The Skills You Need to be a Top Communicator

ByElizabeth Harrin Last updated: Communications

“The successful project communicator is a good networker and builds effective working relationships within the project, across the wider organization of which the project is a part and sometimes externally,” writes Ann Pilkington in her book, Communicating Projects.

You need good communication skills in order to be able to do that, but what are ‘good communication skills’? Ann sets out some of the technical and soft skills you need to be able to communicate effectively on your project. Here’s my take on her conclusions.

Strategic skills

You need to be able to communicate as a “strategic adviser”, as Ann puts it. This includes:

  • Working at board level
  • Providing strategic counsel when asked (and, I imagine, sometimes when not asked)
  • Having advanced stakeholder management skills
  • Having advanced influencing skills
  • Understanding how to use research to inform strategy
  • Being able to speak in terms that the rest of the business understand
  • Building effective relationships
  • Drawing on best practice and the latest thinking to inform what you do.

Strategic communications are used for:

  • Supporting change
  • Building engagement
  • Generating feedback
  • Supporting the communication skills of other managers/team members
  • Advising upwards.

Strategic communication gets your project in front of the board and helps you get involved in strategic discussions that affect your project. This puts you in a better position to advise on the project in general but also on how communication should be managed more generally.

You’ll need the respect of your board-level team if you are going to be successful in this capacity, and if you don’t have the gravitas to do it justice, bow out gracefully and get your project sponsor to do it instead.

Technical skills

Communication also has to happen at a more hands-on, technical level. This requires the project manager to have:

  • Good writing skills, for example the ability to write clear project management reports
  • Experience at managing a range of communication channels (e.g. email, social communication, presentations etc)
  • An understanding of the management of design and print projects for preparing printed communications like leaflets
  • Attention to detail – nothing like a mailing out to people with incorrect names to undermine credibility in your project!
  • An understanding of the project management methodology and how communication fits in.

Technical project communication results in defined outputs like:

  • Posters
  • Emails
  • Newsletters
  • Magazines
  • Intranet and social media sites
  • Presentations
  • Status reports.

Project communications involves a wide range of techniques from being able to brief a designer for your desk drop leaflet to building a wiki to capture project lessons learned.

Good technical writing skills will help you construct a story, tailor it to your audience, present it clearly and then follow up to see if your message has been understood.

Overall, confidence in your ability is important as this will help you avoid wishy-washy communications or that feeling where you don’t know if it is good enough so you don’t do anything at all.

Communication is often very tricky to get right and very easy to get wrong, so have confidence in your convictions, plan it properly and go for it!

Elizabeth Harrin wearing a pink scarf

Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years.
Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects.