The Essay Highlights The Importance Of Professional Communication Skills For Project Managers. (70 Characters)

Skills necessary for the development of a personnel career

This essay depicts the concise review of the literature, particularly focusing on the skills as well as the skills that are necessary for the development of a personnel career. For any business organization, project managers play the most crucial roles to meet the project goal and organizational objectives (Coombs, 2015). In order to develop the career of any personnel certain skills are needed to be possessed by the project managers such as competence management, risk management, professional communication.

For different job roles the allocated set of skills also differs a lot and for this specific essay on career advancement the chosen skill for the profession of project manager is professional communication. Skill is defined as the capacity or ability that can be obtained through deliberate, systematic rather sustained efforts for smoothly complex job roles and professional activities (Hagemeier et al., 2014). The skills that a project manager needs to possess include consistency, flexibility, communication, problem solving ability etc.  

According to Munyon et al., (2015) communication is one of the most important skills as it helps to provide the project team members a positive working environment with effective working efficiency. Besides professional communication leadership, operational abilities are the additional abilities that today’s project managers should have. The career that has been nominated for illustrating this essay is project manager and the skill that has been nominated for the student is professional communication (Brady et al., 2016).  It has been identified that the path of becoming a project manager will become much easier if the student possess proper communicating skill. Hagemeier et al., (2014) stated that communication management is very necessary for the critical project success rather in the world of project management communication is always highlighted as a n essential process. However not only the project manager but also all the project team members are required to have proper ability to communicate with each other. Open communication will allow the project team members to share the point of views with the other project team members. With the addition of the high level creative project level ideas a simple project can become successful with quality. Kerzner & Kerzner, (2017) opined that, success of a project is also dependent on its quality and the quality of any project can be improved with the undertaken actions by the project manager being the head of the projects.

For different professional the definition and necessity of skills also differs a lot such as technical skills, interpersonal skill, cognitive skill etc. However, for any job role inter-personal skill is very much important (Nickolayev et al., 2015). Thus, it is necessary for the project managers to communicate accurately with the rest of the project team members to provide an efficient an effective working environment. The aim of this essay is to develop a clear and inspiring vision of what the project manager needs to achieve in their career.

The professional level communication is comprises of some components such as ideation, sending the encoded message to the receiver side with overcoming the noise, decoding the received message, communication channel, feedback after decoding the message. Communication approach has the ability to exchange understandable information from the sender side to the receiver side. Efficient communication is important for the success of programs, projects and portfolio etc (Gibson & Sodeman, 2014). Typically if there is something that may negatively impact the project scope, cost, risk and quality if a project then that is improper communication. Jackson (2015) stated that, some communication medium are there such as e mail, fax, voice mail, face to face communication, wireless devices, chatting through websites that may be utilized by the project managers for successfully deliver their ideas to the rest of the project team members.  The electronic communication tools for project management like web interface for scheduling is also necessary for the project managers to possess (Coombs, 2015). Lack of information about the project details, unfamiliar technologies and long distance between the sender and the receiver can stand up as an interruption in project deliverables. The three different types of communication skills that are pointed out include:

Importance of communication skills for project managers

Interactive communication:  The process of interactive communication is referred to as a multidirectional information exchange procedure between two or more than two parties.  For the common understanding of the project team members this specific type of communication is found to be most effective one. Video conferencing, phone calls, face to face meeting are the ways of interactive communication that are widely used by the project managers (Verzuh, 2015). This kinds of skill is definitely needed by the project manager to let the other project team members inform about the project details including objectives, deliverables, acceptance criteria, constraints, cost, time etc.

Push communication: This is the way of communication which is quite secured. In this kind of communication approach no involvement from the third parties are allowed which means that the communication will be limited only between the sender and the receiver. These types of communication skill make sure that the information is being distributed but not spread among everyone. Push communication can be performed through emails, fax, press release, voice mails, report etc (Bloom et al., 2014). This kind of communication is required by the project managers while delivering any confidential information to the business or organization executives.

Pull communication: This kind of communication is used for delivering large set of information at the correct time with accurate impact (Arnold & Boggs, 2015). Only the necessary information will be send to the receiver and all the extra additional and unnecessary information will be avoided by the sender side.

All the efforts served by the project team members will become useful only if those are properly applied by the project managers. Thus, it can be said that partly the success of the project team members are dependent on the pro-activeness delivered by the project managers (Brière et al., 2015). However, in most of the cases communication is listed as an area that needs accurate development. In order to ensure the success of the project much information along with project expectation, goals, requirements, resources, status of project reports, project budget, and request for product purchase are also required to be communicated with the associated project stakeholders (Bolden, 2016). Moreover, for conveying the latest information as a project manager they must approach open communication within their business organization.

Communication skill acts as a strategy for the successful delivery of the project. This is the role of the project manager and the project team members to communicate accurately for maintaining organizational professionalism. Stakeholder management is again a term that is associated to managing project. This is little safe to imply the radio silence is just not likely to instill consumers confidence. The consumer requires knowing the project managers they have hired have prominent, consistent and valid understandings regarding project requirements (Jackson, 2015). In order to main strong customer relationship the project manager needs to maintain communication as it acts as one of the biggest key tool for the successful implementation of the projects.

This is instrumental, that the project managers always keep their consumers within a loop ate each and every stage of project development. However, in order to foster strong relationship with the consumers it is important for the project managers to being good listeners also. Thus, the combination of a listener and good speaker can combiningly develop the career of a student as a professional and successful project manager (Gibson & Sodeman, 2014). Inspiration downward communication rather professional speech can also inspire the rest of the project team members. Therefore, it can be said that professional communication can engage a person to their job roles. Thus for the designation of project manager the most important skill that is important is communication.

Different types of communication skills for project management

Conclusion

From the overall discussion it can be concluded that with the help of professional communication the creative ideas can be eventually distributed among the project team members. There are certain reasons such as relying information, receiving information,  discussion issues, changed in decision, cultural gaps and language gaps etc for which the communication skill is determined as an important feature in project development. Thus, the project manager should have this specific ability to overcome these organizational challenges. It is expected that if theses specific characteristics are adopted by the project managers then atleast the project level issues can be partly resolved. Though, besides communication there are many other skills that are important to become a successful project manager by profession. During the course and study session the students are advised to attend grooming classes and personal development classes also to make themselves enough efficient for further growth in their career. There are many well-known figures who give inspirational ideas to the students to make their career much focused to their job roles. It has been found that, non verbal communication accounted for around 55 percent of the way through which audience may perceive the presenter. Thus, it can be said that successful communication can lead the career of a student towards a successful project manager. A student can eventually become a professional project lead or project head if he or she gains the ability to manage the project team members.

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