University of Maryland, College Park

Pearl Diving Assignment 2

Robert C. Wilson
Communication for Project Managers: ENCE424
Dr. Shana Webster-Trotman
March 12, 2022
Introduction
As an Architecture student, I am often tasked with many technical based projects that test
my ability as a fledgling designer, where there isn’t much verbal presentation instruction at all.
Now that I am preparing to start my post-graduate position as an Assistant Project Manager at
KADCON after Spring Break, I want to ensure that the teachings from this course will have me
readily prepared to work in the professional construction management industry. Much of the
information that I have been learning through both our weekly lectures, as well as the readings
and YellowDig discussions has given me a wide array of intrapersonal communication skills that
I must ensure that I consider once I am starting my career. Communication skills are integral to
succeeding not only as an assistant project manager, but also within the project itself. This
second Pearl Diving assignment will synthesize the growing body of knowledge that I have
gained over these past eight weeks so that I can compile my pool of knowledge as a form of
demonstration and reference for the years to come. These five prompts will show how my
communication skills have grown over the semester.
Team Email

Good morning, Everyone,

I have been talking with our superintendent for the Reagan Airport renovation, and they were
saying that they have been struggling to get the shop drawings and build requests from our team
on time; so much so that they had to stop work early the other day because there wasn’t any
direction on where they should move next and could not get ahold of anyone on our project team.
I went and looked at our project schedule and realized that we are nearly eight days behind on
our projected schedule, and it’s starting to add unwanted costs to the project. As your project
lead, It is my duty to make sure that the project meets its deadlines, and that each and every one
of you can achieve to work that we have set for this project. Because of our delays, I would like
to set up a team meeting tomorrow morning so that we all can get on the same page on what’s
been slowing us down and see if we need to reallocate some of our resources around to
maximize everyone’s efficiency while not overloading you with too much work, so we can
rebalance our schedule and make sure no one is struggling to get their work done on time. We
are all in this project together, and I want to make sure that we all are comfortable with the load
that has been assigned to them. At UMD Construction, we all value an adequate work-life
balance and if there is anything that you need to speak with me about, privately in-person, please
come to my office at any point of the day. I want our team to succeed, and I should have been
checking up on you all more to make sure there’s nothing holding us back. I hope to see you all
tomorrow!
Robert Wilson,
This mock email was addressing the project manager’s (me) team’s deliverables falling
behind and delaying to project work at Reagan International Airport. The emails utilize all three
forms of rhetorical meaning: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to appeal the team members the best. I
also utilized the STATE method mentioned in Crucial Conversations. To begin my email, I
mentions direct facts that justify why I am contacting them in the first place. By mentioning how
our project is falling behind, and that we are missing deadlines, my utilization of Logos leaves
nothing up to interpretation as to what the issue is; our project is behind, and it is making us miss
construction deadlines. From there, I mention that I am the project lead, and it is my duty of
ensure our team can get the tasks done on time and everyone is satisfied; utilizing Ethos to prove
my authority and credibility to them, showing that I have them in my best interest and this is my
job to keep the project moving along. I then finish with the use of Pathos to appeal to their
emotions and show that I really do care about their wellbeing, I mentioned this through asking if
they would like to talk to me in private and voice their concerns to me personally, so that I can
get everyone’s input without fear of them being reprimanded. I also mention our companies
values to tie an emotional response to increasing our project throughput. This process follows the
STATE method in that I begin with hard facts that state the problem at hand, I then tell my story
as to why I felt the need to contact my team, and then I ask for their paths, or opinions and
reasoning, so that we can grow the “shared pool of knowledge”.
Group Activity Concepts
Between weeks five and eight, I would say the most important concept that I learned
through a group activity was during week five, which was the class that we discussed different
personality types, and how to appeal to them in a professional environment. For this group
assignment, we had to email our boss that a report which would be due tomorrow, would be four
days late. We had to appeal to their DISC personality type and to utilize the platinum rule. Our
