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PMTimes_July24_2024

Six Essential Abilities for PM Excellence

Six essential abilities enable effective performance in any role, whether as a manager, leader, partner, or team member, at work or at home. These are in addition to traditional project management skills such as planning, scheduling, and managing risk.

The foundation for these abilities is:

  • Mindset – the way you perceive the world through your mental models, attitudes, and beliefs
  • Emotional intelligence – your capacity to manage your emotions and be aware of your impact on others, and
  • Mindfulness – your capacity to be objectively aware of what is happening internally and around you.

 

Six Essentials

The six essential abilities for effective performance are particularly important when working with others in complex, uncertain, changing circumstances to accomplish objectives. They are:

  • Adaptability – the ability to change as circumstances change
  • Communication – the ability to exchange ideas and understandings.
  • Conflict-management/Problem-solving/ Decision-making – the ability to confront uncertainty and problems to resolve them by making effective decisions
  • Time management – the ability to organize and balance your effort, and the way you use your time.
  • Relationship management – sustaining healthy connections with others
  • Resilience – the ability to bounce back when faced with difficult challenges and obstacles.

 

Combining the Essentials

While we can cultivate each ability independently of the others it is the combination of them that makes the difference:

  • Communication, adaptability, relationship management, and resilience support problem-solving and decision-making.
  • Communication, effective problem-solving, time management, and adaptability enable healthy relationships.
  • Healthy relationships are essential for conflict management and problem-solving.

 

Cultivating The Abilities – Integrated Learning

These abilities can be the subject of courses, coaching, and experiential learning opportunities, and embedded in traditional PM skill training, for example, highlighting adaptability as a factor in risk management and communication and decision-making in planning courses. Regular reminders in team meetings and work sessions help to integrate the essentials into daily life and sustain and improve performance.

In this article, we will point out the basics for each ability and identify the roles of the foundations of mindset, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness.

 

Adaptability

Adaptability is the ability to change as circumstances change. And circumstances change all the time. For example, adaptability is being able to shift roles, responsibilities, and schedules when a team member leaves, or when any change occurs that disrupts plans.

To adapt requires emotional intelligence with the ability to remain calm, accept the uncertainty of the situation, and confront any resistance to making sensible changes, including the disappointment about slipping the schedule if that is likely to happen.

A growth, as opposed to a fixed mindset, opens you to alternatives and learning. A positive mindset recognizes that each obstacle is an opportunity to move in a new direction rather than a dead-end. When you apply a positive growth mindset you accept uncertainty and an absence of complete control, it opens the door to adaptability.

 

Communication

Communication is the ability to exchange ideas and understandings. It transcends speech and writing to include listening, body language, and the intuitive sense of the feeling tones that communicate mood.

Whether adapting to change, convincing executives to authorize a project, getting a client to sign off, inform, or motivate the team, the ability to clearly say what is on your mind in a way that enables others to understand it is critical to success.

Mindfulness and emotional intelligence support communication by making you sensitive to your feelings and habits, and to the responses of others to what you are saying or not saying to them.

 

Conflict Management/Problem-solving/ Decision-making

Conflict management involves adaptability, communication, problem-solving, and decision-making. Conflict arises when there is uncertainty regarding a path forward, or there are alternatives that seem to be or are opposed to one another. A decision must be made to resolve the conflict.

An open-minded mindset founded on systems and process thinking enables strategic and critical thinking. These lead to more effective decisions.

Emotional intelligence and mindfulness help to avoid unnecessary competitiveness and promote collaboration, so conflicts are relationship builders rather than relationship busters.

 

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Time Management

Managing your time puts you in charge of optimizing your effectiveness. Cultivate a mindset that respects your time and work style and recognizes the needs of others for uninterrupted work periods and rest.

  • Prioritize and schedule tasks based on criticality, your preferences, the need for collaboration, task duration, and wait times.
  • Focus on one thing at a time to avoid multitasking. But be open to multitasking when it makes sense. In other words, adapt.
  • Avoid interruptions and distractions by blocking work sessions as if they were meetings or other busy periods.
  • Apply mindfulness to avoid being drawn down rabbit holes and away from your task focus.
  • Take rest and recovery periods, mindful of the onset of mental or physical fatigue.

 

Relationship Management

A systems and process mindset acknowledges that relationships are the single most important aspect of project management if not all of life. A project team is a system of people performing processes. If relationships are unhealthy, full of tension, inappropriately competitive, and lacking in mutual respect, performance is likely to be subpar.

Communication, conflict management, and adaptability when founded on emotional intelligence and mindfulness of your emotions and the emotions of others will generate healthy relationships. Healthy relationships will enable effective communication, and conflict management, as well as help the entire team be adaptable.

 

Resilience

Resilience is the ability to recover and be ready to respond when faced with difficult challenges and obstacles. It differentiates highly effective project managers from those who either burn out or perform marginally well under pressure.

You know you or those around you are not resilient when depression and defeatism follow a setback. Resilience is built by

  • Cultivating a growth mindset so you can treat obstacles and failures as learning opportunities,
  • Applying mindfulness to be self-aware of tendencies to over-dramatize crisis, and
  • Enhancing emotional intelligence to avoid reactivity.

Resilience requires being realistic and optimistic. It is enabled when you accept whatever has happened and let go of remorse and blame to recover and move on with renewed enthusiasm.

 

Call to Action

In summary, project management and performance excellence require a positive growth mindset with a base in systems and process thinking, your capacity to manage your emotions and behavior, and mindful awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations.

Together these are a foundation for the essential behavioral abilities that enable the optimal application of project management technical skills.

Achieve sustainable optimal performance:

  1. Continuously assess individual and team behavioral capabilities
  2. Assess the degree to which they are valued in your environment
  3. Develop or refine your learning plans
  4. Cultivate the foundations and essential abilities in conjunction with technical project management skills
  5. Assess the difference in performance
  6. Adjust.

George Pitagorsky

George Pitagorsky, integrates core disciplines and applies people centric systems and process thinking to achieve sustainable optimal performance. He is a coach, teacher and consultant. George authored The Zen Approach to Project Management, Managing Conflict and Managing Expectations and IIL’s PM Fundamentals™. He taught meditation at NY Insight Meditation Center for twenty-plus years and created the Conscious Living/Conscious Working and Wisdom in Relationships courses. Until recently, he worked as a CIO at the NYC Department of Education.