How would you rate yourself based on your management skills? And more specifically, what about your communication skills? If you’re a management graduate and/or project manager, it’s highly necessary for you to develop good management communication skills.
This really is one of the most important areas of development as constituency based management relies heavily on a person’s ability to not only communicate their own ideas with peers, subordinate and customers but to also have the ability to listen effectively to other people’s concerns and interests. It’s an essential tool of resource management which makes it extremely important for managers to be assessed and trained, and then once they have been trained they need to practice, practice, practice.
As a career oriented person, especially in the field of management, there are certain skills which need to be developed as fully as possible. And are even required in many cases when you apply for a job position. Management of an organization requires a high level of mental activity which uses communication to carry out its roles in a goal-oriented environment.
Many of the duties of management specialists include both short and long-term planning, confrontation of objectives, determining the course of action for the organization, delegation, risk taking, decision making, putting out fires and the list goes on and on. All these roles are important and each one of them require good communication but by nature they also help in developing and honing one’s management communication skills. Remember the need for practice we talked about earlier?
Within an organization, meetings are a vital part of what makes everything run smoothly in terms of work flow and information. A meeting is where all available resources are gathered together from many sources throughout the team or organization to work towards a common objective.
It’s in these meetings that management communication skills really come into play. This is because meetings can become long, futile, boring and at times disliked when the management conducting the meeting lacks truly effective communication skills. How many times do you hear people excited about having to attend yet another meeting?
As a project manager, your purpose is to break the mould and make the meeting effective and interesting. What a novel idea! Interesting, who would have ever thought of that? A boring meeting won’t stimulate the right responses you need from other project managers or other team members and much of the resources available to you and the organization can end up wasted. People need stimulation, excitement, and effective encouragement from the leaders to get ideas flowing.
Normally, meetings are planned, monitored and reviewed afterwards. This is important to provide room for improvement in your future meetings. Use this process wisely and even ask for objective criticism from team members so you can continually improve your meetings as time goes by.
Another part of your job as manager is to organize the information and structure of each meeting using the skills you developed along the way and to also use these skills to support effective communication of all other managers or team members present at your meetings.
Here are a few vital points to keep in mind as far as effective management communication skills go for you to take note in improving your own skills:
- Plan your purpose and message before hand. For an effective meeting or speech to be properly communicated, state the idea of what you are trying to convey in a clear, concise and easy to understand message. If you want them to be prepared then you must be prepared.
- Expression is a must. When speaking in front of a group of people, your management communication skills comes into play and therefore the style with which you speak expresses what you want the participants of the meeting to do. IF you want them to support the teams objectives, then you should be enthusiastic in your style of expression. Do what you can to stimulate creativity and participation.
- Answer questions, solicit feedback and encourage the flow of ideas. And most importantly be an active listener.
Communication is a two way process; one has to speak and the other needs to listen. In an organizational meeting, after conveying your message, give chances to the other members of the meeting to express their own opinions and ideas. Listen intently to what others have to say and look at them as they speak, maintaining eye contact appropriately.