team was tasked with a boss who had a high Influence Personality. This activity was a very
informational way of learning about how to appeal to these different personality types because it
had rarely occurred to me that you shouldn’t treat every contact the same. While there is a basic
level of professionality that should be had no matter what when talking to coworkers or
superiors, it is a smart idea to appeal to your recipients’ personalities. This was especially
apparent when listening to the other teams’ emails that were written, because they had a
completely different tone to them compared to ours. We had to appeal to our boss in a way that
would ensure that they felt optimistic about our new approach and that we weren’t ignoring
them, while the other teams had to appeal to the boss in different ways that met their personality
types: Dominance, Conscientiousness, and Steadiness. Overall, this exercise showed me that
appealing to your recipients DISC personality type, or any personality type for that matter could
lead to more efficient communications between coworkers. I believe that while utilizing these
personality tests shouldn’t be taken into consideration on job applications, because it seems like
a form of discrimination that shouldn’t play a role in the job application process. On the other
hand, I do believe that having an idea of what your coworker’s personality types are would help
in everyone understanding how to work the best with each other. Just like the stories you told in
class about your own experiences, having an idea of everyone’s personality type could
differentiate between someone thinking that you don’t like them, or you both don’t work
together, and the both of you just having different personality types.
While it would be unlikely that the company, I work for would have everyone do a
personality test to see how I will work with my coworkers, I do want to be more mindful of the
tendencies of my coworkers. This is something that I haven’t taken too much consideration into
previously before this lecture. Oftentimes I would write concisely and in a professional way as if
I was talking to a professor, which while I believe this is an appropriate method of
communication at least by email, putting in the effort to think critically about the best way to
communicate with people in my life. These general analysis’s of how people act would make it a
lot easier for me to communicate and understand how they work within a project team, and from
now on, I would like to stay more conscious of not only my coworkers’ actions and ways of
thinking, as well as in my interpersonal relationships outside of work. The use of the platinum
rule would allow me to have more empathy for the different people I communicate with daily
and that would lead to me having a smoother experience and more success within my career and
relationships. After understanding the difference between the Golden rule: “Treat others the way
you want to be treated”, and the Platinum rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated”,
the golden rule seems more of a general basis of communication, where if you are talking to a
stranger, or someone who you are not too familiar with, then that would make more sense, but it
is more logical to treat people who you hold relationships with: albeit professional or
unprofessional, the platinum rule just makes more sense. If I know how someone acts and their
mannerisms, then it would be in both of ours best interest that I communicate with them in a way
that best matches their personality. Being able to work smoothly with the people around me and
play from both of our personalities would ultimately lead to a more productive workday and
ideally much less issues and confrontations within the workplace as a whole. Appealing to the
platinum rule would also allow me to get on good sides with my superiors and could lead to
more favorable options in the long run because I have learned how to communicate with them
effectively, which is there’s anything I have learned in this class, it is that effective
communication is integral to a successful career.
Crucial Conversation
When put into a crucial conversation, the risk of acting out of line is an often-quick
response to a statement that will most likely lead to more problems down the line. When faced
with a confrontation that puts us at risk, either through losing an argument, or needing to defend
your decisions, we will tend to lash out as to protect our dignity, or to win an argument.
Therefore, many of the techniques in the book “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When
Stakes Get High”, By Patterson et al, highlights many of the techniques that we can utilize so
that the conversations stay productive and cool when stakes get high. In this scenario, we will
use the circumstance where your boss called you an idiot in front of the entire team. While we
don’t know the context as to why your boss called you an idiot, it is safe to assume that whatever
you did was not approved by your boss, so much so that they were curt enough to insult you in
front of the whole team. For the sake of this example, lets assume that you messed up an integral
