Don’t think too hard about soft skills
The Insight
It has become a bit of a cliché that project management is all about having soft skills.
Be a communicator, negotiate with empathy, use your interpersonal skills, work as a team, be a leader, be emotionally intelligent... Sound familiar?
Whilst these skills are undoubtedly useful in helping project managers ‘grease the wheels’ of the project management processes and procedures, they are rarely given airtime in project meetings, seldom mentioned in project reports and almost never used as a “key performance indicator” of project success. There are some very specific exceptions but these are few and far between so we won't go there right now.
But how do soft skills actually affect our performance?
The Impact
As project managers, we just want to get the job done for our clients by delivering on time and under budget. To do so, we must accurately estimate the work and plan for success. We have an arsenal of tools to help us achieve this, from scheduling software to files full of templates.
Logistically speaking, it can be very easy to set a project up for success. Problems arise because we cannot control people. Whether it’s the client who keeps changing their mind, or the supplier who has closed for a 4-week summer vacation, or the contractor who keeps building to the wrong drawings, there are always aspects that the project manager cannot plan for.
We can influence change, but we cannot change certain events, rewind the clock, or predict the future with absolute accuracy. Our clients, contractors, consultants, and stakeholders rely on us as project managers to keep them informed, up-to-date, and aligned with the project’s progress and changes.
The ability to react well to and influence change is perhaps the most important soft skill we can have.