Project Leader Resolutions

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.

  Career Development   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

A new year brings new challenges — and renewed commitment to excellence for one project leader. What about you? What professional “bad habits” will you leave behind and replace with new best practices in 2012?

Last month in “Project Leader Health Check,” I wrote about looking back at the past year and seeing how we all can learn from our performance and grow as leaders and communicators. This month I want to look forward — it’s the start of a fresh new year with all of the exciting prospects that come with that, and it provides the perfect opportunity to make some commitments to ourselves about how we can improve.

We all know that New Year’s resolutions have a nasty habit of being broken early on (how can I commit to eat better when my wife buys so many cookies for Christmas that they last until February?). That said, let’s look at some things that should be easier for us to stick to if we are good leaders.

The foundation: communication

The great thing about soft skills is that you can always improve them, and never is that truer than with communication. The pace of technological change is phenomenal, and shows no sign of slowing down. That alone requires us to evolve and update our communication skills to positively leverage these new technologies, and there’s my first resolution.

The ability to look at an instant …

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