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Hey, welcome to this episode. I'm Mike Fesco, a 20-plus year project manager. And if you're an aspiring project manager stuck in a support role with no apparent path to advance, you're in the right place.
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Oh, and if you're an early career PM who's struggling with some aspect of the job, you're welcome here as well. Let's get going. Learn more about being a project manager. Oh. So here's a situation for you.
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You're three weeks into your project. The team's really busy. You've been sending the weekly reports by email.
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You had a big kickoff meeting, and then your vice president pulls you aside and says, "I feel like I have no idea what's going on with this project." And you think, "How? I've been communicating constantly."
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The question I'd ask you is, have you been busy communicating or communicating effectively? As an aspiring project manager, take a note of the distinction.
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And for a lot of early career project managers, that distinction could be where your project quietly starts to fall apart.
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Today, we're looking into one of the most underrated skills in the entire project management toolkit, and that is communication.
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And not the theory of it, not the textbook version, but the real, practical, sometimes uncomfortable reality of keeping teams aligned, stakeholders informed, and projects moving.
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Before you can communicate well, you need to know who you're communicating with, and this is where a lot of new PMs make their first big mistake.
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They either communicate to everyone or they communicate to the wrong people. So let's cover stakeholder identification and analysis.
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A stakeholder is anyone who has interest in your project or who can affect its outcome either positively or negatively, and that's a wide net.
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It's your sponsor, your team, your end users, finance, legal, that one department that didn't ask to be involved but will complain loudly if they're not. Well, they're all stakeholders.
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But not all stakeholders are created equal, and this is where a tool called the power interest grid becomes your best friend.
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It was popularized by researchers Mendelow and Eden back in the '80s, and it's still one of the most practical frameworks in the game. Here's how it works.
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You plot stakeholders on a two-by-two grid, and one axis is power, how much authority or influence do they have over your project, and the other axis is interest, how much do they actually care about the outcome?
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So picturing that you have four quadrants. High power and high interest, these are your key players. You manage them closely. They need regular, meaningful communication.
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Think like your project sponsor, your steering committee. Then there's high power, low interest quadrant. Keep those folks satisfied, but don't overwhelm them.
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They can derail your project if they're unhappy, but they don't want weekly updates. So a well-timed, well-crafted executive summary goes a long way in that quadrant.
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The low power, high interest quadrant, you want to keep them informed. They care deeply, but they might be your end users, your subject matter experts, the ones that are really involved.
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They're great for feedback and buy-in even if they don't have formal authority. And finally, the low power, low interest quadrant. Monitor them with minimal effort. They don't need a standing invite to every review.
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The reason this matters for communication?
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Well, if you're sending the same update to all four quadrants, you're either under-serving your key players or drowning your low interest stakeholders, and that creates noise and fatigue that will come back to bite you.
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On top of that, here's a bit of practicality. When you build your stakeholder list, also document each person's preferred communication style. As you can imagine, some executives want a single slide.
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Some SMEs, subject matter experts, want a detailed document that they can mark up. Some people live in email. Others only respond on Slack or Teams. This tagging of style preference isn't just a nice to have.
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It's the difference between a message that lands and one that gets ignored.
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Now, here's something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough in early PM circles, and it's a bit of math, so bear with me because it's actually kind of mind-blowing. It's simple math, though. Don't worry about this.
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There's a formula in project management called the communication channels formula, and it goes like this. I'm going to say it, so try to picture it.
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It's n times parentheses n minus one close parentheses, all of that divided by two, where n is the number of people on your project.
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By the way, if you'd like a visual representation of how complicated this gets when you add more people, there's a link to download my communications calculator in the episode notes.
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So here's what that looks like in real life. If you have a team of five people, that's 10 potential communication channels. And walk through that formula, it's five times five minus one is four.
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Five times four is 20, divided by two is 10, so 10 potential communication channels. But if you go to a team of 10, that's double the people, that jumps to 45 communication channels.
