You want to be an excellent project manager?
As a project manager you are result-oriented; you probably go straight towards the goal and you make sure you get there. With your organizational talent you plan the project well and you use tools for planning and monitoring for support, which you have probably heard about while you attended project management training, such as PRINCE2™. You can predict and plan almost anything in a project, with the exception of your project team members. At the most crucial and unexpected moments they let you down. They won’t work together, are not using their expertise or fight amongst each other. Most problems you have seen (and are still to come) can be traced back to the Human-Error-Factor (HEF).
Soft is hard
We need to address this HEF. Luckily a lot of research has already been done on this topic, which has unequivocally shown that the HEF can be re-introduced by increasing involvement. Imagine what it would be like if you could really motivate all project team members in a way they would always do what is needed.
For this enormous commitment you will have to connect to what your project team members find important, which is:
- asking for their individual expertise and providing opportunities to use it
- being valued
- increasing involvement, not just in one limited task, but in the entire project
- not wasting time on endless discussions about differences of opinion
Team members want to be taken seriously and managed well, which is the essence of successful project management. This means that a project manager should know how to do this.
Be the winner you want to be
Because project managers are working under great pressure, they don’t pay enough attention they don’t pay enough attention to people, even though they realize that people are the key to success. This is why it’s so important that project managers become skilled in ‘practical project psychology’ to motivate their employees to give their best and work well together.
Whether you’re interested in developing your soft project management skills or not, you will have to invest in them at some point because you are quite dependent on them.
Project management is a heavy-duty job. You are not only accomplishing large and very complex tasks, but you also do this in a short period of time, with a limited budget and with people who are not used to working together and who are lacking the required communication and problem solving skills. However, if you really want to perform better than your colleagues, you have to make sure that you know how to get the best performance of your people.
