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• Match Your Medium With Your Message

• Orin Thomas – Trainer by day, Author by night!

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May-Jun 2009

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• Varied Skills the Key to Getting Ahead

• How to Attain More Value from Projects

• Planning on Paper Towel and Other Mistakes: A PM Trainer’s Perspective

Nov-Dec 2008

• Six Ways to Negotiate with Other Cultures

• Gain Fast ROI from Virtualisation

• Communications Skills and Surfing Microsoft: A Trainer’s Perspective

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Match Your Medium With Your Message

Face-to-face is the richest medium for communicating because it is made up of three elements; words account for 7% of the message, body language 55%, and voice tone 38%. Correlate these elements and their importance with the different mediums above and you can see how they become less and less robust in communicating a message. Specifically, if you take face-to-face communication and insert technology into the mix for something like teleconferencing, it becomes a little degraded because of video resolution and sound quality. With telephone communication body language has been removed, but there is still voice tone and words. Email, text messaging, faxes and snail mail are the leanest of all communication mediums because all you have is written words.

Every message you want to communicate has some level of volatility and there is a chance that what you have to say will trigger the person emotionally and evoke a negative response. We're humans-we can't help it. Given this, it makes sense to match the volatility of the message with the communication mediums you have available to you. Meaning that the more volatile the message the richer the communication medium you should choose.

Sounds easy, but here is why we unconsciously are reluctant to do so. The richer the medium, the more we have to encounter uncomfortable feedback in the process of communicating volatile information. It's easy to hide behind email and say difficult things; and, it's hard to be more present and experience the uncomfortable feelings of communicating something volatile.

Take Susan for example

A high profile project she was managing just encountered a major technology hurdle that was going to delay the project several months and cost the company an additional 15%. Instead of setting up a meeting to deliver the news face to face, she chose to send it out in an email because she believed it would be more efficient to do so. The response she got was very negative as expected; but, what she also got that was not expected was a fire storm of communication that she could not control. Accusations and recommendations from the original distribution list and many others up the chain of command were included in the many responses. She was ultimately removed as the project lead, all because she did not deliver the news in a face to face meeting.

If you care about the relationship with the person you need to communicate volatile information to or you need to control the response to it, then invest the energy and follow the rule. It may be harder, but you have a better chance of getting through the difficult time with less negative impact.

DDLS' 5 day Project Management for Practitioners - Essential Skills Program covers The People Side of Project Management - Understanding people, Learn the use style models, Flexing your style, Understanding differences and Communicating.

For more information contact DDLS on 13 12 01 or visit www.DDLS.com.au.