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If you add five more, now you're at 15 people total, and you're managing 105 potential channels. So when you let that sink in, you can go from five to 15 people, and your communication complexity doesn't triple.
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It's now more than tenfold, and this is actually referenced in the PM guide, and it's core to why large projects require dedicated communication planning.
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This is why adding people to a project to speed things up often does exactly the opposite.
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Someone named Fred Brooks wrote about this in the Mythical Man-Month all the way back in 1975, and it's still one of the most cited observations in software project management.
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He called it Brooks' Law, that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. And part of why? Communication overhead. Every new person added to a team doesn't just add one new relationship.
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They add relationships of various strengths with every single other person, and each relationship is a potential source of misalignment, misunderstanding, and delay.
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So what does this mean for you when in a PM leadership role?Well, first, be intentional about who's in the room. Every meeting invite is a communication design decision. Ask yourself, does this person need to be here?
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Do they just need to be informed later? There's a difference right there. Second, resist the pressure to carbon copy or CC everyone.
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We've all worked in organizations where email chains have twenty-five people on them just to be safe, and all that does really is create noise, dilute accountability, and train people to ignore your emails.
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Third, when you need to expand your team, create clear communication structures first. Working group, subteams, designated liaisons. Don't just add people and hope the information flows.
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So let's shift a minute and talk about meetings because honestly, bad meetings might be the single biggest time waster in organizational life, and as a PM, you're gonna run a lot of them.
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There's actually research on this.
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A twenty twenty-three Microsoft work trend report found that professionals spent roughly fifty-seven percent of their work time in meetings and communication, and a significant chunk of that is considered low value.
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That's a staggering number, and as a PM, you have more control over this than you might think. So here are some principles to follow to build your meeting culture around.
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Every meeting needs a clear purpose and a pre-distributed agenda. Not a vague topic, but a purpose. Project sync is not a purpose.
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Review scope change request number four and decide whether to escalate to the steering committee, well, that's a purpose, and it bounds your agenda.
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And when people know why they're there, the conversation is many times more focused. Work a summarized version of that into your communication subject line.
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Send the agenda at least twenty-four hours in advance if possible. If you can't articulate the agenda, you're not really ready for the meeting, right? Also, you wanna assign roles.
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At a minimum, someone needs to facilitate, someone needs to take notes, a real person or AI these days, and someone needs to track action items. And honestly, AI transcripts of a recorded meeting do a great job of this.
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These can all be you when you're starting out, but be deliberate about it. Ooh, plus you should rotate note-taking among the team.
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It keeps everyone engaged because nobody wants to be the one who missed something when it was their turn. You can also start with the end in mind. Before you open the meeting, know what done looks like. Is it a decision?
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Is it an alignment? A list of the next steps. Stating that at the top, for example, by the end of this hour, we need to have decided x, that changes the energy in the room. Some people may think of it as, "Oh, hope.
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When I hear that done, I know the meeting's just about over," but it's really important. And then end every meeting with clear action items, not vague commitments, but specific actions with an owner and a due date.
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So if you say, "We'll look into the vendor timeline," that's not an action item. It's like something that might happen if somebody does it, but nobody knows when or where.
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Rather, Sarah will confirm delivery date with the vendor by Friday end of day. That is an action item. It's the difference between meetings that keep things moving and meetings that just consume time.
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And when you record those action items, you can bring them right up at the next meeting and see where they are. One more thing, not everything is a meeting. This could have been an email,
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a quick Slack message, a shared document for async comments. Build a habit of asking that question before you send the calendar invite.
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All right, let's talk about one of the most important recurring responsibilities you'll have as a PM, the status update.
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If it's done well, a project status update is a powerful alignment tool, and if it's done poorly, it's either anxiety-inducing or completely ignored, and a lot of early PMs aren't taught how to do this well.
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If you're an aspiring project manager, watch how this is done by other PMs in, in your, um, in your sphere of, of, uh, everyday existence because you'll see that some are done well and some are not.
