Most people working on projects realize that in the long run it is beneficial to work toward mutually satisfying solutions. Still, occasionally you encounter someone who has a dominant win/lose attitude about life and will be difficult to deal with. Fisher and Ury recommend that you use negotiation jujitsu when dealing with unreasonable people, such…
Tag: Skills
Building Trust the Key to Exercising Influence
We all know people who have influence but whom we do not trust; these individuals are often referred to as “political animals” or “jungle fighters.” While these individuals are often very successful in the short run, the prevalent sense of mistrust prohibits long-term efficacy and hinders them from building trust. Successful project managers not only…
Leading by Example
A highly visible, interactive management style is not only essential to building and sustaining cooperative relationships, it also allows project managers to utilize their most powerful leadership tool—their own behavior, thus creating what is called leading by example. Often, when faced with uncertainty, people look to others for cues as to how to respond and…
Management by Wandering Around
Once you have established who the key players are that will determine success, then you initiate contact and begin to build a relationship with those players. Building this relationship requires a management style employees at Hewlett-Packard refer to as “management by wandering around” (MBWA) to reflect that managers spend the majority of their time outside…
Influence as Currency Exchange
To successfully manage a project, a manager must build a cooperative network among divergent allies and make use of their influence. Networks are mutually beneficial alliances that are generally governed by the law of reciprocity. The basic principle is that “one good deed deserves another, and likewise, one bad deed deserves another.” The primary way…
How To Be An Effective Project Manager in a World Full of Contradictions
An effective project manager has to be able to deal with the contradictory nature of his work. Why would I say that, well here is my view: Project management is, at first glance, a misleading discipline in that there is on inherent logic in the progression from formulating a project scope statement, creating a WBS,…
Managing versus Leading a Project
I will begin with a brief discussion on managing versus leading a project. Then in a subsequent article I will move to tackle the importance of managing project stakeholders. I couldn’t wait to be the manager of my own project and run the project the way I thought it should be done. Boy, did I…
Skills a project manager should nurture
Chapter 9 of a much more comprehensive post Project Management Starting Out Guide. Let’s get right in and discover the areas where an aspiring project manager should focus. Developing the right skills is crucial to your success. Project Manager Skills An innate leader by innate leader, I mean one appointed by their peers, rather than…
The Smarts Behind A Decision Making Process
Starting with the work done by March and Simon (more on them here) researchers have developed a step-by-step model of the decision making process and the issues and problems that managers confront at each step. I will try to present that information in a more human way, through the use of a case study. The…