Leadership Skill Sets
Leaders must have a number of skills to successfully achieve the goals when managing a project. Some of these include: effective communicator, motivator, delegator, decision maker and empathy.
Effective Communicator
Defining a project requires clear direction from the leader. An overall understanding of the entire scope, goals and timeline needs to be communicated to the project management team. Each member must understand their role and their contribution to the project.
Face to face meetings or phone/video conferencing are good methods for communication. Texts, e-mails and collaboration tools online can be utilized for keeping the project moving forward, however, these cannot be solely relied on for effective communication.
Motivator
This topic of motivating a team usually arises when discussing projects and business with other leaders. How do you motivate each member of the project team? If you think it is only about money you may find out this is not the case for most members.
Besides providing the overall goal and the importance of each member’ role, leaders focus on individual personalities. Build stronger relationships with each team member and get to know them better. You will find they require different motivation and it is okay to build your strategy with unique motivators.
Delegate with Authority
Provide clear direction on what the tasks entail and empower each member to execute the tasks. It is easy to micro-manage and want to be involved in every step. Let go and trust your team.
When you empower them to make decisions, they might make some mistakes or they might ask the leader to make a decision. Encourage them to make their own decisions, provide guidance as needed and help everyone learn from any mistakes made along the way.
Decision Maker
As the leader, you will be relied on from time to time to make decisions. Do not wait until you feel you have 100% of all the information as this is not realistic. Remove your emotions and personal biases, ask questions, gather the facts and make a decision.
Procrastinating does not help and may result in the project not being successful. As mentioned above, provide the tools and information to your team so they can make most of the decisions for a successful project.
Empathy
Leaders demonstrate and teach others how to be empathetic. Business and projects are made up of people. Show them you care. Teach them to care. It is a simple concept and yet it is lacking in many areas today.
Listen to your team, ask them questions and show them you support them. Caring about others helps with overall satisfaction, morale and success projects.
What skill sets do you bring to your Project Management Team?
Decision making can be very stressful. I agree with “Remove your emotions and personal biases, ask questions, gather the facts and make a decision.”.
To help out with it, I will also add, to make it a process where you assess and weight the pros and cons, use a decision making to tool as necessary.
Thanks Frank for mentioning Empathy, which is not always considered as a leadership skill. As leaders we have to understand that people are at the core of projects. Caring about others allows you as a leader to have the right people at the right position by understanding each individual of you team, their strengths and weaknesses, their needs and requirements for their success and thus the success of the project,
The winning of the 2019 NBA championship by the Toronto Raptors is a vibrant example of building the right team by having the right people with the right skills sets doing what they are best at, for the collective win.
Thank you Blandine for your insight, working to your team members strengths is a great way to receive the best results from your team while keeping morale high. I’m glad to hear you found value in my post, it’s why I do it 🙂
Leaders create a vision—the future state of the organization when its strategic goals are achieved. Leaders think long term in achieving the vision. Project managers are focused on achieving the short-term and mid-term deliverables to accomplish the project goals, as part of achieving the long-term strategic goals.
Well Said!