Category Archives for Communication Skills
LEAD: Your Four Project Leadership Priorities
When you are in a Project Leadership role, you will have a lot to do. As well as managing your project day-to-day, you’re responsible for the people. They look to you for leadership and guidance. But, with so many responsibilities, it can be hard to know what are your leadership priorities?
Often, it is the soft skills that are hardest to practice. Yet they regularly make the biggest difference. There is a well-established acronym, listing four vital soft skills. For me, it forms a great checklist and reminder of my leadership priorities. And, in this article, I want to share it with you, with some tips and tricks along the way.
Managing Difficult Conversations: A Guide for Project Managers
From time to time, every Project Manager will find themselves managing difficult conversations. Because it is an important part of our role. But it’s one we’d rather not have. Then, of course, at the end of a hard day or week at work, you leave work. And again, you will have to face these types of conversation at home, with friends and in social situations.
We all know a difficult conversation as soon as it gets started – in fact, we mostly spot it in advance. This triggers adversarial or defensive reactions that just make things worse.
There are ways to plan and manage a difficult conversation to vastly increase the chances that it will go well. You want the other person will listen and participate constructively. You also want a good outcome. So, in this guide, I’ll offer you some practical techniques to give you confidence when you are managing difficult conversations.
Communication Skills for Project Managers | The Best Books
A large part of your job as a Project Manager is communication; arguably the largest part. So, only focusing on technical skills will not serve you. It’s essential that you develop excellent communication skills. Luckily, there are many great books to help you.
Increasingly, this is the area my training business is focussed on. My clients are learning the value of giving their project managers – and general managers – great communications skills. And my experience as a project manager taught me two things:
- Your success as a Project Manager depends more on your ability to communicate well (with stakeholders, team members, and bosses or clients) than on anything else
- There is no better context than Project Management in which to learn, practice and hone your communication skills
So, in this article, I have set out to share some of the brilliant books that have helped me learn along the way. In reviewing them, I have selected the ones that are most likely to help you, today.
Performance Feedback for Project Team Members: In a Nutshell
As a project manager, you are not just responsible for your project. You are also responsible for the people on your project. And there is nothing that develops people more reliably than good quality performance feedback.
Often, we get our own performance feedback by simply observing what we do and the results it has. But it’s too easy to miss the details. That’s why we need others to give us their feedback. So, you need to develop the skills for giving good performance feedback to your project team members.
In this article, we’ll summarize the skills, techniques, and tips you’ll need.
How to Plan Your Stakeholder Engagement Campaign
As a Project manager, you need to be prepared to learn from many different places. And, from the world of marketing, you can learn a lot about how to plan your stakeholder engagement campaign.
You are a project manager. You care about getting things right. So you plan meticulously, identify threats and take steps to mitigate them. The only thing that can get in your way now is one thing: people.
What all experienced project managers know is this:
It is your stakeholders who will ultimately determine whether your project is deemed a success… or not.
So you need to be equally rigorous in planning your stakeholder engagement campaign. You will need to learn from them, build their trust, and ultimately influence their attitudes.
So what are the components of a stakeholder engagement campaign, and how can you determine the best strategy for each?
The Best Personal Effectiveness Books for Project Managers
There is a vast literature of personal effectiveness books. With so many to choose from, where should you start?
Don’t worry. Here at OnlinePMCourses, we have a big library and have read many personal effectiveness books. We’ll talk you through our top recommendations for each of the personal effectiveness skills.
Why are Personal Effectiveness Books so Important?
When you are a Project Manager, people look to you. They look for leadership, inspiration, and guidance. They also expect you to be a highly effective professional; capable in all circumstances. But many of these skills aren’t taught as a part of your project management learning:
- Time management
- Speaking well
- Connecting with people, emotionally
- Dealing with difficult people (as if…)
- Negotiating
- Making decisions
- Influencing people
These skills come with practice. But where do you learn what techniques to try out and practice? That’s where our list of personal effectiveness books comes in. They offer some of the best advice, most clearly given, of all the books (around 1,000) on our shelves.
Podcast: Politics and Stakeholders
Two of the things that put off many project managers are Politics and Stakeholders. Yet they are intertwined and a necessary part of project management. You cannot escape either so you may as well embrace them.
In this podcast, Andy Kaufman of the People and Projects Podcast, interviewed me about Politics and Stakeholders – an interest we share.
This interview ranged wider than politics and stakeholders, but for me, that is at its heart. Andy’s case study questions tapped into real ad tricky situations.
Great Team Communication: The 10 Commandments
Have you got a great project team? If you have, then one thing acts like top-grade oil in a highly-tuned engine: great team communication.
With great team communication, everything seems so much easier.
Conversations are friction free, problems get described, addressed and solved. And work gets shared and handed-off efficiently.
Contrast that poor team communication.
It’s like the oil in your engine is burnt and gritty. Everything seems harder and nothing flows smoothly.
So, in this article we look at how to create great team communication, and share ’10 Commandments’.
4 Steps to Engage Difficult Stakeholders
One of the things Project Managers fear most is resistance. When we encounter difficult stakeholders, it triggers deep emotions. It’s easy to feel out of your depth professionally, and challenged, personally.
This is a common problem for all project managers. And it can be unsettling for newer PMs. So we asked an expert in this topic to write an article for you.
Elise Stevens runs the fabulous FixMyProjectChaos.com website, with over 100 podcasts for you to listen to. We like podcasts. And she is a seasoned practitioner who now coaches, mentors and trains project managers. Hear Elise’s interview with OnlinePMCourses founder, Mike Clayton.
But most important, Elise has thought deeply about the challenges posed by difficult stakeholder. She even has an eCourse available. So why don’t we turn this article over to Elise, and let her tell her story…
Project Politics: How to Win The Game of Projects
A seasoned Project Manager, you quickly learn that there’s no escaping project politics.
It’s a fact of life.
‘When you play a game of projects you deliver or you fail.’
But you may find yourself tempted to say something like: ‘Hang on, I’m a project manager: not a politician.’
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? You could spend your days focusing on the basic management principles.
Except, what are the Basic Project Management Principles?
Well, pretty near the top is… Stakeholder Engagement. And what’s that all about? Politics.
So, you’ll always came back to the political dimension.
Because it’s always there in real life. No matter how much you may want to; you cannot escape project politics. So you do need to understand the basics.
Continue reading…
