Management Communications in the workplace.

The course description for Management communication in EMBA states that Management Communication is designed to provide managers with the needed knowledge and skills to prepare for a successful career. Indeed, communication is a key requirement to succeed as a manager.

Managers’ need for communication can be summarised below:

1. As managers oversee others who are doing the work of the organization, this requires a commitment to effective communication to ensure teams are productive, satisfied, motivated and operating at their full potential.

• Managers also need to communicate effectively with their leaders and those above them in the hierarchy, as well as with colleagues on the same level, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders.

• Effective communication ensures that all stakeholder is on the same page, understands their goals and objectives, and that conflict is minimized.

One of the tools for effective management communications is stakeholder management. Stakeholder management is the identification, prioritizing, and engagement of those individuals who are important for the success of the task, product development, or project.  Without proper stakeholder management, there would be conflict and chaos in the workplace. 

Recently in my workplace, the manager of the application configurations team and the manager of the engineering team had heated email exchanges about who should be responsible for handling a new task introduced by a regulator in an already established process. The manager of the configurations team indicated that the responsibility for managing the new task lie squarely at the Engineering team but the manager of the Engineering team thought otherwise.

This manager brought this to my attention and sought my intervention. To him, the other manager was being unreasonable and obstinate, and he complained about the inability of his team to take on additional tasks to their already very heavy workload.  I sympathized with him, however, I asked him a few questions: Has he done proper stakeholder identification and engagement? Has he identified the right point in the process where this task will be properly situated? Is he certain that the other manager has a proper understanding of the new tasks? I made it clear to him that the challenge was a management communications issue, and that proper stakeholder management has not been done before assigning the new task.

I could feel in his response that my questions did not situate quite well with him, he thinks that the other manager was being unreasonable given the workload his team is currently under. After a few hours, I received a call from his divisional head making the same complaint about the matter. I raised the same questions that I had with the manager. We agreed that a stakeholder’s meeting should be called immediately so that everyone will be on the same page and understand the goal as well as the objective. The meeting will enable relevant stakeholders to identify the impact of the new task on the current process and agree on who will be responsible for managing and driving the new activity.

The meeting took place some hours after. In the meeting it was very clear that it was not a task for the Engineering team, we concluded that the business team will drive the new activity.