Top 5 Project Management Skills You Never Knew You Needed

As a project manager no two days are the same. Business changes, project dynamics, and the myriad stakeholders you deal with are just the beginning. For daily entertainment, here are a few additional project management skills you must develop and deploy to be effective:

1. Storyteller – Effective conversations and project documentation are the beginning of your project story. What you really need is vivid communication–the story of how your project can progress from idea to reality. Senior leaders need reassurance, often in the form of hero reports and processes that save the day. Practice telling the story of your project. To be certain your story will sell your senior leaders, make it part Marvel action movie and part warm snuggly lullaby. Do that, and you’ll be in your project’s driver’s seat.
2. Non-insulting Consultant – One of the more challenging things a project manager does is turn away work. That’s right – you have to say no to some project assignments. Pet projects, impractical projects that sponsors erroneously assume employees will buy into, and other unrealistic project concepts will cross your desk for justification. When you find yourself in this position, you need to put on your consulting hat and convince your enthusiastic sponsor their idea won’t fly. You have to be firm and direct and, at the same time, avoid insulting them. Take the approach of steward of your sponsor’s business and assure them that your job is to protect them from issues that impact the bottom line. Consider telling a good project horror story (see item 1).
3. The Battle-revealer and Peacemaker – Your project sponsor may be totally convinced about a project, while other key stakeholders think differently. Finding those not-so-on-board stakeholders and revealing the battle that needs to be fought is critical for success. Otherwise, you’ll have one significant stakeholder tell you to go north while another tells you to go south. Good luck with THAT! Find the requirement and prioritization mismatches, get the combatants in a room, and help them clearly articulate their differences. You act as the peacemaker and look for compromise, if necessary. Then your life as project manager will be much easier.
4. The Discoverer of wobbly truth – The people you need to work on your projects are almost always working on other things, too. (If you run a project with 100% dedicated resources, you haven’t experienced the full fun of being a PM!) Your project team members are juggling things and almost always underestimate. They try to be diligent, but they’re usually optimistic about what they can produce, in quantity and quality. Gently and compassionately, you need to find the truth about what your project team can produce and the status of their work. Wobbly truth (a well-intended statement that isn’t a lie, but doesn’t turn out to be accurate) has spawned more nightmares than Dracula—at least for project managers. Be persistent and kind, but don’t stop poking until you get the truth.
5. Executive Whisperer – Anticipating your sponsor’s reactions to project twists and turns is a useful skill. Even more important is understanding the fears that these project situations will awaken in your senior leaders. Understanding those fears helps you identify the information to share to either reassure them or give them clear options to help you address the concern. Executive whispering is best performed going into a project, when you can have a conversation with your sponsor and other stakeholders about the risks they are most concerned about and the positive outcomes they value most. That way, you can whisper to your senior leaders to help you guide the project and control their fears!