Leadership Skills for PMs: Edition 12 – Compassion
The magic behind the success of great project managers isn’t typically technical skill; it’s compassion. While it’s thought of as a “soft skill,” it’s not easy to be compassionate when the pressure is on. But it offers a strategic advantage that transforms how project teams generate results. Here’s how:
- Compassion creates psychological safety. Team members who are confident that their project manager cares about them outperform those who feel unappreciated. They know they won’t be reprimanded for raising concerns or admitting mistakes. This means they will be more likely to identify risks, share creative ideas, and go the extra mile to produce deliverables on time.
- Understanding each team member produces more realistic planning. Compassionate project managers take time to understand what’s happening in their team members’ lives—they know what drives them, and when they feel overwhelmed. This helps the PM make informed decisions about workload, reasonable deadlines, and resource allocation. As a result, the compassionate manager’s project plans are designed around team members’ unique circumstances, increasing the likelihood of meeting commitments.
- Compassion reduces burnout and improves retention. Project resource churn is disruptive, as people who leave take vital institutional knowledge with them. Compassionate PMs recognize signs of exhaustion and protect work-life boundaries. This helps keep team members engaged and productive as the project progresses. Compassion helps improve retention, which saves time and money replacing and training staff.
- Compassionate project managers promote more effective collaboration. Project managers need to manage competing priorities and challenging stakeholder relationships. With compassion, you can understand the pressures, constraints, and concerns driving each stakeholder. Instead of viewing difficult stakeholders as obstacles, you recognize them as people with legitimate needs, which leads to productive conversations, effective compromises and better outcomes.
- Compassion creates teams that people want to join. Some PMs assume that the best project managers get the best team members, which is why they’re so successful. That’s true but perhaps not in the way you think. Team members actively seek to work with compassionate project managers. As a result, those project managers produce better project outcomes. In a business environment where most projects require lots of collaboration and matrix management, compassion yields a competitive advantage that directly impacts delivery quality and speed.
_______________________________________
This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 100,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.
Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.