Active Listening Skills for Project Management Pros

Adriana Girdler

What Every Project Manager Needs to Know Project management isn’t just about tracking tasks and deadlines. It’s about understanding the needs of your team and …

What Every Project Manager Needs to Know

Project management isn’t just about tracking tasks and deadlines. It’s about understanding the needs of your team and the expectations of your client. You cannot do either if you’re not truly listening. Active listening goes beyond hearing words – it helps you truly understand your project so you can steer clear of poor team dynamics and the kind of misunderstandings that lead to rework and missed deadlines.

Here are some tips to help you master active listening skills. They may seem simple, but in my many years of managing projects, I’ve seen them yield big results.

Tip one – give your full attention

One of the keys to having great active listening skills is being fully present in the moment, both mentally and physically; giving your full attention shows that you’re listening. That means you should:

  • Remove distractions like your phone or computer screen.
  • Show you’re engaged with eye contact and body language.
  • Be patient and polite by respecting the speaker and not interrupting.

Tip two – clarify and summarize

An equally important part of active listening lies in what you do after the speaker finishes talking. That’s when you should:

  • Paraphrase what the speaker said to confirm that you understand.
  • Ask additional clarifying questions.
  • Summarize the conversation’s main points to confirm what is agreed upon. 

More tips to master active listening

I have a few more tips to share with you about active listening, and I review them in detail in my latest video. In the video I also tell you about:

  • Pre-conversation attitude checks to help you be a better active listener.
  • Post-conversation actions that will support your efforts at active listening.

Follow me over to YouTube and we’ll keep chatting about this!

Want to lead every project to success? Make sure you check out my SLAY Project Management course where I give you all the templates, tips, and techniques to implement to SLAY your projects.

Adriana Girdler, PMP | Creator of Slay Project Management

P.S. Check out what one of my students said recently about SLAY:

“I can’t wait to get started on my next project so I can use what I learned in this course. I am more confident and have a much better understanding of what I can do, and what I can do better, in my next project.” GM

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Adriana Girdler is a project manager, productivity specialist, entrepreneur, professional speaker, facilitator, visioning wizard, and author. As President of CornerStone Dynamics, Adriana is one of Canada’s prominent business productivity and project management specialists—helping both individuals and businesses do what they do, only better. She is a certified master black belt lean six sigma with over 20 years’ experience improving how companies work.

She also holds both PMP (project management professional) and CET (certified engineering technologist) designations. She’s a Tedx speaker, as well as a HuffPost and Thrive Global contributor. She has been interviewed on Global, CBC, CTV, CHCH, 680News Radio, Newstalk 1010, Sirius XM and published in the Globe and Mail and numerous industry magazines. WANT ADRIANA'S FREE ONLINE TRAINING? In 45 min, learn Adriana's 5 project management secrets she use on EVERY project. Sign up for the Free Webinar here: THE FAB FIVE FUNDAMENTALS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT

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