Communication Skills

General technique · See it on the map

Guide only — Active listening and clarity are practiced, not run.

The personal abilities, like clarity, tone, and listening, that make a specific communication actually land.

When to use it

Preparing any message where getting it right matters — a stakeholder briefing, a difficult status update, a negotiation — and the risk is in how it's delivered, not just what channel carries it.

When to avoid it

As a catch-all fix for a problem that's actually structural — polishing the delivery of a message that contains bad or incomplete information doesn't fix the information. Don't over-invest skill-building effort in a channel that's wrong for the message regardless of how well it's delivered.

Steps

1. Identify the audience and what they need from the message — a decision, reassurance, a warning — before drafting it.
2. Match tone and register to that audience: an executive summary reads differently from a field-crew briefing on the same fact.
3. For live delivery, prepare for nonverbal cues (yours and theirs) as deliberately as you prepare the words.
4. Practice active listening in the response — confirm what you heard back to the other party before reacting to it.
5. After a high-stakes communication, check whether it landed as intended, not just whether it was delivered.

What it produces

• A message delivered in a form and tone the intended audience can act on.

Common pitfalls

• Using the same register for every audience — a status update written for executives is unreadable to a field crew and vice versa.
• Listening to respond instead of listening to understand, especially in conflict-adjacent conversations.
• Treating skill in delivery as a substitute for substance in the message.

Worked example

The PM needs to tell both the client's executive sponsor and the site foreman about the two-week conduit delay. For the sponsor she leads with impact and recovery plan in three sentences; for the foreman she leads with the specific sequencing change that affects tomorrow's crew assignment. Same fact, different message.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §10.2.2.3

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.