A recent (and ongoing) debate on domain knowledge sparked a thought that I am considering delving into in more detail, regarding how our personality styles as PMs influence both our capabilities as PMs, and our management style.
A leadership workshop I attended involving personality styles explored the subject of control. Some people are more comfortable in a highly organized environment, and others in a more chaotic one. You can pick up on some of that looking at things like whether their desks are neat or cluttered, so that you can adapt your own style to communicate with them personally. When people fall more to one side of the spectrum, they may become less comfortable when their environment is on the other side.
My question to my colleagues here is how do you think or personality styles affect our performance as PMs when we have to operate outside our comfort zones? For example: Will a PM who is more comfortable in chaos steer stable projects into chaos, and can a PM who is more comfortable in a highly controlled environment operate effectively when the big risk turns into an issue, and the project becomes a recovery effort? Saving Changes...
Mohammed KarsiDirector of PM/PMO| National Agency for Health InsuranceRabat, Morocco
very interessing question!
I have thought about it in several times.
I think that we should introduce Personality Styles as part of Ressources management process in order to facilitate the job for the project manager and the team. Saving Changes...
That is a very interesting question and I am reading other people's comments and some I absolutely agree with. I think the most important thing is for the PM to have an adaptive style when it comes to leading the project. Saving Changes...
I think that the environment we are in directly contributes to the style that we employ and use. We should be able to adapt our style to the particular workplace that we are in. If we are use to working in a highly organised multi national company that has departments and job titles for all the resources that we require and then suddenly move to a small start up company were we may be wearing many different hats, a project manager should be able to adapt their management style accordingly. Some project managers may seek out these roles as they may need a new challenge after many years in the same environment. As project managers we need to be constantly challenged in order to force ourselves outside our comfort zone into new environment thus testing and learning new skills. Bringing our knowledge of building and managing a project management office into a environments where this structure does not exist is a fundamental underlining principle of project management, that being cross knowledge transfer between team members. Saving Changes...
Alok PriyadarshiProject Manager| Tata Consulting Engineers LimitedJamshedpur, Jharkhand, India
Hi Keith,
It Is very interesting and relevant question about project manager. Of course personality style of project manager can influenced project. As project is very dynamic in nature hence we can not succeed with fixed type of personality. To manuvour project nicely we have to apply dynamic approach. Our personalities type should be flexible enough to sustain the rough as well as smooth journey of project. Hard is always prone to break so be flexible accordingly to situation and proceed accordingly as per project requirements. Saving Changes...
I think an organized manager will always make it easier for the whole project team to follow the intended path.
Being a little more chaotic will make it more difficult to create a plan / set clear roles / control the budget
The organized one probably may be less socializing but I think the project success at the end is the most important and it should be rewarding to all members Saving Changes...
