Soft Skills for Effective Collaboration

Maureen McWhite, Business Apps analyst, Fed Ex began with K-I-S-S  Keep  It Short and Simple.  Keep your emails and personal messages short and simple.  Communication are important, but leave out unnecessary information.  She believes you should always set expectations, know your audience, own it or have accountability.

Everyone had a great time participating in an exercise on communication using balloons and a pin. This exercise helped to demonstrate what the stakeholder asked for versus what was the result.  Had everyone stood still and did not pop any balloons everyone could have won.  It is human nature to react and not take the step back to plan and organize.  You can see this fun exercise in the video below.

Maureen also talked about the how to communicate with different personality types.  She divided up the room by “Drill Sergeant”, “Rational”; “We are the world” and “Life of the party” of personality types.  She was able to demonstrate how each of these personality types communicate and negotiate with different personality types. 

It is important to build relationships with teams, sponsors, customers to be successful.  Always have meeting notes to refer to later and keep your project on track.

You can hear the highlights from Maureen in the video link below: