Listen Up

     If you think you’re not a good listener, you’re probably wrong.

     Listening researcher Kevin Murphy asserted that in his book “Effective Listening: Hearing What People Say and Making It Work for You.”

     Murphy questioned a sample of 20 top managers, “all business leaders whom I had known to be truly tuned to their employees’ needs and goals“.

     “Are you a good listener?” was Murphy’s question. What was the result?

     “More than 75 percent of the good listeners I surveyed answered no. Why? Because the better you listen, the more you learn about how little you know.”

     So the good listeners were harder on themselves than the independent experts were. Unhappily, the opposite also is true. In general, studies show that most people think they’re good listeners – and most people are wrong.

Team Is Work

     “What is a team, and why do we need to know what it is?”

     That’s a standard discussion point for any meaningful consideration of basic Project Management. After all, Project Management is all about people working together to accomplish something new. The “working together” part is teamwork.

     Actually, the basic question often doesn’t come up at all, because we believe everyone knows what a team is, and how it is vital to the effective management of projects. So we launch our projects assuming we’ll be a team and it will work.

     Well, do we really know what a team is or how it should work? Or what it could accomplish? Or how short most of our group activity falls from gaining the benefits of this invaluable concept?

     Most of all, we don’t realize how studiously we avoid developing teamwork and how seriously that mistake damages our potential for project success.

     We may not connect project shortfalls with inadequate teamwork. We sort of assume projects, by their nature, never get close to 100 percent – that’s just the way it is.