Leadership and Learning from Others

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Career Development   Leadership  

Learning how to be a project manager does not only come from books or from earning a certification. You learn from doing, from positive experience leading projects and teams, and working directly with schedules. Bu this type of “on the job” training comes with risks, and it’s important for a project manager to learn from other project managers as much as possible before being thrust into a sink-or-swim type of role.

The project manager should take every opportunity to learn from others in a formal or informal arrangement. Even an experienced project manager should still be learning--not just in the classroom, but also through real world experiences. Learning should never stop.

Positive and Negative Experiences
You can learn from both positive and negative experiences. A positive experience may be working with a leader that knows how to motivate and communicate and is able to manage a successful project, or it could be that a project failed and the project manager was able to salvage something and make the best of the situation. In many ways, the experience comes down to how a situation is dealt with instead of whether or not the project was successful.

On the other end, a negative experience results from the project manager not being able to deal with the project or the project team. While this situation may be painful for those involved with the …

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