Wondering what goes into being a great project manager? Here are the answers!
Whether you’re a newbie project manager or an experienced one, we could all use a little brushing up of our skills every now and then. Even as someone who has been in the business for 20+ years, I know that there are always improvements that can be made to my skills as a PM.
But what exactly are the skills that we should be focusing on? There’s so much that goes into great project management, it’s hard to know where to start.
Here are a few critical skills every project manager needs to have to see consistent project success.
1 – Leadership and coaching
Being a great leader doesn’t mean being a dictator. You want to coach and understand people. Ensure everything is inclusive and encourage positive team dynamics. This means you need to have great listening skills, and you need to be as neutral as possible in all situations. Take all points of view equally. Obviously, you will ultimately have to make decisions and be the tiebreaker. But a good project manager is one who considers various viewpoints and truly listens to the subject matter experts on their team before coming to a decision.
2 – Time & Task Management
Understand the bigger picture and break things down into smaller tasks. As a project manager, you need to be able to distinguish what is high priority and what is low priority. So often, things are labelled ‘urgent’ when they’re not truly urgent. You need to be able to identify what is truly urgent for the project so that you can enable those on your team to execute the tasks they need to accomplish for the success of the project.
3 – Planning Skills
Planning skills are different from time management skills, but still go hand in hand. Planning takes into account not just timelines, but everything else associated with the project. This can be anything from small scale to large scale elements and tasks.
Other Critical Project Management Skills
This isn’t all you need to know about project management skills. There are other additional skills that are critical to know in order to be a great project manager that leads the project team to success. I’ve already created a video where I talk about all the project management skills that I’ve found to be instrumental as a project manager.
Join me over on YouTube so we can dive into these a little deeper together. See you there!
I really hope that you found this helpful – and if you did, it would mean so much to me if you would share it on your social media.
Meanwhile, if you really are committed to mastering your next project, do consider taking my SLAY Project Management online course where I show you step-by-step how to successfully manage a project, plus you get access to every template you will need, along with detailed video instructions on how to fill them out.
-Adriana
