Preface
“People issues” tend to be the most frustrating aspect of project work. People issues contribute to delays in project completion, reduced project quality, and increased project costs, not to mention high levels of personal stress and aggravation for the project management professional. Unfortunately, most project professionals, in their educational background or through other training, have had few opportunities to develop a concrete set of practical people skills.
This book is dedicated to giving you, the project management professional, tangible and field-tested people skills that will help you productively address the messy people problems that can surface on a project team, while also helping you manage your own career direction. We offer a set of specific, practical skills that you can use to resolve the difficult people issues so often encountered in managing projects.
The people skills that we present in this book include:
• The ability to communicate effectively on interpersonal levels with different types of stakeholders
• The ability to comfortably implement project manager leadership roles crucial to project success
• The ability to determine the personal style of your team members and other stakeholders, which will enable you to work more effectively with each individual
• Proven methods for productively resolving conflict
• Best practices and strategies for motivating team members
• Awareness of how to help a team recover after a critical incident has struck a team member or the team itself
• Skill and comfort in applying various approaches to managing your professional and personal stress
• Career management skills you need to thrive professionally in today’s world of continual change.
Why do you need these people skills? The many reasons include the complexity of managing the people issues within a matrix management system, the increasing complexity and scope of projects, the prevailing philosophy of “doing more with less,” the increasingly cross-cultural nature of teams, and the proliferation of virtual teams and an outsourced, distributed work force.
We believe this is a unique book for the project management professional. Essential People Skills for Project Managers is based on our original book, People Skills for Project Managers, published in 2001. In this derivative version, we have tried to capture the essence of the original book and bring the key concepts of people skills into sharp focus. Project managers need information they can grasp quickly and apply immediately to their projects. We hope that this “essential” version enables project managers to do just that.
We have presented parts of this book and our original People Skills for Project Managers to project management professionals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom during two-day training workshops. We have also given presentations in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland at the International Project Management Association’s NORDNET conferences, as well as to numerous chapters of the Project Management Institute in the United States. In these and similar settings, we hear from project managers just how much more attention is currently being paid—throughout the world—to the people component of project work. (Indeed, the first edition of this book was recently published in Russian by a Moscow publisher!)
We bring two different but convergent backgrounds to this book. Steve brings a background of management and leadership that builds on his original training as a clinical psychologist to a career focused on assisting individuals, teams, and organizations in working more effectively and productively. Ginger brings her background as an experienced project manager and project management consultant who has managed projects for companies and organizations in both the public and private sectors.
Two core beliefs anchored our writing. The first is that a project manager’s success, advancement, and professional satisfaction are directly related to his or her level of people skills. Our second belief is that while people skills may come easier to some people than to others, everyone can significantly improve those skills by investing the time to consider the insights and practice the techniques presented in this book.
We would like to express our thanks to the staff of Management Concepts, especially Myra Strauss and Jack Knowles, for their assistance in the production of this new version.
Steven W. Flannes
Piedmont, California