Equipping yourself with these project management skills will set you up to become a well-rounded leader.
A team leader is someone who not only rallies a group of people around a common goal and vision but also ensures that the team meets the objectives collectively. Project management skills come in handy in such scenarios. If well employed, the different project management skills can give you unprecedented success in the area of team management.
If you’re a leader and you want to keep improving in your role, check out these project management skills and use them to your advantage.
Scheduling and time management
As long as you’re dealing with human beings you know that occasional delays and time wastage might happen. You, therefore, need to organize your goals, and tasks and most importantly have a project scope statement. A project scope statement is a detailed description of the work that needs to be accomplished. The statement gives a clear picture of the output that the project needs to deliver, the allotted budget, and the deadline for completing it.
For example, a company might have a new product that they want to test out in the market. They, therefore, map out research options and areas. They also set a timeline and set resources apart towards the same goal.
This skill helps keep the team focused and they own their role and part to play in the larger vision to complete the project. It also prevents the shifting of priorities and misunderstandings as far as personal responsibility is concerned. Working with targets and expectations properly laid out will help your team always function at its peak. If there are gaps such as a person not being able to meet their targets, you can easily identify them and make the necessary changes.
Fuzu has some amazing courses that will guide you on effective scheduling and time management when managing a project.
Effective communication
Good communication is the backbone of any successful project. A project involves many parties and many wheels moving together in different capacities. The only way to ensure that there is harmony when you have all these moving parts is to ensure that the communication lines are functioning openly.
A project manager or leader needs to ensure that there is a conducive environment for different people to freely express themselves and air out their issues if there exist any. Without good communication, there will be misunderstandings and miscommunication. Ultimately, the project starts to fall apart from the inside and you fail to meet your objectives as required.
Communication has many facets to it. As a leader, you need to know how to communicate with your juniors, teammates, seniors, clients, and other stakeholders. You need to update them on what is going on in direct, simple, and understandable language.
In case the project runs into headwinds and you experience challenges, you’ll need to know how to navigate those situations. There are no perfect processes because they’re being run by imperfect people. The only issue is how you deal with them and how you come out on the other side.
You need to be fair, especially when there are disagreements among team members. One of the most important aspects of communication is the ability to listen so that you can understand. Someone who only hears so that they can come up with a rebuttal is poor at communicating. Listen to both sides and give a fair judgment.
Develop a reputation for doing what you said you’ll do. As they say that actions speak louder than words. This builds trust and when you communicate something, your credibility enables people to listen and trust you. At the same time, you need to trust your team members to do their job. You don’t need to stand behind their necks trying to ensure that they do their job. Micromanaging kills motivation and team spirit.
Trust and transparency go hand in hand. You need to be open and honest about what’s going on. Especially when there are problems, communicate with your team members. For example, if resources to run the project are increasingly becoming lean with time, just come out openly. It doesn’t mean that you have to give all details but give them something to work with.
Motivation
This falls in line with communication. You need to keep your team members motivated especially when you can tell that they’re exhausted. Often when it seems as if there is no end in sight, people’s minds tend to start giving up and switching off as a coping mechanism. Secondly, when mistakes are made or people experience failure while working on a project they lose the spirit to keep fighting.
As a leader, you need to develop that fighter spirit within you so that you can keep lifting the spirits of your team members. Teach them that failure and mistakes are a core part of the process so that they can learn lessons and gain perspectives that they didn’t have originally. Believe in them and tell them to keep believing in themselves despite the challenges so that they will be resilient to the end.
Negotiation
A project manager engages in constant negotiations with different parties. Negotiation is one of the project management skills that you should be intentional about developing. You’ll need to negotiate budgets with the leadership and finance department. Additionally, since a project may need the collaboration of different departments you need to agree on how to engage and how to work smoothly and harmoniously.
There are different styles of negotiations depending on the scenario. When conflict or disagreements happen, negotiation skills will help you settle them effectively. You could choose to compromise in some situations where an agreement between opposing parties is reached. The other style is collaboration. It’s where both parties agree to work together in a way that everyone wins.
Lastly, you could opt for competition if that’s your last resort. This is simply a win-lose situation. An exceptional, smart project manager reads the situation well and determines the best style to use.
Risk management
As a leader, you need to be proactive and anticipate the possible risks that a project might run into. The ability to prepare for risks adequately is one of the fundamental project management skills that you must aspire to possess.
Project managers don’t assume that these risks won’t happen. They actually set up risk mitigation measures such as setting up an emergency fund for the project. You can also hatch a fall-back plan in case the original plan fails so that you get work done.
Therefore as a team leader, you need to apply critical thinking and problem-solving to identify the possible areas for risks. When the teams are big and the projects that you’re handling are big, sometimes they become complex and problems arise. These project management skills will save you plenty of problems.
Conclusion
These project management skills that we have highlighted can be developed by enrolling in the different courses that Fuzu has prepared for you. Once you grasp them, they’ll set you up to be an equipped, well-rounded leader who can face any challenge and can be trusted by team members, seniors and clients as well.
Get started on your project management journey here.
