Making It Your Own

Craig is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has worked with ProjectManagement.com for the last six years developing the various HEADWAY processes (Project, Change and Portfolio). He has hosted a series of webinars and is a business intelligence subject matter expert.

  Career Development   New Practitioners  

Every project manager has their own style. Each one of us has our own way of doing things. This is true in everything, including driving a car, making a presentation or managing a project. As a new practitioner to project management, the sooner you recognize your own style, the better the project manager you will be. The concept of “making it your own” will help you down this path.

Years ago, I started to teach project management courses. While I had lots of facilitation experience, I was limited in a teaching background. Thankfully, I was fortunate to have some excellent mentors that did a great job in showing me the ropes, providing me guidance and assistance in my early, impressionable years.

As I absorbed the course material, I also started to absorb the approach they took to each course and the style they used. I saw what worked and attempted as much as possible to emulate their delivery style. It was successful for them, and I expected it to be successful for me as well. That is the way it works, right?

Regrettably, my delivery of the course content was both awkward and choppy. The examples I used, the jokes I made and the tone I set were not my own, and I struggled. Sometimes, that challenge was focused inward as I struggled to better master the content and delivery of the courses. Some of it was focused outward and impacted the students I was …

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