Tag Archives: Emotional Intelligence

In a world full of messages, are we losing communication?

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A student emailed me recently with a perfectly reasonable question about an upcoming quiz.

The message was short. Very short. Just one line:

“Hi there, I was just wondering if the content for week 7 will be included or excluded from the quiz on the 14th of April?”

That was it.

No name. No sign off. No self-identification. No real sense of who was writing to whom.

I did not think the student intended to be rude. In fact, I am quite sure they did not.

But the email still unsettled me.

Not because it was offensive, but because it felt like a message stripped down to its bare transaction. Efficient, yes. Clear enough, yes. Human, not quite.

And that made me ask a bigger question.

How a message can be clear and still feel wrong?

A message can be clear and still feel wrong

The student’s question was valid. The channel was appropriate. Email is the right way to ask that sort of question.

Yet something was missing.

The problem was not content. It was texture.

A greeting that recognised the person being addressed. A sign off that acknowledged the interaction. A simple sense that this was not merely a data exchange, but a communication between people.

These may seem like small things. But they are not trivial. They signal awareness of context, relationship, and tone.

When they disappear, a message can still work at the level of information while failing at the level of human connection.

That distinction matters more than we sometimes admit.

This is not really about rudeness

It would be easy to read such a message and conclude that standards are slipping, or that students no longer know how to communicate professionally.

I think that is too simple.

I did not feel that this student was deliberately rude. I still do not. The issue was not intention. The issue was that the email could easily be perceived by others as abrupt, overly direct, or impersonal.

That is a different problem.

A message does not need bad intent to create a poor impression.

And perhaps that is one of the defining communication challenges of our time. We are increasingly surrounded by people who mean no harm, but who have grown used to communication styles that strip away many of the cues older generations still rely on.

We may be mistaking constant messaging for communication skill

This is where the issue becomes more interesting.

We often assume that because younger generations message constantly, they must be naturally strong communicators. But frequency is not the same as depth, and speed is not the same as judgement.

Many students today have grown up in environments where communication is rapid, informal, and highly transactional. Messages are short. Context is assumed. Formality is reduced. The goal is often simple: send the question, get the answer, move on.

In that environment, a one-line email may feel completely normal.

But formal communication, whether in university or in project work, asks for something more. It requires an awareness of audience, role, setting, and likely interpretation. It asks the sender not only to express a need, but to frame it appropriately.

That is where the tension sits.

The sender may feel the message was efficient and harmless.
The receiver may experience it as flat, abrupt, or careless.

Neither side is necessarily wrong in motive. But they are operating with different communication norms.

Why this hit me as a teacher

What made this moment sting was that I had already spent six weeks teaching this cohort about communication.

We had explored tone, emotional intelligence, personality, nonverbal communication, virtual interaction, and the importance of considering the receiver. So when I read that email, part of me immediately felt I had failed.

That reaction was probably harsher than the situation deserved, but it revealed something important.

Teaching communication today is not simply a matter of explaining models or offering tips. It is an effort to interrupt habits that students may have been developing for years. They come into our classrooms shaped by texting culture, social media shorthand, flattened tone, and constant digital interaction.

So perhaps the real lesson is this.

When students communicate poorly, it is not always because they have ignored what we taught. Sometimes it is because what we are teaching is pushing against a much larger cultural current.

Why this matters beyond university

This is not just about emailing lecturers. It is about professional life.

Future project managers will work in environments where success depends not only on sending information, but on building trust, showing judgement, and adapting communication to context. They will write to stakeholders, sponsors, clients, team members, and partners. They will need to influence without authority, clarify ambiguity, and maintain relationships under pressure.

In those situations, technically correct communication is not enough.

A message can be clear and still damage rapport.
A question can be valid and still sound careless.
An email can achieve the task and still weaken the relationship.

That is why these small habits matter.

Not because formality is sacred, but because communication is always doing more than one thing at once.

So what did I do?

I replied in the tone I hoped to model:

Hi [student name],
Thank you for your email,

Week 7 in-class quiz will cover material from week 1 to week 6 only.

Wish you all the best in your studies and quizzes.

Best regards,
Ibrahim

I chose not to correct the student directly. Instead, I tried to demonstrate what professional, respectful communication can look like without turning the exchange into a reprimand.

That felt more constructive.

The provocation for educators

Here is the question this incident has left me with.

If students are growing up in communication environments that reward speed, brevity, and function, are universities doing enough to teach tone, audience awareness, context, and professionalism explicitly?

Or are we still assuming that students will somehow absorb these things along the way?

I am increasingly convinced they may not.

And if that is true, then communication education is no longer a soft extra. It is a core professional capability.

Final reflection

That one email did not convince me that students are rude. It did not convince me that Gen Z is disrespectful.