financial report that your boss asked you to complete, since it was very important for the
stakeholder meeting next week. When presented with he reports, your team noticed some
miscalculations, and your boss was so displeased that they lashed out and called you an idiot.
While this was extremely unprofessional on your boss’s side, it is extremely important that you
keep a state of dialogue going, rather than devolving into an argument in your defense that
maintains your “dignity”.
This example is talked about in chapter five of Crucial Conversations, which is about
how can you make the conversations safe. The response you choose to give should be based on
three steps, explained in the section “What to Do Once You Step Out” on page 82. These three
steps are: Apologize, Contrast, and Create a Mutual Purpose. According to the book, these three
steps are utilized to ensure that you can still maintain/find mutual respect and mutual purpose,
which are both the most important parts of any crucial dialogue. After hearing your boss call you
an idiot, you should start with the first step: apologize when appropriate (p.84) wherein you
apologize to “express your sorrow for your role in causing-or at least not preventing- pain or
difficulty to others. An appropriate response to your boss may be: “I apologize for my mistake in
miscalculating the financial report, I know that this was an important bid that we were preparing
for at the start of next week, and it was integral that all aspects of the bid package were to be
accurate, and we could risk losing the project had I not been so careless.” The key to an effective
and sincere apology is one that, according to Crucial Conversations, means that your motives
must change as a result, and you must face with hurting your ego a little bit in the sake of
maintaining dialogue. There is then a crossroads from here whether you need to follow the next
steps. If they accept your apology and mutual respect is restored, then you can go more in depth
on what exactly happened, or if dialogue safety is still in danger, then you can move onto the
next step of Contrast to Fix Misunderstanding (p.84) The method of contrasting is to understand
the don’ts and do’s that you intended as reasoning for your downfall. In this case, you boss might
then ask you what the reasoning for why you didn’t have the report proofread or why didn’t
anyone else assist you in drafting it. This is where contrasting come in hand. You want to first
figure out what you don’t want your boss to think, and then what you wanted your boss to think.
For example, you didn’t want your boss to think you were incapable of taking care of the
financial report all by yourself, and you did want to prove to your boss that you have grown as an
employee who is efficient and a capable member of the team. It has already been established that
you messed up, by utilizing the contrasting method, you are explaining that you didn’t mess up
the report out of malice, but instead to prove to your team that you are a good fit. The essential
part is maintaining the mutual respect between both parties. Once you figure out both contrasting
statements, you can combine them into your explanation: “This finance report is a big step for
me within the company, because I wanted to prove to you that I have grown since I was hired
last year and that I am more self- sufficient than I was when I started here. I didn’t want you to
think that I haven’t been learning what I have been taught here and ended up biting off more than
I could chew on my own.” This explanation keeps you sincere as to why you decided not to ask
for help in ensuring the report would be complete correctly and allows mutual respect and
understanding between you and your boss. As emphasized on page 87, “Contrasting is not
apologizing. – It is not a way of taking back something we’ve said that hurt others’ feelings.
Rather, it is a way of ensuring that what we said didn’t hurt more than it should have.”
Ultimately, contrasting provides “Context and Proportion” The last method is Create a Mutual
Purpose (p.90). This is split into the acronym CRIB, and this method ensures that there is a
mutual understanding on how it is going to be remediated. If your boss is asking you how this
issue is going to be resolved now, we must employ these four steps of CRIB. The first step is
Commit to Seek Dialogue, wherein we go back to the adage of starting with heart, the key aspect
of maintaining dialogue. You want to make it clear that you are willing to remediate this problem
until it gets solved. The next step is Recognize the Purpose Behind the Strategy, before you find
a mutual purpose, you want to know what they’re purposes are. Without understanding both
views, you won’t get anywhere. Next, is invent a Mutual Purpose, where once you understand
their purpose, you’re able to find a compatible goal. In this case, you want to regain the respect
from your boss and peers, while your boss wants the financial report completed accurately and
before the bid must be submitted. By understanding these two desires, you can invent a mutual
purpose which solves both: “Since it is the end of the work week, I will come in tomorrow
