “Creating an environment that is energizing to work in because it promotes physical, emotional and social well-being.” Conclusions point to the fact that when engagement declines, companies become vulnerable not only to lower productivity, but also to poor customer service, higher absenteeism and turnover. Again, leader characteristics were identified as the top drivers to engagement and, more particularly when they:

• Are effective at growing the business
• Show sincere interest in employees’ well-being
• Behave consistently with the organization's core values
• Earn employees’ trust and confidence

Another area of engagement that has been extensively studied is “customer engagement.” This area of research has come to us via customer relationship marketing (CMR), a trend that became popular in the late 1990s. CRM marked the first attempts to move away from one-way mass marketing to a two-way dialogue with customers and more recently, with the development of new technologies, the power of consumers in this dialogue has grown considerably. They can seek advice from other consumers, are more informed and can express themselves. Organizations and brands have little or no influence over parts of the conversation. Although the focus of CRM has always been involvement and interaction, engagement seems to differ in terms of the level of intimacy and influence. The depth of this relationship can only evolve through the creation of true two-way conversations. It is no longer sufficient for customers to simply react to company news, views and bulletins; they must now be able to proactively engage with a brand (Myles, 2011).

This move from CRM to customer engagement (CE) was prompted by the fact that research has shown that high customer satisfaction alone was not sufficient to guarantee the customer's business. Results to the order of 60% to 80% of customers who defect to a competitor said they were satisfied or very satisfied just before defecting. It has now become accepted that an “engaged” relationship is probably the only guarantee for a return on your or your clients’ objectives (Eisenberg et al., 2006).

Whether it be employee focused or customer focused, the main difference between what was traditionally understood as communication and the ongoing shift towards engagement seems marked by:

• More customized individual interactions that prompt stakeholders to act on the content.
• The participation in product development, customer services and other aspects of the organization's experience.
• Moving away from a top-down formal interaction to a continuing, dialogic, decentralized and personalized experience initiated and led by either party.

As we can see from the numerous studies, one of the key factors is being able to develop a trusting relationship with employees and customers. In PMI’s 2005 publication on leadership, Adler states that project management (as most professions) has “its own language” therefore, “one must be conscious that most executives are not trained in project management lingo” (p. 14). Gina Westcott (who was Director of Management Development programs at Boston University Corporate Education Center) took this thought one step further saying that the project management language “can actually alienate clients and create distrust” (2005, p. 14). McCoy (senior vice president in the Technology Management Group at Visa International's HQ) emphasized “the importance of relationships with team members” and “the necessity of spending additional time with individuals thoroughly discussing the issues and providing guidance” (2005, p. 30). For the last 10 years, the overall message to project managers has been clear: “Communicate, communicate, communicate… ” However, to this day, most training programs in project management still provide little knowledge on the subject of communication leaving many project managers at a loss when it comes to creating and sustaining “meaningful communications.”

Also well documented is the fact that for recruiters, communication skills are often cited as the single most important decisive factor in choosing managers. Several authors mention that communication skills, including written and oral presentations, as well as an ability to work with others, are the main factors contributing to job success. These are not recent preoccupations as even 10 years ago AT&T were spending over $10m per annum (for the USA only) in order to improve the communication skills of its employees (Loosemore & Lee, 2002).

In spite of the increasing importance placed on communication skills, many project and program managers continue to struggle, unable to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively – whether in verbal or written form, not to mention the more difficult aspect of managing meaningful relationships with all levels of stakeholders. This inability makes it difficult for them to compete effectively in the workplace, stands in the way of career progression and may be one of the primary factors preventing project and program success (Deguire, 2007).

Given that the history of communication dates back to the earliest signs of life, it is not within the scope of this paper to cover the extensive literature on communication. The goal of the present paper is rather to scan the abundant literature in order to start a very important discussion about basic knowledge that would seem useful for project managers in their different roles and tasks such as engaging stakeholders.

The Projectized Context of Communication

Because it involves people, communication is a complex and continually changing subject that is difficult to pin down or summarize. Although human communication has been studied widely in the fields of business, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, it has been a longstanding issue that very few tools have been developed to help managers communicate (Mead, 2001). Furthermore, in the past, most of our communication occurred at meetings, over the telephone, or through paper correspondence, but today, information technologies have changed and multiplied the way we communicate. Even simple communication is difficult to measure, in addition to the long list of variables already stated, one must also consider personalities, media, information flows, as well as barriers.

