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People At Work
Taking into account the wants and needs of the people involved on your projects might sound warm and fuzzy, but a project manager's people skills can determine the life or death of an initiative as much as any methodology. But can people skills be learned? And what exactly are they, anyway?
Here's your project. Come back in six months with it done right. If only it were that easy. Melanie Cullen, a Davis, Calif.-based management consultant, says she has seen such an approach all too often. And when management dispatches a team with little more than brusque marching orders to "make it happen," attention to people skills can fall right to the bottom of the priority pile. "Yet if a project manager is only focused on technical details, he or she isn't going to earn respect of the team and they aren't going to be able to communicate where they are going and communicate that to management," says Cullen, head of TerraSys Consulting.
Focusing a project so it takes into account the wants and needs of the people involved may sound like so much "Mom and apple pie," Cullen says, but for a project manager, strong people skills can determine a project's life or death. "I've seen people darn near punching each other out in the middle of a project," she says, but with strong leadership ended up "hugging and crying and just …
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"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world." - Lucille Ball |