Dear Braindead through listening
Thanks for bringing Savi what is indeed a personal communications challenge. These arise and they can affect wider project factors including progress. If a plan or an action is poorly understood or mistranslated it can lead to mistakes, sometimes costly mistakes.
So, let’s deal with the big question first. Swapping out individuals. This may be easier for your supplier than your company, yet it not in itself a straightforward transition. I say that as suppliers must always keep commercial factors in mind and if a client requests a swap, it should be listened to with a level of respect. Internally, it is politically challenging to remove an individual from your team or board if they have not voluntarily withdrawn.
My advice is to treat this on both sides at a last resort option. Your data lead will walk away with months of tacit knowledge of your company and the migration. Your team member will walk away with the update to all takers that this project team ousts people for “being useful.”
And I do think despite your frustration and some real delay and error potential, it would be very difficult to justify a removal if the current issues have not led to major project impacts.
So, there are other things you can do.
We do not need to be professional coaches to take someone to one side and ask for brevity. This can be couched in polite, sensitive terms, that you must get headlines upfront, or that you value someone’s high-level suggestion on solutions or diagnostics to relay it accurately to other people.
Overcommunication can be down to confidence – they do not trust themselves to say the main thing they need to alone, thus saying everything to offer comfort they have not left anything out.
It can also be a mistrust or critique. It would be interesting if you detect any note of condescension in these exchanges or over explanation. They may simply think you do not know your onions.
Also, people who work in detailed areas who are details oriented, like in data roles, are so often working on complex, abstract, multi-faceted problems that they struggle to make the adjustment when it is time to return an update to a clock watching project manager.
And you work with people who work with the law. It is not surprising that you team colleague has done well to get to their current role knowing and describing complex issues.
But there is a keynote here – these people have a project communications role too. And anything complex must be relayed simply. It’s part of professional life to work with people from other disciplines. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” as Einstein stated.
In all these scenarios I would recommend you perform what I might term meta-communication: in each interaction, tell everyone not only these individuals the way you want to communicate (the meta part) then proceed with discipline from that starting point (the communication part)
And you may well need to learn greater patience. If you are impatient now, it means your mind operates at quite a lick, which means you are probably good at efficiency and catch-up. So, whilst I fully respect this is a problem that needs coaching, dig deep.
Factor in this: during the word count, the intention of your team member: are they trying to alert you in a way that might be your next best project risk identification?
Do the same for your data lead: they are struggling to articulate a complex that must not be avoided next to prevent a major problem later.
Keep listening and what you tend to find is you start hearing not only the words but the driving point and the value of what is being said.
As this concerns you, I want to give further tips that may help on a practical level.
• Shorten all your 121s and small group interactions with these people. Unless the content warrants it, give them a natural deadline and mention time remaining on a frequent basis.
• Demand data visuals. Data professionals although full of detail work well in my experience when they themselves have been forced to draw down their detail as a schematic or set of visual diagrams.
• And with your data lead, outsource the problem. Speak to a lead consultant or PM at your supplier side and state you only need the headlines from them in any scenarios where you are not required on data calls in person.
• Don’t forget humour. Without being rude, people tend to know they are wordy. There is an opportunity to be jocular about the message you need in the time and format you need it.
In conclusion, do not feel guilty about this. It is important and you are the most time-pressured individual in your project environment. Projects create families and regarding over-communicators, every family’s got one, or two in your case. You’ve got the breadth to deal with this even if you must become a comms coach some of the time.
Good luck!
