Project Leader Health Check

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

As the year draws to an end, it’s a good time for self-examination, professional and personally. For project managers, it’s important to conduct an honest assessment of your leadership and communications performance this past year — and identify opportunities for improvement in the coming year.

December again, another year that seems to have flown by. I always find that it’s a good time to reflect on what I have achieved. Have I grown as a person, as a professional, as a project manager? In this article I want to share a little of that with you and encourage you to perform your own ‘health check’ as you prepare to do it all over again next year. I’m going to focus on leadership and communications, the theme of this series, but the concepts hold true for any other aspects of your working (or personal) life.

The how, not the what

For me the details of what I have accomplished are of less importance than how I accomplished it. As project managers we know that the success of our projects can be impacted by things that we have absolutely no ability to control, and the same is true of any and every interaction that we have with people. I get much more satisfaction from being able to answer the following questions ‘correctly’:

• Did I improve as much as possible as a leader and communicator this year?
• Did I learn from every …

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