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So here's a framework that I've used a lot. Think about your status update in three layers. First one is the headline, like, is the project on track, at risk, or in trouble? Use a simple traffic light,
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red, amber, green, sometimes referred to as RAG or rag, and don't sugarcoat it. It's one of the fastest ways to lose credibility with senior stakeholders if you report green right up until the moment you miss a deadline.
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They'd rather know something is amber early and have time to respond. The second layer is the context, like what happened since the last update, what's coming next, are there key decisions or approvals needed?
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And keep it pretty concise. Busy stakeholders don't have time to read a novel, like three to five bullets is often all you need. And the third layer is the risks and blockers.
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This is the part most PMs, especially new ones, shy away from because it feels like admitting a failure. It's not.
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In fact, I made a YouTube video about failed projects that covers more on this topic, and I'll link that down in the episode notes as well. You know, surfacing a risk early is one of the highest value things a PM can do.
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It gives stakeholders the chance to help, to remove obstacles, to make calls maybe you can't. And if you're hiding a blocker until it becomes a crisis, well, that damages trust.
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Oh, and this is important, match the format to the audience. Your team might get a quick Slack update with three bullets. Your executive sponsor might get a one-page dashboard.
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Your steering committee might get a structured slide. It's the same core information, it's just different packaging. And send status updates on a predictable cadence. It doesn't matter if it's weekly or biweekly.
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What matters is that people know when to expect it. When stakeholders know updates are coming, they stop asking for them ad hoc, and that frees you up to actually manage the project.
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Here's something that catches a lot of PMs off guard. Alignment isn't a one-time event. You don't align stakeholders at the kickoff and call it done.
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Vision drift is real.People get busy, priorities shift, new stakeholders come in mid-project, and suddenly you've got different people in different departments working toward different understandings of what success looks like, or the definition of done.
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Your job as the PM is to be the guardian of the project vision, not just to document it, but to actively reinforce it throughout the project lifecycle. Here's a few practical ways to do this.
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Create a one-page project brief.
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Sometimes you call that a project charter or a project vision document, and that should capture the project's purpose, the goals, the scope boundaries, the definition of success in plain language, not PM talk.
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Plain language. Give this to every new stakeholder who joins. Reference it in your steering committee updates, and bring it back out whenever scope creep starts creeping.
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Also, use the language of outcomes and not outputs.
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Instead of saying, "We're building a new reporting dashboard," say, "We're giving the sales team real-time visibility into pipeline health so they can make faster decisions."
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It's the same project, but one version reminds everyone why it matters, and that why is what keeps people aligned when trade-off decisions get hard. Next is to name misalignment when you see it. It's a skill.
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You need to develop that. When two stakeholders are pulling in different directions, a lot of new PMs try to quietly manage around the conflict, but don't. Bring it into the open.
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"I'm noticing some different expectations here around X. Can we take five minutes to align on this?" So addressed early, it's a conversation. If you ignore it, it becomes a crisis.
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And finally, repeat the vision more than you think you need to. There's some research on organizational communication that consistently shows people need to hear a message multiple times before it truly registers.
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One kickoff presentation is not enough to state the vision. You need to weave the project's purpose, the shared vision, into your status updates, your meeting openers, your sponsor updates.
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Repetition isn't redundancy, it's reinforcement. Okay, we're getting close to the end, but I want to leave you with a handful of other communication practices that don't get enough airtime or podcast time.
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Document decisions. Every significant decision made in your project should be logged. What was decided? Why? Who made it?
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And this sounds bureaucratic and administrative, but six months in, when someone says, "Why did we go with that approach?" you'll be grateful you have the answer.
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A simple decision log in your project notebook or a shared doc is all it takes.
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If there's ever a legal dispute down the road, the documentation that exists in your system for, you know, the standard five to seven years could save a great deal of grief to prove a point that was made, why it was made, how it was made, instead of things getting out of control.
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Next, create a RACI matrix for communication responsibilities, and RACI, capital R, capital A, capital C, capital I, stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.
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It maps out who needs to be involved in what decisions, and importantly, it draws a clear line between people who need to weigh in and people who just need to know the outcome.
