How to Become a Great Project Manager - 3 things you need

Competency and technical project management skills are not enough to make a great project manager. So in this video, I want to answer the question, what is? I want to look at how to become a great project manager. To be a great project manager, I think we need to keep our focus on a couple of things. And the first of them is to be always learning. To keep learning and finding out new stuff. And the other is to keep our focus on people. Developing our skills at relating to people, at working with them effectively, at influencing them, at understanding them. So I made myself a great long list of all the things I thought might be most important in building a great project manager. And at the end, having looked for overlaps, having looked for things which are not as important, I was able to narrow it down to the three things you need to develop to become a great project manager. The first of them, and I think of all the most important, is self-control. And there are a lot of elements to self-control. And the first is, of course, to be able to be calm in times of crisis. And we're not naturally calm in times of crisis. So this is a learned and learnable skill. How to calm yourself down. How to keep a presence of mind when things get tough. And it also means keeping your temper. We know when you get pushed to the limit, it's very easy to be snappish and angry and bitter and make everyone around you feel like they can't do the right thing. And they won't want to do the right thing if you are not kind and courteous to them. So your ability to keep your temper is an important part of your ability to remain composed and controlled and to get the best from the people around you. And I think there's also something really important about being able to remain enthusiastic, optimistic and confident about the future. Now, I'm not saying that you should have that kind of glass half full optimism, which says that no matter how bad things are, we can all be happy. It's about being confident that there are opportunities to improve the situation and that if you remain calm and resilient and resourceful, you can spot those opportunities, you can harness them and you can prevail. And one of the words I just used there was resilient. And I think that is part of self-control, the ability to bounce back from setbacks and adversity. Now, partly this is physiological. If you are healthy and you maintain your nutrition and your rest and your relaxation, then you will be able to bounce back that much more easily. But a lot of it is in the mental game. It is about the self-control to say that no matter how badly things are going, I can lift my own morale, I can motivate myself and I can motivate my team as well. This is fundamentally about a determination to succeed. And I made a video recently about that and the modern term for it, grit. The second thing to develop if you want to become a great project manager is generosity of spirit. And this is a phrase which embodies another bunch of important characteristics of great project managers, all of which you can work on and develop for yourself. And the first of them is helping, supporting, guiding, teaching, coaching, mentoring the people around you. You have a team and the team is going to deliver the project for you. But you also need the generosity of spirit to give your time freely to those people to help them become better professionals and better people. That's an important part of your duty, but far more fundamental than that is the need to take time to listen to team members and stakeholders. This is about trying hard to see the world through their eyes, to understand their point of view. This is valuable, not just because they may be right. They may know something you don't know. It's valuable because if you do not understand how they see the world, you run the very realistic risk of trampling over their worldview and therefore not getting the best from them. So be open to the ideas and opinions of your team members, your colleagues and your stakeholders. And next, I want to advocate that you care for them as well. You put your team members first. One of the best book titles that I know of is Simon Sinek's Leaders Eat Last. The principle in that is that if you're going to eat last, it's because you're putting your team members, your colleagues first. That's real generosity of spirit. And I think we can embody it all in the concept of servant leadership. Something I've written and spoken about in videos like this many times. So if you're not familiar with the concept of servant leadership, please do take a look at our video on that. And the third and final thing I want to propose that you need to develop if you want to become a great project manager is curiosity. Curiosity is the insatiable desire to learn and to know more and to find out and to understand why. It's an always-on wonder about the world and everything within it, especially what's new and different and challenging about a situation. Project managers have to be observant. We have to be constantly scanning the horizon for what's going on. And when we see something we don't understand, we have to be curious about it rather than putting it to one side. A great project manager is never satisfied with OK. We're always looking for something better. Something newer. Some better way to do something, to deliver something, to engage people and to convince them. And one thing that relies absolutely on curiosity is critical thinking. Challenging orthodoxy and having a willingness to see the world from multiple perspectives at the same time. Only if you can see all the different arguments from all the different points of view about a decision, about a choice, about a problem, can you really deliver the best solutions and the best decisions. And of course, you will be challenged by the people around you. So the final part of this has to be a willingness to challenge the majority view. So if you want to be a great project manager, then I suggest there are three things to work on. Self-control, generosity of spirit and curiosity. Please do give a thumbs up if you like this video. There'll be loads more great project management videos to come. So please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell so you don't miss any of it. And I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video.