As a project manager, what’s one non-project management skill or habit that’s unexpectedly made you better at your job—and why?" A unique skillset
Saving Changes...
Sort By:
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
run faster than my stakeholders when things go wrong....hehe....sorry, bad weekend joke....
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Akin, Soft Skills and specifically Emotional Intelligence. Being able to recognize and manage emotions, both my own and others, has helped me navigate difficult conversations, resolve conflicts, and build stronger, more trusting relationships with team members and stakeholders. It’s improved my ability to lead with empathy, adapt to different personalities, and keep teams motivated and aligned, especially under pressure. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Akin Fadare One of the most transformative non-technical skills any project manager can develop is the ability to listen with presence and purpose.
Exactly as proposed by Covey’s Habit 5: seek first to understand.
Truly listening (not just to reply, but to understand what is at stake) is what makes genuine empathy possible, enables constructive conflict resolution, and fosters solutions that respect all parties involved.
In critical or ambiguous situations, this deep listening allows us to:
- Capture unspoken needs,
- Align perceptions and expectations,
- And build relationships based on trust and mutual respect.
Without authentic understanding, there can be no lasting leadership.
The impact of conscious listening goes far beyond communication - it transforms decisions, relationships, and outcomes.
Saving Changes...
Phoenix MTechnology LeaderSan Francisco, United States
Agree with Luis there, active listening’s my secret weapon as a PM. It helps me catch hidden issues, build trust with the team, and keep projects humming by making everyone feel heard.
To be honest, this is one key thing for anything in life, not just project mangement. Making people feel they are heard, always make things easier :) Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Akin,
I agree with Luis and Rami. PMI now refers to it as Power Skills, but I prefer the term Leadership Skills. It is also called Soft Skills. Specifically, besides EI and empathy, influencing others is a core skill that project managers often overlook.
A leader influences people to become his followers, in a project team, as project customers, and as project superiors. Managing expectations includes convincing customers about what you think is possible and useful. Communication to wider stakeholder groups is giving them an impression of security, not to fear the results of your project. Influencing means owning the narrative about your project. It means to build alliances and power potentials in the organization even among executives or people that do not report to you.
Influencing should be done ethically, preserving the values of fairness, honesty, respect, and responsibility as outlined in PMI's code of ethics. Ethical dilemmas will emerge. Saving Changes...
I look at soft skills like active listening as core PM skills, but from my engineering background, one skill that keeps providing unexpectedly big returns is statistical analysis, and I'm not even that good at it.
A very wise professor once taught me that although complex problems involve many variables, in most cases one will dominate the entire output so find that variable. When given a complex problem to solve, I will find what relevant data is available, calculate the average, variance, and plot them over time.
Most won't show anything interesting but often one or two will stand out like a sore thumb and then I start asking why. Often, the root causes are completely unexpected and met with a lot of skepticism. Digging into the issue deeper reveals that things nobody thought were important, or trends nobody noticed, turn out to be very important and expensive factors. Saving Changes...
Active listening. it’s helped me understand unspoken risks, team dynamics, and stakeholder concerns before they escalate. Just being fully present in conversations makes a surprising difference.
PMO Leader | Speaker & Mentor | Content Leader – PMOGA Latin America
Hub| Catholic University of UruguayMontevideo, Montevideo, Uruguay
Active listening.
Not the typical "listening to respond", but the real one, the one that seeks to deeply understand what the other person is saying... and what they are not saying. It may not seem directly related to project management, but it has been one of my most powerful tools. It has allowed me to detect conflicts before they explode, align teams faster and, above all, build trust in complex or high-pressure environments. In a world full of dashboards, KPIs and methodologies, listening carefully remains an undervalued competitive advantage... but a tremendously effective one. Saving Changes...
Community Champion