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This one tool alone can eliminate a massive amount of unnecessary meeting attendance and email traffic. Next, over-communicate during uncertainty.
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When a project hits a rough patch, like a scope change, a missed milestone, a key resource that leaves, the instinct for many people is to go quiet until things are resolved.
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But you need to resist that because silence breeds speculation. The rumor mill starts running, and speculation is almost always worse than the reality. So a short, "Hey, here's what happened.
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Here's what we're doing about it. Here's when you'll hear from me next," message does wonders for maintaining trust. And finally, build relationships before you need them.
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The best communication foundation is a human one. Take time to know your stakeholders as people, not just roles. A stakeholder who trusts you will give you the benefit of the doubt when things get bumpy.
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One who barely knows you will assume the worst. Project management is often described as a technical discipline. You've got schedules, budget, scope, risk, and those things matter.
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But ask any experienced PM what separates the good ones from the great ones, and communication comes up almost every single time.
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In fact, somewhere in PMI documentation, you'll find some guideline that communication is 90% of a project manager's time.
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The frameworks and formulas we talked about today, like the power interest grid, the communication channels equation, the traffic light status update, these aren't just theory.
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They're actual tools that you can start using, you should start using, on your very next project, or why not today's project? The goal isn't perfect communication. It's intentional communication.
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Know your audience, be honest about status, protect the vision, and respect people's times by being clear, concise, and consistent. That's what builds trust, and trust is what makes projects actually work.
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One more bit of information, but first, I want to thank you so much for spending time with me today on the Being a Project Manager podcast.
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If the episode was helpful, please share it with someone who's just stepping into their first PM role. They'll thank you for it. And before you go, I'd love to connect with you.
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If you have questions, want to share your own communication wins, or you're just looking to expand your PM network, find me on LinkedIn. The link is right there in the episode notes.
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Until next time, keep leading with intention.
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Hey, welcome to this episode. I'm Mike Fesco, a 20-plus year project manager. And if you're an aspiring project manager stuck in a support role with no apparent path to advance, you're in the right place.
2
00:00:11.960 --> 00:00:27.540
Oh, and if you're an early career PM who's struggling with some aspect of the job, you're welcome here as well. Let's get going. Learn more about being a project manager. Oh. So here's a situation for you.
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00:00:27.640 --> 00:00:34.100
You're three weeks into your project. The team's really busy. You've been sending the weekly reports by email.
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00:00:34.620 --> 00:00:47.520
You had a big kickoff meeting, and then your vice president pulls you aside and says, "I feel like I have no idea what's going on with this project." And you think, "How? I've been communicating constantly."
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00:00:48.580 --> 00:00:59.040
The question I'd ask you is, have you been busy communicating or communicating effectively? As an aspiring project manager, take a note of the distinction.
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00:00:59.100 --> 00:01:06.160
And for a lot of early career project managers, that distinction could be where your project quietly starts to fall apart.
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00:01:07.040 --> 00:01:13.730
Today, we're looking into one of the most underrated skills in the entire project management toolkit, and that is communication.
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And not the theory of it, not the textbook version, but the real, practical, sometimes uncomfortable reality of keeping teams aligned, stakeholders informed, and projects moving.
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Before you can communicate well, you need to know who you're communicating with, and this is where a lot of new PMs make their first big mistake.
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They either communicate to everyone or they communicate to the wrong people. So let's cover stakeholder identification and analysis.
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A stakeholder is anyone who has interest in your project or who can affect its outcome either positively or negatively, and that's a wide net.
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It's your sponsor, your team, your end users, finance, legal, that one department that didn't ask to be involved but will complain loudly if they're not. Well, they're all stakeholders.
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But not all stakeholders are created equal, and this is where a tool called the power interest grid becomes your best friend.
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It was popularized by researchers Mendelow and Eden back in the '80s, and it's still one of the most practical frameworks in the game. Here's how it works.
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You plot stakeholders on a two-by-two grid, and one axis is power, how much authority or influence do they have over your project, and the other axis is interest, how much do they actually care about the outcome?
