There are lots of skills and behaviors that contribute towards being able to run a project successfully. Here are our top 10 behaviors for successful project managers. These are the skills you should concentrate on building if you want to excel in the role.
1. Leadership
First, leadership. While you might have the job title of project manager, technically you’re leading the effort every day. If managing is doing the work right, leading is making sure people are doing the right work.
Project managers need to be adept at both, but often if you set the team up for success and focus on the leadership, the task management aspects fall into place more easily.
2. Communication
It’s often said that project management is 80% communication, so it makes sense that this skill would be on our list.
Successful project managers use all kinds of communication types to help get the message across and build commitment to the project. From giving presentations to holding online meetings to breaking disappointing news to stakeholders, you have to be able to do it all.
3. Organizational Abilities
As you’d expect, the best project managers are those that find organizing themselves and others easy, although that is definitely something you can practice and improve with effort. You need to be able to organize the work, create a plan with input from the team, see the big picture for the overall effort and yet still drill down into the detail to support colleagues when they need it.
4. Decisiveness
Decision making is a core skill for project managers, even if typically we think of project-related decisions as those made by the project sponsor or by subject matter experts in the team. As a project manager, you’ll make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to escalate, how to record information, what actions to chase, what can be deferred, how to use the contingency funds, when to update the project management software, what goes into your status report and more.
Alongside that, you also have to be able to facilitate decision making for the team, so it helps to have some knowledge of group decision making techniques.
5. Process Management
Leading a project successfully requires drawing on a range of processes from risk management to quality assurance and everything in between. Processes help deliver standardized results and they speed up projects because the team doesn’t have to create new ways of doing things every time.
Good project managers know the processes inside out and backwards so following them becomes second nature. They are also pretty adept at bending processes when they need to! As long as you know the rules, you’ll be able to make smart choices about when bending them is appropriate.
6. Relationship Building
While understanding process is important, projects are delivered by people. You can have the best processes in the world but if the people aren’t interested in following them, you’ll have a hard time getting your project done.
Successful project managers invest time in building relationships, both with stakeholders and the team members responsible for completing tasks. If you create an environment where people are engaged with the work and each other, you’ll build commitment and reach your goals more quickly. You’ll also create a nice place to work and people appreciate that too!
7. Resource Management
Team building and resource management go hand in hand. If you’ve got good relationships with your team members, you’ll find it easier to work out what they should be responsible for on the project. And if they enjoy working with you, they’re more likely to give your tasks priority in the day – it sounds simplistic but time and time again we see it proven to be true.
However, no one likes to be overallocated or overwhelmed at work, so project managers use resource management techniques to ensure people are only assigned to a reasonable amount of work that fits their capacity. Resource management reports in your project management software will help you do this – the thing to remember is to use the data.
8. Dedication
Commitment is important for project managers, because it takes determination and dedication to reach the end goal, especially when a project runs over multiple years. Successful project teams work together to overcome problems along the way and they never give up. They are always looking for creative solutions that will help them get where they want to go.
9. Change Management
Change management is the art (and a bit of science) of making sure that what you deliver is accepted by the people on the receiving end. It’s the difference between delivering a fantastic new process and everyone still working the old way. When a company invests in doing things differently, they want people to use the output of the project. Change management is a range of techniques that make that more likely to happen.
Change management is a discipline all by itself and large projects may well have a dedicated change manager on the team. If you don’t, the project manager typically takes on this role because someone has to do it!
10. Tact
Finally, being able to operate with tact is important. You’ll hear many confidential things in your role as a project manager, and you need to be OK with that. Keep the confidences and be diplomatic in your dealings with others. Understanding the office politics and the informal networks in the business will help you navigate the project.
How many of those behaviors can you say you have? Is there a program in your PMO to upskill project leaders so that they can operate in the increasingly complex environments we find ourselves in? Project management training can help you and the rest of the team develop your skills and set yourselves up for success.