morning to revise any mistakes that are in the report. I will also check in with Don (relevant team
member) to make sure that I won’t miss any mistakes and will have the new bid on your desk
when you come in Monday morning.” By providing a solution that both mutually benefits you by
learning from you mistakes, and your boss still getting the financial report before it’s due, you
have created a resolve. In conclusion, while it would have been best not to make a mistake in the
first place, by being able to keep cool when your boss lashes out, and maintain that productive
dialogue back and forth, you no longer risk tarnishing your reputation with your boss and
coworkers even more than you already have, and in turn maintain that mutual respect with your
peers by coming up with a sincere apology, explanation, and method of solving the issue.
Five Star Storytelling
The book Five Stars, by Carmine Gallo, highlight how integral it is in the professional
world to be an expert communicator. Nowadays, companies desire an employee with wonderful
skills in conveying stories, and inspiring others more than someone who can do their technical
skills. An extremely common situation that many job interviewers put us in is asking us about a
personal experience that we had, where we demonstrated our ability to overcome adversity.
During my interview process over the past month or so, every single company had asked that
question one way or another as a method of gauging my problem-solving techniques, while also
seeing how good of a communicator I can be. As mentioned, countless times in Five Stars,
expert communication gets you the jobs, and the promotions. That is why I will draft a personal
story that utilizes both the recommendations given in chapters 10 and 11 (p.145-175). Before I
begin my story, I will preface with some of the thoughts that I am basing my story off. On page
157, Gallo mentions that there are three kinds of stories that I can incorporate into a conversation
to incite action. These three being: personal experiences, real customers or clients, and signature
events in the history of a brand or company. For this story I will reference from one I told to
three prospective project team members who were interviewing me for a position as a Project
Engineer with Barton Mallow. While I ultimately didn’t take the job offer, I still believe this to
be a good example of a story that you could tell interviewers to demonstrate my proactiveness
and willingness to learn, which are integral skills at this point in my career. I made sure to utilize
all three rhetorical styles of: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to appeal to the interviewers as much as a
I can and convince them that I had what it takes to work effectively and take risks through
communication when on the job.
Last summer, I had done an internship with Kalkreuth Roofing and Sheetmetal up in
Frederick. They mainly specialized in low-slope commercial roofing applications across the DC
Metropolitan area. Now, as a junior working on an Architecture degree, I had very little
experience in the actual day-to-day workings of a roofing sub-contractor. Luckily, my manager
knew that and had set me off with learning as much I can about the subject and taking me out to
job sites so I can get as much exposure as I possibly can. I started getting assigned some smaller
tasks like materials requests and minor RFI comparisons to see how much more material we will
have to order, or how many more man hours will we have to report due to these changes.
Everything was going great for a few weeks; I was improving on my work, and I was starting to
be given more important tasks for my manager to the point where I was self-sufficient for most
of the week. Eventually though, as I’m sure all of you were very aware of, the material delays
started hitting, and all the sudden basically all our projects were getting delayed since there
simply wasn’t anymore material we could get ahold of. The office had gone from extremely
productive, to trying to figure out where we can find material to keep all our workers busy, and
the funding still flowing in. By July, most of our weekly team meetings resulted in discussions
on material sourcing and reallocating our workers so that no one had to get laid off. This affected
my work as well, because now all the projects that I was assigned to got pushed back to the fall,
which I would no longer be here to help with, and as a result, my manager was running out of
work for me to do. It was getting to the point where I was spending most of my days during the
week just sitting around trying to occupy my time. I could only go out to sites with the safety
officer so many times, and my manager never had anything for me to do. Getting tired of not
helping out with anything, I realized that I could use my drafting skills form school to help out in
our shop drawings department. There is only one person who creates the shop drafts, so I brought
it up to my manager that I could help her out with the shop drawings since there is still a lot of
work that needs to be done there. By the next week, I had a new desk and a new desktop that I