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So picturing that you have four quadrants. High power and high interest, these are your key players. You manage them closely. They need regular, meaningful communication.
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Think like your project sponsor, your steering committee. Then there's high power, low interest quadrant. Keep those folks satisfied, but don't overwhelm them.
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They can derail your project if they're unhappy, but they don't want weekly updates. So a well-timed, well-crafted executive summary goes a long way in that quadrant.
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The low power, high interest quadrant, you want to keep them informed. They care deeply, but they might be your end users, your subject matter experts, the ones that are really involved.
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They're great for feedback and buy-in even if they don't have formal authority. And finally, the low power, low interest quadrant. Monitor them with minimal effort. They don't need a standing invite to every review.
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The reason this matters for communication?
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Well, if you're sending the same update to all four quadrants, you're either under-serving your key players or drowning your low interest stakeholders, and that creates noise and fatigue that will come back to bite you.
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On top of that, here's a bit of practicality. When you build your stakeholder list, also document each person's preferred communication style. As you can imagine, some executives want a single slide.
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Some SMEs, subject matter experts, want a detailed document that they can mark up. Some people live in email. Others only respond on Slack or Teams. This tagging of style preference isn't just a nice to have.
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It's the difference between a message that lands and one that gets ignored.
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Now, here's something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough in early PM circles, and it's a bit of math, so bear with me because it's actually kind of mind-blowing. It's simple math, though. Don't worry about this.
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There's a formula in project management called the communication channels formula, and it goes like this. I'm going to say it, so try to picture it.
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It's n times parentheses n minus one close parentheses, all of that divided by two, where n is the number of people on your project.
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By the way, if you'd like a visual representation of how complicated this gets when you add more people, there's a link to download my communications calculator in the episode notes.
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So here's what that looks like in real life. If you have a team of five people, that's 10 potential communication channels. And walk through that formula, it's five times five minus one is four.
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Five times four is 20, divided by two is 10, so 10 potential communication channels. But if you go to a team of 10, that's double the people, that jumps to 45 communication channels.
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If you add five more, now you're at 15 people total, and you're managing 105 potential channels. So when you let that sink in, you can go from five to 15 people, and your communication complexity doesn't triple.
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It's now more than tenfold, and this is actually referenced in the PM guide, and it's core to why large projects require dedicated communication planning.
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This is why adding people to a project to speed things up often does exactly the opposite.
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Someone named Fred Brooks wrote about this in the Mythical Man-Month all the way back in 1975, and it's still one of the most cited observations in software project management.
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He called it Brooks' Law, that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. And part of why? Communication overhead. Every new person added to a team doesn't just add one new relationship.
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They add relationships of various strengths with every single other person, and each relationship is a potential source of misalignment, misunderstanding, and delay.
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So what does this mean for you when in a PM leadership role?Well, first, be intentional about who's in the room. Every meeting invite is a communication design decision. Ask yourself, does this person need to be here?
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Do they just need to be informed later? There's a difference right there. Second, resist the pressure to carbon copy or CC everyone.
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We've all worked in organizations where email chains have twenty-five people on them just to be safe, and all that does really is create noise, dilute accountability, and train people to ignore your emails.
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Third, when you need to expand your team, create clear communication structures first. Working group, subteams, designated liaisons. Don't just add people and hope the information flows.
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So let's shift a minute and talk about meetings because honestly, bad meetings might be the single biggest time waster in organizational life, and as a PM, you're gonna run a lot of them.
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There's actually research on this.
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A twenty twenty-three Microsoft work trend report found that professionals spent roughly fifty-seven percent of their work time in meetings and communication, and a significant chunk of that is considered low value.
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That's a staggering number, and as a PM, you have more control over this than you might think. So here are some principles to follow to build your meeting culture around.
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Every meeting needs a clear purpose and a pre-distributed agenda. Not a vague topic, but a purpose. Project sync is not a purpose.
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Review scope change request number four and decide whether to escalate to the steering committee, well, that's a purpose, and it bounds your agenda.
