The core leadership skills that PMOs should invest in today
By Emily Warren and Jennifer Bierman
In a previous article, Andy Longstreth and I talked about evolving the function and expectations of Project Managers. Specifically, we identified soft skill expectations that are shared between Project Managers and business and IT leaders. Not only is prioritizing soft skill development important to enabling the successful next generation of Project Managers, but there are also organizational benefits to creating a pipeline of talent for future business and IT leaders.
Today, Emily and I will explore which soft skills a Project Manager or Program Manager (referred to as Manager throughout this post) needs to be successful today, and what skills will set resources and organizations up for success in the short and long term. We bucketed seven skills into three categories: Managing Yourself, Leading Individuals and Team, and Influencing Others.
Managing Yourself
The ability to manage yourself — fairly, thoughtfully, and with self-awareness — is critically important to leading projects and programs. Soft skills needed to manage yourself include:
· Manage time and attention: Time is your most precious commodity. With a million different things competing for your time, you must learn to prioritize time for the activities that really matter — versus what just keeps you busy. Managing time is table stakes.
Take this a step further: Managers who set themselves apart from their peers have figured out not just how to manage their time, but also their attention. Email, IM, and other collaboration tools can interrupt focus and put you in a distraction zone. Poorly planned or executed projects cause Managers to spend a lot of time being reactive — moving from one fire to the next creates a high level of stress that can impact not only your work but also your physical and mental well-being.
Steven Covey said it well: “Proactive people carry their own weather with them.” Managers who always seem a step ahead of the curve, in front of the latest risk, driving towards consensus on the most critical decisions — these are leaders who have mastered the skill of executing in a proactive zone. The proactive zone enables strategic thinking, planning, reflection, and allows you to take care of your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.
· Be aware of self: First, understand your personality and communication style. Many tools exist that can help you assess your own style, like Myers Briggs, DISC, or any other reputable behavioral/personality assessment.
But knowing your style is only the first step to becoming an impactful Manager. You must learn to flex your style to meet the needs of your stakeholders in any given interaction. For example, a Conscientiousness profile in DISC values quality and accuracy and may find delegating tasks to be difficult. However, to spend time in a proactive zone for yourself and work effectively with others (perhaps even other Conscientiousness profiles who have goals of personal growth), delegation is key.
With practice, you’ll learn how to use the insights about your own style to effectively communicate with stakeholders. For example, if you score high in the Influential profile of DISC, you likely use storytelling as a communication mechanism. But as you gain more experience with DISC, you might recognize that when asking a sponsor who is high in the Dominant profile to make a decision to resolve an issue, they are likely looking for quantitative data and facts about the issue. You can adapt your communication style to match the sponsor; instead of focusing on the overall story, you’ll home in on the most compelling facts. Practice identifying your style, your stakeholder’s style, and being able to flex where needed.
Leading Individuals and Teams
Managers need the ability to lead individuals and teams — and, often, lead teams made up of individuals who they don’t have direct authority over. It can be tricky! The best Managers realize that they cannot do everything on their own — rather, they need to lead a team in achieving the next great outcome.
These are the soft skills we believe necessary to effectively lead individuals and teams:
· Build trust: Great leaders have people who trust them and each other and, unfortunately, trust can take time to build, yet mere minutes to destroy. That’s why great Managers take extra care to grow soft skills here — it requires effort, patience, and perseverance.
There are many established formulas for measuring trust. Some characteristics that increase trust include Competence (demonstrating the ability to execute the role), Reliability (actions match words said and commitments made), Sincerity (being truthful even when the truth isn’t popular), and Empathy (being open and vulnerable). The most common destroyer of trust is having a high self-orientation, leading people to believe you are not interested in anyone’s success but your own.
In our experience, Sincerity and Self-orientation can be the most challenging for Managers and can be made even more challenging by the corporate culture. Are Managers and delivery teams supported and applauded for being transparent when projects move from green to yellow or red? Does finger-pointing happen when there are issues, pitting one development team against another or the business against IT? Managers must find ways to build trust and actively work to keep it, often employing other soft skills in the process.
· Enable a high performing team: There is a quote often attributed to the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
A high performing team doesn’t just happen on its own. Help your teams understand where they are on the phases of team development (forming, storming, norming, performing) and proactively work with them to build or improve the characteristics of high performing teams.
We’ve found it helpful to have newly formed teams create a shared purpose statement, establish team principles, and share their own stories and goals to build a foundation of vulnerability-based trust. Not only does an activity like this help the team accelerate through the team development curve, it also helps to establish trust, the critical foundation for high performing teams. Additionally, an activity like this paves the way to high performing team characteristics such as productive conflict (e.g., healthy debate on risk mitigation), commitment (e.g., once a decision is made, everyone is on board), mutual accountability (e.g., meetings end with specific resolutions, next steps, and/or commitments to take action) and a focus on results (e.g., successes are celebrated and errors are owned and fixed proactively).
