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Interpersonal and Team Skills
It’s time to look at the interpersonal and team skills that you will need as part of your project management career, and stakeholder engagement.
Interpersonal and team skills are the behaviors and tactics that a person uses to interact with stakeholders in a project effectively. The ability to establish a relationship with others and maintain that relationship is a key to the success of your project.
If you don’t get along with the people that you’re working with, or delivering the project to, there are going to be problems when your project comes to delivery.
Types of Interpersonal Skills
So what are these interpersonal and team skills? Well, we’ve got things like Conflict Management. This can be used to help bring stakeholders into alignment on the objectives success criteria, high-level requirements, project description and other things. We might need to manage that conflict as we’re going along and there are various techniques for that in the PMBOK guide.
We’re definitely going to need facilitation. Facilitating meetings or facilitating focus groups or requirements gathering sessions or reporting on the how the project is going – facilitation is very important. And that involves meeting management as well.
We’ve got active listening. So how we are mirroring the person that we’re speaking to and repeating back what they’ve said so we ensure that we understand what they’ve said.
General leadership is used to communicate the vision and inspire the project team to focus on the appropriate knowledge and knowledge objectives.
You will need networking. So this allows informal connections and relations among project stakeholders. Sometimes if you have a good network within an organization, you can actually just go over to someone at the water cooler and say “Did you get this? I actually need your support on this. Can you help me out?” And they’ll say yes without any need for formal communication.
You’ll definitely need political awareness. Who has those those networking relationships in the organization? Maybe there’s a group of people over here and they talk a lot, and so if you’re in the bad books was one of them, potentially you’re in the bad books with all of them. You need to be aware of the politics that are going on and how business gets done in an organization.
That leads us to influencing. Influencing is gathering the relevant and critical information to address important issues and reach agreements while maintaining mutual trust. Sometimes we need to get our way across to others but do it in a way so that everybody feels good about it, and that’s not often easy to do.
Which brings us to negotiation. Sometimes if we’re influencing it might involve a little bit of back and forth. Two teams might need the same resource, and now we need to negotiate for those resources, and we need to do it in a way that everyone feels good so that you can come back and work with them again. We’re using that stakeholder engagement and ensuring that your network is still okay.
We’ve got motivation in general as part of our leadership. It’s providing a reason for someone to act. We want them to know why they’re doing something. We do need to help motivate them to do what we need them to do.
That also involves team building. So now we’re building our team, conducting activities that enhance the team’s social relations, and that includes increasing their motivation. It builds a collaborative and cooperative working environment. That might be doing things like requirements gathering together as a team, or making sure everyone has an input during the team meeting, making sure that a team is being built and no one is feeling left out.
Now as part of that we need a high emotional intelligence. So high emotional intelligence, we want the ability to identify, assess and manage the personal emotions of ourselves and of other people, as well as the collective emotions of groups of people. Not an easy task as a project manager, but definitely essential and something that you will learn and get better at over time.
As we’re doing that were also we’ve got communication styles assessment, which is a technique used to assess the communication styles of people, identify the preferred communication method – do they prefer to catch up, do they prefer a telephone call? Do they email or do they prefer a daily stand up or meeting once a week. What is the preferred communication style? And can you work with that with your stakeholders.
We’ve got cultural awareness, again very similar to political awareness so how business is getting done. But also just general cultural sensitivity, which is more broad, things like different nationalities or different things going on in people’s home lives. We have to be aware of that and aware of the fact that not everyone is the same.
To ensure that we’re able to work together in a nice and positive way involves observation and conversation as well. So that’s used to stay in touch with the work and the attitudes of the project team members and other stakeholders. Maybe we are having conversations about something that’s going on, with different festivals for different cultures and different ways of work, different hours that people will need to work depending on the situation and that comes through observation and conversation.
And those are all of the interpersonal and team skills that you’ll need as part of your project management career.
– David McLachlan