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And when people know why they're there, the conversation is many times more focused. Work a summarized version of that into your communication subject line.
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Send the agenda at least twenty-four hours in advance if possible. If you can't articulate the agenda, you're not really ready for the meeting, right? Also, you wanna assign roles.
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At a minimum, someone needs to facilitate, someone needs to take notes, a real person or AI these days, and someone needs to track action items. And honestly, AI transcripts of a recorded meeting do a great job of this.
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These can all be you when you're starting out, but be deliberate about it. Ooh, plus you should rotate note-taking among the team.
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It keeps everyone engaged because nobody wants to be the one who missed something when it was their turn. You can also start with the end in mind. Before you open the meeting, know what done looks like. Is it a decision?
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Is it an alignment? A list of the next steps. Stating that at the top, for example, by the end of this hour, we need to have decided x, that changes the energy in the room. Some people may think of it as, "Oh, hope.
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When I hear that done, I know the meeting's just about over," but it's really important. And then end every meeting with clear action items, not vague commitments, but specific actions with an owner and a due date.
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So if you say, "We'll look into the vendor timeline," that's not an action item. It's like something that might happen if somebody does it, but nobody knows when or where.
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Rather, Sarah will confirm delivery date with the vendor by Friday end of day. That is an action item. It's the difference between meetings that keep things moving and meetings that just consume time.
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And when you record those action items, you can bring them right up at the next meeting and see where they are. One more thing, not everything is a meeting. This could have been an email,
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a quick Slack message, a shared document for async comments. Build a habit of asking that question before you send the calendar invite.
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All right, let's talk about one of the most important recurring responsibilities you'll have as a PM, the status update.
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If it's done well, a project status update is a powerful alignment tool, and if it's done poorly, it's either anxiety-inducing or completely ignored, and a lot of early PMs aren't taught how to do this well.
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If you're an aspiring project manager, watch how this is done by other PMs in, in your, um, in your sphere of, of, uh, everyday existence because you'll see that some are done well and some are not.
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So here's a framework that I've used a lot. Think about your status update in three layers. First one is the headline, like, is the project on track, at risk, or in trouble? Use a simple traffic light,
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red, amber, green, sometimes referred to as RAG or rag, and don't sugarcoat it. It's one of the fastest ways to lose credibility with senior stakeholders if you report green right up until the moment you miss a deadline.
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They'd rather know something is amber early and have time to respond. The second layer is the context, like what happened since the last update, what's coming next, are there key decisions or approvals needed?
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And keep it pretty concise. Busy stakeholders don't have time to read a novel, like three to five bullets is often all you need. And the third layer is the risks and blockers.
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This is the part most PMs, especially new ones, shy away from because it feels like admitting a failure. It's not.
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In fact, I made a YouTube video about failed projects that covers more on this topic, and I'll link that down in the episode notes as well. You know, surfacing a risk early is one of the highest value things a PM can do.
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It gives stakeholders the chance to help, to remove obstacles, to make calls maybe you can't. And if you're hiding a blocker until it becomes a crisis, well, that damages trust.
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Oh, and this is important, match the format to the audience. Your team might get a quick Slack update with three bullets. Your executive sponsor might get a one-page dashboard.
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Your steering committee might get a structured slide. It's the same core information, it's just different packaging. And send status updates on a predictable cadence. It doesn't matter if it's weekly or biweekly.
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What matters is that people know when to expect it. When stakeholders know updates are coming, they stop asking for them ad hoc, and that frees you up to actually manage the project.
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Here's something that catches a lot of PMs off guard. Alignment isn't a one-time event. You don't align stakeholders at the kickoff and call it done.
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Vision drift is real.People get busy, priorities shift, new stakeholders come in mid-project, and suddenly you've got different people in different departments working toward different understandings of what success looks like, or the definition of done.
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Your job as the PM is to be the guardian of the project vision, not just to document it, but to actively reinforce it throughout the project lifecycle. Here's a few practical ways to do this.