Other important factors that affect the context of communication have concurrently evolved. To name but a few, the progressive popularity of distance work, individuals and teams that are no longer co-located, the importance of relating to upper levels of management with the development of program management roles and the shift from shareholder to stakeholder governance. It has simply become a gross understatement to say that “communication is important” and businesses at large need to rethink the overall context of how they approach communications as a whole. Without good communication skills, managers cannot hope to engage others.

Given the years during which project management developed, it is not surprising to find a rather mechanistic approach to communication that permeates its literature. This history might account for the numerous observations outlining the fact that when set in traditional structures, project-based activities seem to display a great number of communication weaknesses like the difficulty to coordinate organizational learning and development (Hobday, 2000; Bresnen et al., 2004) and the difficulty in grouping stakeholders from different “thought worlds” (Dougherty, 1992), not to mention the even more important communication task of linking projects to organizational processes and strategy (Gann & Salter, 2000; Lindqvist, 2004).

Throughout its development, the project context seems to have neglected the importance of the qualitative aspect of communication that is now being recognized as essential to foster meaningful relationships and engage stakeholders. In the new context of projects and programs, quantitative aspects of communication such as the number of meetings or the length of these meetings are quite secondary issues to more qualitative issues like the meaningfulness of a meeting. These issues have been raised and well documented in the business environment since Weick's numerous publications on sense-making in the early ’90s (Weick, 1995).

It is all very well to tell project managers to engage with employees and stakeholders, but how does one demonstrate that they care? How does one go from counting “the number of meetings” to instigating “a meaningful two-way communication”?

Answers to these questions are readily found and relatively well documented in the fields of psychology and related social sciences that provide valuable guidance in terms of “how one develops meaningful relationships at different levels and in different contexts.”

The last part of this paper will focus on a few examples of such knowledge and skills and the pertinence of importing them to the project management environment.

Communication

As life experience teaches most of us, meaningful relationships usually take time to develop and are the product of a number of communications, of which, many have simply drifted from light superficial to more meaningful content. In business, the preoccupation for efficiency together with time constraints have made us consider this kind of unplanned chatter as wasteful.

In accordance with the more mechanistic approach to communication (sender-receiver & encoding-decoding), Blair (1995) suggested that, to ensure efficient and effective communication, one must start with three basic considerations:

• Making your message understood
• Receiving/understanding the intended message
• Exerting some control over the flow of the communication

In this framework, it is felt that communication is best achieved through simple planning and control. However, the past two decades have witnessed a great deal of scholarly attention to transformational leadership behavior and it is currently the most widely accepted leadership paradigm (Tejeda, 2001) and most probably the best suited to create and develop stakeholder engagement. According to Rubin et al. (2005), transformational leadership behavior represents the most active/effective form of leadership. Here, contrarily to the mechanistic approach, managers are closely engaged with followers, motivating them to perform beyond their transactional agreements and Ashkanasy and Tse (2000) describe transformational leadership behavior as the “management of leader and follower emotion.” For these authors, emotional abilities are critical in accomplishing this task: “Transformational leaders are sensitive to followers’ needs […] they show empathy to followers, making them understand how others feel” (p. 232).

Bass (1990) went so far as to argue that transformational leaders “meet the emotional needs of each employee” (p. 21) and a number of authors have since added that creation of follower excitement and enthusiasm stems from appraisal of followers’ authentic feelings (George, 2000). In this new context, the simple skills of planning and control provided by the mechanistic approach are no longer sufficient to help or guide project managers in their roles and responsibilities as good communicators and leaders. As a prerequisite for meeting followers’ emotional needs, one needs to have an accurate assessment of how followers feel, a competency often seen (in the frameworks of the past) as reserved to psychologists, close friends or therapists. Many managers may feel uncomfortable and incompetent about taking on such roles both in their private and professional lives, even more so, in today's politically correct environment.

According to the literature on emotional intelligence, authentic feelings are primarily communicated through facial expressions and nonverbal behavior (Ekman & Friesen, 1974; Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, 2001). For Rubin et al. (2005), a leader's ability to accurately recognize emotions in followers involves the ability to accurately decode others’ expressions of emotions communicated through their nonverbal communications (i.e., the face, body, and voice).

Research findings have demonstrated that emotion recognition is the most reliably validated component of emotional intelligence and that it is linked to a variety of positive organizational outcomes (Elfenbein et al., 2002). Research has shown that managerial derailment is heavily influenced by a manager's inability to understand others’ perspectives, a limitation that makes them insensitive to others (Lombardo, Ruderman, & McCauley, 1987). Mayer and Gavin (2005) take this concept even further when investigating trust relationships in the workplace and provide evidence of how trust also affects performance. These authors point to the fact that managers who have developed these abilities engage their people more, which results in a higher capability to focus attention and better business results.

