Managing Project Pressure

  Career Development   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Here’s a professional development path that all project managers should explore: learn how to manage pressure. It will make it easier for you to deliver your best work when it matters most. In this new series, we begin with using positive expectations to kick off a new project.

This article is the first in an original series developed from principles and tools described in the book Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most, by Hendrie Weisinger and J.P. Pawliw-Fry.

For a project manager, every project you manage is a pressure moment. But it’s hard to do your best — let alone manage a team — when pressure handicaps your ability to perform. Feeling pressure downgrades your cognitive tools: memory, comprehension attention, judgment and decision-making. Furthermore, numerous studies show that pressure causes individuals to bend their ethics and stray from their moral compass.

What about those who say they rise to the occasion or creativity is fueled by a time deadline? For the most part, they hold a pressuredelusion. Hundreds of empirical studies conclude that the overwhelming majority of individuals perform below their capability in a pressure moment — a situation in which they have something at stake and the outcome is dependent on their performance. Sophisticated statistical analyses show that …

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