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Create a one-page project brief.
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Sometimes you call that a project charter or a project vision document, and that should capture the project's purpose, the goals, the scope boundaries, the definition of success in plain language, not PM talk.
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Plain language. Give this to every new stakeholder who joins. Reference it in your steering committee updates, and bring it back out whenever scope creep starts creeping.
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Also, use the language of outcomes and not outputs.
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Instead of saying, "We're building a new reporting dashboard," say, "We're giving the sales team real-time visibility into pipeline health so they can make faster decisions."
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It's the same project, but one version reminds everyone why it matters, and that why is what keeps people aligned when trade-off decisions get hard. Next is to name misalignment when you see it. It's a skill.
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You need to develop that. When two stakeholders are pulling in different directions, a lot of new PMs try to quietly manage around the conflict, but don't. Bring it into the open.
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"I'm noticing some different expectations here around X. Can we take five minutes to align on this?" So addressed early, it's a conversation. If you ignore it, it becomes a crisis.
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And finally, repeat the vision more than you think you need to. There's some research on organizational communication that consistently shows people need to hear a message multiple times before it truly registers.
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One kickoff presentation is not enough to state the vision. You need to weave the project's purpose, the shared vision, into your status updates, your meeting openers, your sponsor updates.
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Repetition isn't redundancy, it's reinforcement. Okay, we're getting close to the end, but I want to leave you with a handful of other communication practices that don't get enough airtime or podcast time.
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Document decisions. Every significant decision made in your project should be logged. What was decided? Why? Who made it?
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And this sounds bureaucratic and administrative, but six months in, when someone says, "Why did we go with that approach?" you'll be grateful you have the answer.
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A simple decision log in your project notebook or a shared doc is all it takes.
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If there's ever a legal dispute down the road, the documentation that exists in your system for, you know, the standard five to seven years could save a great deal of grief to prove a point that was made, why it was made, how it was made, instead of things getting out of control.
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Next, create a RACI matrix for communication responsibilities, and RACI, capital R, capital A, capital C, capital I, stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.
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It maps out who needs to be involved in what decisions, and importantly, it draws a clear line between people who need to weigh in and people who just need to know the outcome.
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This one tool alone can eliminate a massive amount of unnecessary meeting attendance and email traffic. Next, over-communicate during uncertainty.
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When a project hits a rough patch, like a scope change, a missed milestone, a key resource that leaves, the instinct for many people is to go quiet until things are resolved.
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But you need to resist that because silence breeds speculation. The rumor mill starts running, and speculation is almost always worse than the reality. So a short, "Hey, here's what happened.
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Here's what we're doing about it. Here's when you'll hear from me next," message does wonders for maintaining trust. And finally, build relationships before you need them.
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The best communication foundation is a human one. Take time to know your stakeholders as people, not just roles. A stakeholder who trusts you will give you the benefit of the doubt when things get bumpy.
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One who barely knows you will assume the worst. Project management is often described as a technical discipline. You've got schedules, budget, scope, risk, and those things matter.
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But ask any experienced PM what separates the good ones from the great ones, and communication comes up almost every single time.
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In fact, somewhere in PMI documentation, you'll find some guideline that communication is 90% of a project manager's time.
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The frameworks and formulas we talked about today, like the power interest grid, the communication channels equation, the traffic light status update, these aren't just theory.
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They're actual tools that you can start using, you should start using, on your very next project, or why not today's project? The goal isn't perfect communication. It's intentional communication.
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Know your audience, be honest about status, protect the vision, and respect people's times by being clear, concise, and consistent. That's what builds trust, and trust is what makes projects actually work.
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One more bit of information, but first, I want to thank you so much for spending time with me today on the Being a Project Manager podcast.
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If the episode was helpful, please share it with someone who's just stepping into their first PM role. They'll thank you for it. And before you go, I'd love to connect with you.
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If you have questions, want to share your own communication wins, or you're just looking to expand your PM network, find me on LinkedIn. The link is right there in the episode notes.
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Until next time, keep leading with intention.
