When you’re a project manager, you tend to have a lot of things on your plate, and it can be difficult to get them all right if you don’t possess the necessary skills. To help you, we’ve put together a list of six skills that help project managers experience success on a regular basis.
Keep reading to learn what skills you’ll need to cultivate to make an impact on your business.
1) Empowering Individuals & Collective Teams Can Take You Far
Although the word “project” is in the title, one of the biggest parts of being a project manager is actually the management of your team. In most cases, companies that encourage the empowerment of their employees have been shown to have the highest records of growth and long-term stability.
When you as a project manager know how to empower your team and encourage them to become the best versions of themselves, you encourage both their growth and the growth of your company. Empowering women is especially important. And as any successful executive or business owner could tell you, happy team members make for higher rates of productivity, sales, and customer satisfaction.
So if you haven’t yet begun to empower your team members to take initiative and introduce their own ideas into your everyday business practices, there’s no better time than now to start.
2) Planning is an Absolute Must
As a project manager, you play a major role in decisions both large and small. In fact, you’re likely presented with more than 10 critical decisions over the course of each day, and in many cases, those decisions will have an impact on the long-term and short-term growth of your company.
So it goes without saying that making decisions that reflect a larger-scale plan is a must.
First, though, you need to successfully plan both the big picture and minute details of each project from the get-go.
When you do this successfully, you increase the chances that your project will go off without a hitch, and you help empower team members to ensure the completion of vital steps within the plan.
3) Know How to Appropriately Communicate with every Generation
Once you’ve come up with a plan, it’s also necessary that you know how to effectively communicate to each of your team members. If they don’t understand exactly what’s expected of them, you run the risk of running into problems later on.
The most successful project managers know how to tailor their explanations to the various generations according to their particular communication styles.
Baby boomers, for example, tend to communicate best in face-to-face settings, whereas Gen Zers tend to demonstrate the highest rates of comprehension in digital settings.
The ideal communication style often varies from one generation to another, but more so from one individual to another. That’s why getting to know your team members and their individual communication styles can help you ensure smooth transitions between each step in your project management process.
4) Time Management is Essential as a Project Manager
If you’ve adequately planned out your projects, they likely have a projected completion date. It’s at this point that effective time management becomes a necessary skill if you want the project to be completed within that projected timeline. To do this effectively, you need to have a clear idea of your team members’ respective skills, the resources available, and the resources that will be necessary to ensure timely project completion.
5) Make Sure You Know Your Stuff
The market is constantly changing, and your knowledge of your field needs to adapt to reflect those changes. The most successful project managers know that their learning is never done, and they actively look for opportunities to know more about their job, current market trends, and the elements that affect both each day.
To put it simply, make sure you know your stuff. Because the more actively you approach learning, the less likely you will be to enter a project with outdated knowledge and information. This will then enable you to make informed decisions about the necessary timelines, tasks, team members, and overall plans for each project.
6) Know When You Need to Negotiate with Peers and Clients
With the willingness to learn comes the knowledge that you won’t always be right. If you can embrace that knowledge and put it into action when interacting with peers and clients, you’ll find yourself miles ahead of other project managers. This is because project managers who approach complicated situations with this mindset tend to be more successful in negotiations than those who approach the same situations with the thought that they, and only they, have the answers.
Simply put, an accomplished project manager knows when to stand up for their thoughts and ideas and when to compromise.
Conclusion
Part of being a project manager is knowing how to manage your projects effectively. If you take the time and energy to cultivate the skills we mentioned above, you’ll be well on your way to achieving the success you’re looking for.
Good luck!