With the growing popularity of more transactional leadership styles, if nothing else, managers are at least reminded that they “must learn to listen,” if not for the relational aspect, then merely because of the underlying threat that they may not hear the suggestion/information from subordinates that can eventually launch the idea for a project's or even the whole organization's success (Blair, 1995).

The past shows that: “Project teams are frequently headed by people who are chosen for their technical expertise rather than for their leadership abilities” (Pinto et al., 1998, p. 55). The recent trend is that: “Future project leaders will require greater knowledge and skills in managing human factors” (Wong, 2007, p. 323). These findings point to practitioners needing to be well balanced in the technical skills and human skills in order to successfully manage projects (Burgan et al., 2012).

In this new framework managers need to be taught at least a minimum number of additional basic skills from which further emotional growth and maturity as a leader may be expected to blossom. These skills have often been seen as confined to disciplines in social science; however, many can be readily imported to suit the project managers’ situational needs. It is no longer a choice, but an “expected obligation” since research has demonstrated that ineffective project communication and leadership skills lead to gross misunderstanding of project objectives, lack of acceptance from project team members, and poor decision-making (Wong, 2007). One aspect of human skills is Emotional Intelligence (EI) as suggested by Mayer et al. (2001). In this context, project managers must be aware of their own EI abilities in order to further develop and then improve their skills. There is a growing body of research in this area suggesting that EI does play an important role in better communication and general work-related processes (Cherniss, 2010). The results of a recent study published in 2012 by Burgan et al. showed that project management practitioners are very close to the general population averages in their level of EI and slightly better than average on Understanding Emotions. However, it is possible that such results are not sufficient to effectively communicate, lead and manage within the increasingly complex project environments. At the moment, EI seems to be a popular and promising area of research; however, because of its nature (emotion and insight based knowledge), it might not be equally appealing to all types of personalities, namely, those project managers who tend to come from a more deterministic background. If anything, in some cases, the name alone can create a negative bias toward the overall approach. It is therefore important to develop other avenues of exploration to help different types of project managers increase their communication and leadership skills.

Ambiguity Reduction

One of the communication techniques rarely mentioned in the project management domain, but frequently used in social science and psychology is “Ambiguity reduction.” The principles of ambiguity reduction have come to us from Berger and Calabrese's (1975) post-positivist communication theory that explains how communication is used to reduce uncertainty among people in their initial interactions. According to this theory, because people find uncertainty unpleasant, they are motivated to reduce it through interpersonal communication. The theory also proposes that the nature of communications evolve over time as intimacy develops. Since its early development, it has been further researched and used to study intercultural interaction and organizational socialization (Gudykunst et al., 1985). This approach might prove more attractive to understand and develop communication skills for some project managers because it uses scientific methodology and deductive reasoning to reach conclusions that take the form of seven primary axioms and 21 theorems.

In this framework, activities involve looking out for possible misunderstanding and clarifying. When it comes to basic communication skills, the greatest source of ambiguity often stems from words may that have different meanings depending on the individual's past experiences, the context at stake and/or the culture. For example, a dry country may mean that it has no water for some or no alcohol for others and a funny meeting can be either a humorous one or simply a disconcerting one depending on the context. In a transactional framework, it would be of great importance for managers’ to first recognize that there is a potential for misunderstanding and it becomes an essential responsibility to ask for the valid interpretation.

Another common source of ambiguity comes from simple mistakes, more usual, however, is that in reflecting over several alternatives people may suffer momentary confusion and say a word when they mean another. It is not the object of this paper to document the good scientific reasons why this happens; however, a good manager should be aware of the potential problem and counter it. Finally, people might simply mishear and, depending on the situation, the omission of a simple word could be devastating. To help with reducing the ambiguity of communications, the following steps are generally useful:

Playback or Reformulation: During which one simply briefly rephrases or paraphrases what the speaker said and asks for confirmation.

Write Back or Document: Here, it is best to write a brief summary and send it to everyone involved asking for feedback. This has several advantages:

• Further clarification
• Consistency check
• Setting a formal stage - a statement of the accepted position as a spring board from which to proceed
• Evidence when documenting lessons learned

Give Background Information: Which can often counter possible understanding problems by providing a broader context in which the communication can be understood. This reduces the scope for alternative interpretations since only the pertinent ones will be consistent with this background. When others are speaking, one should deliberately ask questions to establish the context in which they are thinking.

A recent study using the “Ambiguity Reduction” Model was conducted on over 700 members of a social networking group to look at what strategies they used to get to know people they had recently met in person. The most common and beneficial strategy was the interactive mode that reduced the most uncertainty by showing a perceived similarity and by increasing social attraction (Antheunis et al. 2010).

