Power to the People Skills

  Resource Management   PM Network  

While delivering projects on time, scope and budget are key parts of every project, success ultimately comes down to the right people doing the work. It’s the intangible qualities—interpersonal skills, communications and the like—that consistently rank as the strongest indicators of project success across organizations, industries and regions. According to the 2012 Workplace Issues Report by training firm Six Seconds, those who use emotional intelligence as a basis for leadership outperform their peers by 32 percent in leadership effectiveness and development.

“The project manager is the central hub of the project team, holding together team members from different groups, different organizations, with different goals and even different languages,” says Murray Duke, PMP, portfolio manager at insurance firm ING Life in Tokyo, Japan. “This is done through the project manager’s people skills.”

But unlike technical skills that can be easily quantified, people skills often are more difficult to gauge, particularly during the hiring process. “During the interview, it’s easier to find out if a project manager has good technical skills than to evaluate his or her soft skills,” says Eric Pepin, PMP, PgMP, human resources director at video game developer Ubisoft in Shanghai, China.

For senior-level project …

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