Active Listening as a Project Management Tool
Listening gets filed under soft skills, which is where techniques go to be admired and not used. It has mechanics, a purpose and an output you can count, and on stakeholder work it reaches information that nothing else will.
The purpose is specific. People state objections in the most defensible form available to them, which is rarely the real one. A production manager who says the shutdown window does not work has handed you a statement you can argue with and cannot act on. The reason underneath it is what you needed, and it only surfaces if the first statement is met with attention rather than a counter-argument.
What the technique is for
Two outputs make the discipline worth it.
The first is information. Most of what a project manager needs to know sits with people who have no obligation to volunteer it and no habit of doing so. It arrives when somebody feels heard enough to carry on past their prepared position, and the volume is considerable: constraints nobody documented, decisions taken elsewhere, the real reason a date matters.
The second is willingness. Somebody who has been heard once tells you things the following month unprompted, and somebody who has been talked over does not. It compounds across a project. A team that hears about problems early is usually a team that listened to something inconvenient back in month two.
What it consists of in a project conversation
Section 5 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition gathers the tools and techniques a project manager draws on, and listening belongs there with the same standing as an estimating method. Five moves do most of the work, and not one of them involves nodding.
Do not answer the objection. The reflex is to explain why the date is fixed, and it closes the conversation in a way that feels like resolution. What an objection deserves first is a question about it.
Ask about the instance, not the category. "Tell me about the last time a shutdown went badly" produces facts. "What are your concerns about shutdowns" produces the position again, in different words.
Reflect the content back so it can be corrected. Saying what you understood, in your own words, invites the other person to fix it, and the fix is usually the valuable part. This is a request for correction, and it fails badly when the other person can tell it is a performance of empathy instead.
Let a silence run. Three or four seconds after somebody finishes is the most productive interval available to a project manager, because most people fill it with the thing they had decided not to say.
Separate the objection from the reason. With both visible, they usually need different responses, and sometimes the objection dissolves because the reason can be dealt with another way entirely.
Listening is not agreeing
Project managers hold back from this mostly out of a fear of appearing to concede. Hearing out an argument for moving a date can feel like signalling that the date could move.
The two are separable, and the separation is worth saying out loud. "I want to understand this properly before I answer, and understanding it does not mean the date can change" costs one sentence and removes the ambiguity for both people. It improves what follows, too, because somebody who knows they are being understood rather than negotiated with stops constructing a case and starts describing a situation.
The other discipline is closing the loop. A conversation where somebody explained a constraint and then heard nothing back teaches them that being heard leads nowhere. A one-line message a week later, saying what happened to the thing they raised, is what makes the next conversation possible.
Four days in October
A manufacturer was upgrading a packaging line, which needed the line down for four days to install and commission. The project manager proposed the third week of October, picked because demand was lower and the maintenance team had capacity.
The production manager objected, firmly and in general terms. October was impossible, the plan showed no understanding of how the plant ran, and four days was optimistic in any case. The project manager's first instinct was to explain the demand analysis. She asked instead what the last four-day shutdown had been like.
The answer took ten minutes and contained the actual problem. Two of his three senior setters take their annual leave in the second half of October and had done for years, so a restart in that window would be run by people who had never done one. His concern was never the four days or the demand. It was who would be standing at the line on the Monday morning.
The shutdown moved to the second week of November at a cost of nothing at all, because the constraint was leave. The conversation took twenty minutes and replaced what would otherwise have become a fortnight of position-taking, an escalation to the steering group, and a commissioning run staffed by the second team.
For a PMP® candidate, it helps to recognise that a stated objection is data and not a verdict. A stakeholder refusing something on grounds that look thin is usually describing a reason that has not been given, and a response that argues with the stated grounds is answering the wrong statement. The useful move is to work out what would have to be true for the objection to make sense. A structured PMP exam preparation course works this ground through situations where the stated reason and the real one differ.
On a live project the measurable version is worth trying. Across a month, count the times somebody told you something you had not asked about. Three or four in a month on a project of any size is healthy; none means the information is going somewhere else, or nowhere. That number moves faster than almost anything else a project manager can change, and it moves because of what happens in individual conversations.
Interested in going further?
The information that changes a plan is usually held by somebody with no particular reason to hand it over. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through conversations where the stated objection and the real constraint turn out to be different things.
The tools and techniques a project manager draws on, listening among them, are set out in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A180: Facilitation Techniques for Difficult Project Conversations
A161: Expected Monetary Value Explained
A187: Retrospectives That Lead to Change
A178: SWOT Analysis in Project Management
A188: Daily Stand-ups: Coordination Tool or Status Meeting?
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
