{"id":159,"date":"2022-02-10T19:46:12","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T19:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/projectmanagement2ndedition\/chapter\/6-4-leadership-skills\/"},"modified":"2024-12-24T05:46:12","modified_gmt":"2024-12-24T05:46:12","slug":"6-4-leadership-skills","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/projectmanagement2ndedition\/chapter\/6-4-leadership-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"6.4 Leadership Skills"},"content":{"raw":"Project managers, as leaders, spend 90% of their time communicating with team members and stakeholders[footnote]Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.). Project Management Institute.[\/footnote]. They communicate through various channels, including in-person meetings, emails, video conferences, phone calls, instant messaging, and collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack. Project managers must also adapt their communication style to suit different audiences, ensuring clarity when discussing project updates with team members, stakeholders, clients, or executives. Their communication involves reporting progress, addressing risks, resolving conflicts, motivating the team, and managing expectations. Additionally, they must facilitate regular status meetings, issue tracking updates, and feedback sessions, ensuring that everyone involved in the project remains aligned on goals, tasks, and deadlines.\r\n\r\nCommunication is the most important leadership skill a project manager should possess, but not the only one. Project managers need many skills, including administrative skills, organizational skills, and technical skills associated with the project's technology. The types of skills and the depth of the skills needed are closely connected to the size and complexity of the project. Each project must be tailored to various factors, including the purpose, objectives, business field, size, complexity, and stakeholders. Although project managers always need interpersonal skills to communicate and collaborate effectively with the team members and stakeholders, they need greater technical skills on smaller, less complex projects. Project managers need more organizational skills to deal with the complexity of larger and more complex projects.\r\n\r\nLeadership skills involve guiding, motivating, and directing a team. Leadership is defined as a social (interpersonal) influence relationship between two or more persons who depend on each other to attain certain mutual goals in a group situation. Effective leadership helps individuals and groups achieve their goals by focusing on the group\u2019s maintenance needs (the need for individuals to fit and work together by having, for example, shared norms) and task needs (the need for the group to make progress toward attaining the goal that brought them together)[footnote]Retrieved from the OER titled \u201cPrinciples of Management\u201d on https:\/\/openstax.org\/books\/principles-management\/pages\/13-1-the-nature-of-leadership<\/a>[\/footnote]. These skills include negotiation, resilience, communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills.\r\n\r\nA large part of the project manager's role involves dealing with people. Hence, project managers should study people's behaviors and motivations. Project managers must be perceived to be credible by the project team and stakeholders. They should detect and clarify the ambiguities effectively to remove the obstacles. The environment changes frequently on projects, and the project manager must apply the appropriate leadership approach for each situation. They must have good communication skills. Lack of communication, team-building, and organizational skills would cause problems in a project and could lead to failure.\r\n\r\nLet's use the analogy of a music conductor, which is a perfect example to convey the responsibilities and skills of a project manager. An orchestra conductor coordinates a variety of performers who play different instruments and should ensure that the audience enjoys the music on the day of the performance. It may be a chamber orchestra composed of 25 musicians or a large one like a symphony orchestra with up to 100 members. The conductor cannot know how to play all the instruments in an orchestra, but only one or a few. However, the conductor must ensure that all the performers playing the instruments, including but not limited to violins, violas, cellos, double basses, flutes, oboes, clarinets, kettledrums, and harps must create a piece of music in harmony so that the audience can enjoy. Conductors perform many rehearsals with all the performers to achieve this harmony. During these rehearsals and the performance, most of the conductor's work would be regarding communication with all the performers.\r\n\r\nThe project manager leads the project team during a project life cycle. As explained in Chapter 2, project managers may start working in the pre-project phase (preparation of a need statement, business case, and benefits realization management plan) to assess the feasibility of candidate projects, especially when the organization has a dedicated PMO (Project Management Office) or has a strong matrix or project-oriented structure. However, in general, project managers are assigned to the initiation (starting, conceptualization) phase or the planning phase after the project charter is approved by the project sponsor. A project manager may be involved after the project is closed out to evaluate the performance of the outcome and, more importantly, to evaluate if the outcome can generate the expected value (both tangible and intangible values as detailed in measurable project objectives). Although we use the term \u201cproject manager\u201d in this textbook, you can come across various concepts such as project leader, project lead, and project coordinator in other resources and also in this textbook in different sections. We assume in this textbook that a project manager is also a project leader and should possess interpersonal leadership skills.\r\n\r\nIn the following subsections, we will focus on leadership and interpersonal skills a project manager should possess.\r\n

6.4.1 <\/strong>Listening<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nOne of the most important communication skills of the project manager is the ability to listen actively. Active listening is placing oneself in the speaker\u2019s position as much as possible, understanding the communication from the speaker's point of view, observing and paying attention to the body language and other environmental cues, and striving not just to hear but to understand. Active listening takes focus and practice to become effective. It enables a project manager to go beyond the basic information being shared and develop a more complete understanding.\r\n
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Example: Client\u2019s Body Language<\/strong>[footnote]Retrieved from the OER titled \u201cProject Management\u201d by Adrienne Watt on https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/projectmanagement\/chapter\/chapter-11-resource-planning-project-management\/<\/a>[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nWe work with a client on a project. The person in charge of the project at the client company just returned from a trip to Australia, where he reviewed the project's progress with his company\u2019s board of directors. Then, he visited our office for a meeting with our project team. The project manager listened and took notes on the five concerns the board of directors expressed to him during his visit to Australia.\r\n\r\nOur project manager observed that the client\u2019s body language showed more tension than usual. This was a cue to listen very carefully. The project manager nodded occasionally and demonstrated he was listening through his posture, small agreeable sounds, and body language. The project manager then began to provide feedback on what was said using phrases like \u201cWhat I hear you say is\u2026\u201d or \u201cIt sounds like.\u2026\u201d The project manager was clarifying the message that was communicated by the client.\r\n\r\nThe project manager then asked more probing questions and reflected on what was said. \u201cIt sounds as if it was a very tough board meeting.\u201d \u201cIs there something going on beyond the events of the project?\u201d From these observations and questions, the project manager discovered that the board of directors meeting in Australia did not go well. The company had experienced losses on other projects, and budget cuts meant fewer resources and an expectation that the project would finish earlier than planned. The project manager also discovered that the client\u2019s future with the company would depend on the project's success. The project manager asked, \u201cDo you think we need to do things differently?\u201d They began to develop a plan to address the board of directors\u2019 concerns.\r\n\r\nThrough active listening, the project manager was able to develop an understanding of the issues that emerged from the board meeting and participate in developing solutions. Active listening and the trusting environment established by the project manager enabled the client to share information he had not planned on sharing safely and to participate in creating a workable plan that resulted in a successful project.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nIn the example above, the project manager used the following techniques:\r\n