could use to revise shop drawings and I was busy again. Now, I was able to stop sitting around
and help my project team and ease the amount of work the shop engineer had to do, ultimately
making the company more efficient. I was able to spend the rest of my time there working on
shop drawings, and that gave me such a leap in experience because now I knew the technical side
of projects as well. This not only helped me in understanding the construction detail aspect of my
studio projects but was able to give me a leg up when applying for project engineer jobs because
I have that exposure that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Big Five Personality Assessment
After taking the Big Five Personality Test, I was able to take a new perspective on how I
can understand my personality. This is the third examination we have taken in this class so far,
and while each of them asks quite similar questions, they always give different types of answers
and explanations to my personality, which I believe the be a more accurate way of getting a well-
rounded understanding of how I act. One different this test made, was that I was able to really
think critically about my different scores and characteristics. For example, one thing that I have
always grappled with is that I am quite technical minded in approach of things and like stuff to
be organized and systematic, while on the flip side, I really enjoy being creative and free flowing
in my thinking. It’s an interesting dichotomy that I must grapple with because I can’t figure out
what side of the spectrum, I am on but seeing that I scored an 87.5% in Openness means I must
be quite dominantly creative to some extent. If I compare this with my JUNG personality test,
where I was categorized as an INTJ, then that brings a clearer picture, because then I can see that
while I’m an intuitive thinker, I am also systematic and logical in my creative process, which is
why I think both the Big Five, and JUNG help clear the picture better. When it came to
comparing the Big Five, and the DISC personality assessment, there can be a bit of a difference
in the results. I will also attest that both tests are not exactly assessing the same thing in me, but I
can still gleam some analysis from them. In the DISC personality test, I was 38% Steadiness,
28% Dominance, 27% Compliance, and 10% Influence. If I relate this to my personality patterns,
then I can see that my two dominance patterns were as an empathetic idealist, and an analytical
thinker, which fit into the idea of having a high steadiness and compliance, because I like to be
logical with my thinking, while wanting to streamline and innovate systems. One where I was
surprised by though was how high my dominance trait wall, albeit only a single percent above
compliance, so there is a degree of spread I’m sure in the assessment, but I don’t often think of
myself as someone who is assertive, except when in working situations, I do have a tendency to
want to take control of the group, which I believe that is where the dominance comes from. If I
analyze the core pattern circumplex more, then I can see that while I am dominant as an
empathetical idealist, I can group both Analytical thinker and Practical caretaker together, to
assume that that I am both practice and analytical but am joined with that idealist (creative) side
of thinking. All of these tests were able to solidify my understanding of myself and all of these
different assessments create insights into different aspects of one’s personality and thought
patterns. While one test may give you some information, the understanding really grows once
you start comparing different tests together, because that give you a greater picture overall. The
Big Five Personality Test assessed my five major dimensions of personality, the JUNG test
categorized my personality into a general type, based off different factors, and the DISC also
adds in interpersonal relationships. All these tests, while beneficial on their own, truly improve
in effectiveness once you start adding them all together to create a holistic view of yourself.

1. My Personality Trail Score

2. My Openness Score

3. My Core Pattern Chart

Conclusion
After answering all five of the prompts for this essay, I have not only gained a greater
understanding of my personality traits through multiple assessments over these past few weeks,
but I have also been able to compile my knowledge through actual exercises that allowed me to
apply the information we have been learning throughout our lectures and readings. After writing
this essay, I will continue to practice the methods I have learned in this class, so that I can
become an expert communicator. I believe this information will be helpful once I start my
professional position in a couple weeks, and I will ensure to reference these books and lectures
when I feel the need to practice more.
 Works Cited
Gallo, Carmine. Five Stars the Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great. St. Martin’s
Press, 2018. Print

Patterson, Kerry. Grenny, Joseph, McMillan, Ron. Switzler, Al. Crucial Conversations Tools for
Talking When Stakes Are High. McGraw Hill Books, 2012. Print