· Give and receive feedback: Bill Gates said, “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” This includes recognizing what people do well and having the hard conversations of what people can do better.
In order to help the team members grow, create a culture of feedback on your team, where everyone is encouraged to share what went well and what could be done better next time, in real-time. As a Manager, you have to model this behavior for your team and build the muscle by doing so repeatedly. Instilling this as part of your leadership approach and team culture is challenging when it’s not part of your organization’s culture and/or you haven’t been taught the art of this skill set.
Beyond building the muscle through repetition, we have found the key to getting comfortable is to find a framework that allows you to focus on facts. In particular, the Situation-Behavior-Impact model works well for its simplicity. A simplicity of the model encourages regular use and starting with the situation encourages you to focus on real-time feedback.
How often have you walked out of meeting thinking either “Sarah’s ability to effectively communicate the risk and mitigation options was the key to aligning stakeholders” or “Steve was unprepared to talk about the implications of the risk and now the stakeholders are doubting our plan”? It is only with a tool and team culture to provide positive and corrective feedback swiftly and meaningfully that a Manager can lead individuals and teams to deliver at their highest potential.
Influencing Others
One of the ways that good Managers get things done is by influencing others — and “others” may include project sponsors, your boss, the person responsible for defining delivery processes/standards that your team follows, etc.
Developing these soft skills will help you be successful in influencing others:
· Listen: Management guru Peter Drucker said, “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” To be an effective listener, you need listen beyond facts for the beliefs, assumptions, emotions, and implications of what your speaker is saying. You also need to feel empowered to ask seeking-to-understand questions, taking the time to peel back the layers and get to the heart of what your speaker is trying to communicate rather than being concerned with always having a ready-made answer. This is a powerful skill to coach and mentor individuals.
Great listening skills will improve every core leadership skill, but we placed it in this category because of the value this skill has for Managers when engaging with the senior-level stakeholders that typically make up steering committees. This skill has the biggest impact to help you move from Manager in the eyes of stakeholders to a Trusted Advisor. Create an environment where project stakeholders feel heard, because it’s only after feeling heard that people believe you really understand.
· Persuade: In order to influence someone, you need them to understand what you are saying, why they need to care, and what you need them to do. Managers aren’t the boss of key stakeholders like sponsors and, in matrix organizations, they aren’t the boss of project team members. Managers effectively deliver projects by having the ability to persuade the people who make decisions and deliver the work.
Just as there are communication styles to leverage based on your audience, we’ve also found different persuasion strategies that work well in project delivery settings. Whether you name it or not, you probably use a Common Vision strategy at the start of projects and leverage a project charter to memorialize it.
Organizational Awareness is a powerful strategy to employ when you need to make sure you have all the right voices in the room. Managers who are good at Organizational Awareness are often seen as having a differentiated ability to deliver because they are so good at understanding how work gets done and decisions get made.
Interpersonal Awareness and Relationship Building get cited as different strategies, but at their core, these strategies are about having relationships with your stakeholders built on listening and trust, enabling you to understand what is important to them, and learn how to address those concerns in the process of persuading them to take action, make decisions, etc.
No conversation on persuasion tactics for Managers would be complete without considering Bargaining. Like Common Vision, you may not name it or realize you are doing it, but any time you are working with your stakeholders to persuade them to make trade-offs between scope, schedule, budget, and quality, you are Bargaining for a mutually satisfactory outcome. In fact, you’re probably using multiple strategies to identify and create a “satisfactory outcome,” as this requires alignment to the Common Vision, Organizational Awareness to know how different parts of the organization will prioritize, and Interpersonal Awareness to know what is most important to the decision makers.
Investing in and building a team of great leaders
Time and attention management, self-awareness on behavioral characteristics and communication style, building trust, leading high performing teams, providing feedback, active listening, persuasion — not only are these skills differentiators for high-performing Managers, these are the skills you find as consistently listed as job requirements for management roles in business and IT.
As our Slalom group described previously, developing these soft skills for Managers in your organization enables you to build a team of great delivery leaders and creates a pipeline of talent. Your Managers will become the future business and IT leaders in your organization.
What other soft skills do you see as differentiators between good and great Managers? What are the roadblocks in your organization to prioritizing the development of these skills? In a future article, we will talk about the challenges we often see in creating an organization that can prioritize the development of soft skills versus a singular focus on the tactical aspects of project management.