These basic communication principles are similar to those expressed by Cialdini (2004, 2008) in his book, Influence: Science and Practice. His overall research covers developments in the social influence literature published between 1997 and 2002. This author's conclusions are based on numerous interesting quantitative research results directly and indirectly related to the art of persuasion and indicate that people have six available powerful shortcuts that prove helpful to communicate a message and influence others. This along with precious ones is another approach that might be more palatable to project managers who want to test out new ways to interact in small probes rather than embrace a larger theoretical model of leadership. These are:

1. Reciprocity: Concerns the “obligation to give back” that most people experience when they have received something. Cialdini documents the implications of reciprocity by providing examples of quantitative studies demonstrating the powerful effect of simple gestures such as mints or chocolates being offered at the end of a restaurant meal. When given one mint, tips consequently increased by 3%, two mints bring a 14% increase and when they are given in a personal or privileged context the tips go up by 23%. Cialdini suggests that wise leaders be the first to give, unexpectedly and in a personalised manner.
2. Scarcity: People seem to want more of something that is scarce. Again here, concrete examples illustrate the case being made for leaders who have the ability of outlining the uniqueness of a situation, its benefits and what people stand to lose if they do not embrace the opportunity at hand. This enables them to engage their followers and extended groups of stakeholders.
3. Authority: Demonstrates that people have a natural tendency to follow the lead of credible, knowledgeable experts. In this area, the author suggests a number of small, ethical and costless changes that can be easily implemented when communicating a message that positively influence its impact. Even being introduced by a colleague who has something to gain from enhancing your CV can be quite effective.
4. Consistency: Has to do with looking for and asking for small commitments that can easily be made at first. Research results show that people will then be more willing to carry out larger commitments they would have otherwise refused to implement in order to maintain inner consistency. In implementing change initiatives or innovative ideas, Cialdini suggests that leaders first look for small, voluntary, active public commitments. He gives the example of health centres having reduced missed appointments by 18% simply by having patients fill in the appointment detail cards rather than an attendant doing this for them.
5. Liking: People prefer to say yes to those they like. Research results show that we like people who are similar to us, people who pay us compliments and people who cooperate with us. When experimental study groups were first asked to exchange personal information about themselves and finding similarities before entering a negotiation task, this led to 90% coming to an acceptable agreement. This shows a considerable difference with the 55% agreement from the group that had been told: “Time is money, get straight to the point.”
6. Consensus: This principle shows that especially when uncertain, people will look to others to determine their own course of action. In this instance, science tells us that as a leader, rather than relying on our own ability to convince people to do something, it can be more effective to simply point out what other people or groups of people are already doing.

Just as the theory of ambiguity reduction can seem more attractive than EI for some project managers when it comes to communication skills, similarly, Cialdini's structured approach to the art and science of influencing may come as good news when it comes to leading. Cialdini's theory is based upon well-grounded research and compiles the findings in a relatively simple organised framework that is within easy reach for most project managers. This approach certainly offers numerous examples and opportunities for project managers wanting to test and practice new skills to increase their leadership abilities.

Conclusion

For projects and programs to be successful, project managers need to communicate to coordinate their own work and that of others. With the fifth edition of the PMBOK^® Guide, this responsibility has been pushed even further and project managers are now expected to actively engage stakeholders. Without explicit effort, most communications will lack meaningfulness and work will collapse though misunderstanding and error.

As outlined by mechanistic frameworks of the past, it is important to treat a conversation as any other managed activity: by establishing an aim, planning what to do, and checking afterwards that you have achieved that aim.

However, in the ever-changing environment of the complex organization, managers must also develop meaningful relationships with a great number of different stakeholders. The newer transactional models of management draw upon research findings that clearly show the importance of the quality of such relationships to ensure project and organizational success. It has become crucial for project managers to develop the knowledge and skills to be good listeners, understand stakeholders’ needs and demonstrate this understanding in all levels of interactions. Some people are naturally emotionally intelligent and proficient at “thinking on their feet” but this is generally because they already have clear understanding of the context and their own goals.

As much as it is a good place to start with a plan, most project managers may want to enhance their initial competencies in this domain and embrace well-known practices from other social sciences. This paper suggests applying the techniques that come from the theory of ambiguity reduction as one of the communication techniques rarely mentioned in the project management domain, but frequently used in social science and psychology. Similarly, the paper briefly presents Cialdini's six principles as inspiration to project managers wanting to enhance their leadership abilities.