No words? Listen More.

I have been working a lot of different projects lately in various levels of maturity in their lifecycle.

Some are more straight forward and are more about coordination, however others are more impactful and bring with them major change.

We often talk about communication in Project Management, the need to get and keep everyone aligned and informed. From here you would help, follow up and sort out any issues that the team is being up.

An important thing to remember however is that silence, the team not saying anything, is an answer too. While the saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", this is usually not true of silence in a project.

People who are silent, who are not contributing anything more than being aware of the project around them is usually not good.

This behaviour is showing you that they may not understand, may not have bought in or are completely checked out and uninteresting by what is going on.

So always remember to make sure you are listening and paying attention to the silence of the room / team, it can be just as (or more) telling than anything that is being said.

Comments

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