But it did convince me of this.

We may be living through a generational shift in communication norms, one in which messages are becoming more frequent, more immediate, and more efficient, while also becoming thinner in tone, context, and relational awareness.

That matters.

Because in project work, in leadership, and in life, communication is not just about getting words across. It is about how those words land, what they signal, and what kind of relationship they create.

We have never sent more messages.

But perhaps that does not mean we are communicating better.

Stakeholder Management: Deliberate Relationship Building

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(This article was first published in the Critical Path, the monthly newsletter of PMI Sydney Chapter publish in February 2023)

Stakeholder Management is one of the key pillars of effective project management.  Managing their expectations and keeping them in the know of project progress and status are good practices that work well with committed and already engaged stakeholders.  However, to surpass good project management towards making a real difference by delivering long-impacting projects, you need to go beyond merely managing your stakeholders: you need to deliberately build a purposeful, collaborative, and positive relationship with your stakeholders – particularly the difficult ones.

Melanie McBride in her PMI Global Conference 2012 Paper “A PM, a bully, a ghost, and a micromanager walk into a bar – difficult stakeholders and how to manage them” provided an innovative description of effective stakeholder management: “the purposeful crafting of a collaborative and positive relationship that truly separates the very good project managers from the superb project managers.”  Let me explain the impactful words in this interesting definition:

  • Purposeful: deliberate and planned stakeholder management and relationship building.  Doing it ‘on purpose’, not by chance or as a by-product of other Project Management activities.  Devise a clear plan for relationship building.
  • Crafting: An excellent use of the word ‘crafting’ rather than ‘building’.  It is important to ‘craft’ the relationship with art and innovation.
  • Collaborative: A good relationship is always a two-way relationship built on collaboration – give and take.
  • Positive: Always look for the positive side of things: search for the ‘silver lining’ and promptly address any potential setbacks.

To build such an effective relationship, you should be aware of the characteristics of your stakeholders.  The more ‘difficult’ your stakeholders are, the more effort you need to put in crafting the relationship.  Here are some examples of difficult stakeholders and few suggestions on how to deal with them.

The Bully, that stakeholder who dominates you and others through aggressive force of will.  There aren’t many around, but they derail your project while they are thinking they are doing the right thing.  For bullies, you need to establish a strong ‘first impression’.  Don’t hesitate to confront, explain with confidence, and persuade.  The important thing is to keep the discussion professional and avoid being dragged into “winners vs losers” game.  Look them in the eye (or in the camera if virtual meeting) and be ready to call ‘timeout’ and regain your position if needed.  One way you can deal with a bully is to give them an assignment to produce data to support their argument.  If they are unable to produce supporting data, they are likely to notice the flaw in their argument.

The Ghost, the stakeholder who doesn’t return your calls, emails, or messages and are ambivalent to your project status.  You should aim to limit your project’s dependence on their input and direction.  Agree with them on how far you will run without their direct input, knowledge, or approval.  Ensure that they remain happy and be extremely concise and direct in your communication with them.  One thing you can do is consider whether they can delegate their authority to another, more engaged, stakeholder.

The Visionary, the stakeholder who has the ‘big picture’ of what they want, but they can’t explain it.  You have to be patient with their long talks and twisted tales.  They are usually happy with the project, and they acknowledge how it is important to their future.  Ensure that you drive the discussion into deliverables that will achieve their vision.  It would be good if you can develop early prototypes to review them and discuss them with the visionary stakeholder.  Make sure you are conclusive and explicit about the deliverable and what can and can’t be done – or what is in or out of scope, otherwise you will be dragged into an endless list of amendments and new features.

The Micromanager, the stakeholder who looks for the tiny details and undermines the Project Manager authority.  To satisfy the ‘micromanagement’ desire of your stakeholder, provide consistent, regular, and concise status updates.  Show them “here is how you can help up” in your updates and provide them with actionable items they can work on.  With the current move into ‘virtual’ ways of working where the stakeholder is not physically close to ‘stop by and see how things are going’, a consistent and regular update with actionable items is more important than ever.

The Prisoner, one of the more toxic stakeholders: they don’t want to be on your project, but they are “nominated” (forced) by their managers.  Your main strategy is to see how you can get them off your project – peacefully.  Have a candid discussion with their direct manager and see if they can be assigned somewhere else.  If you are lucky and the prisoner is not disrupting the team dynamics, let them be there.  However, if they are ‘sucking the joy out of the room’ then you need to think seriously about removing them – make them aware that you are going to escalate about them. In conclusion, do your homework: don’t manage your stakeholders in an adhoc manner – have a structured and deliberate plan to deal with them.  A well-crafted email is not enough, you should own and drive the conversation.