The 6 Skills Successful Project Managers Have in Common

Develop the leadership skills your team needs

Embodying leadership in project management is important because the rest of your team will be looking to you for guidance and direction throughout a project’s duration. Effectively leading a team as a project manager requires that you develop certain skills. Here are some of the most important leadership skills for project managers.

1. Organization

It is nearly impossible to lead a group of people in completing a project in an organized manner if you are not organized yourself. While some people think organization is an innate skill, it can also be taught to those who don’t gravitate toward it naturally. Organization makes everything about project management run more smoothly and keeps the usual project chaos under better control.

2. Time Management

Being a project manager is a complex job with many components that all demand your time. Knowing how to manage your time is essential if you hope to get everything done on deadline and facilitate your team’s doing the same. How much time should you spend assigning tasks? Checking on their completion? Meeting with the client? Knowing what you need to get done and about how long it will take can help you decide how to manage your time in the best possible way.

3. Planning

The logistics of complex projects require careful planning skills. If you don’t do things in a particular order, you will end up wasting time and repeating things that you’ve already done, but which were undone when the next task was completed. Planning can ensure that you do things in the proper order so that you can avoid spending more time than you have to on each step. Planning can impact not only deadlines but cost as well. Time is money, after all.

4. Negotiation

You want experts and top talent working on your project, but along with expertise comes the realization that you may be in charge, but you may not be the top authority on any given task. Negotiation comes in handy when you need to tap into the expertise of others and when your team members have definite ideas about how things need to be done—especially when those ideas conflict with yours.

5. Problem Solving

Problems are commonplace when managing a project, but they are not insurmountable. Being able to think of solutions to problems quickly is an invaluable skill for a project manager, and will go a long way in keeping the project on task and on your preferred timeline.

6. Risk Management

Many projects with a dedicated project manager involve large budgets, which means that risk will enter the picture. Managing risks involved with a project can save thousands of dollars in lost revenue by preventing costly problems or even the derailing of the entire project, which could be a fiscal disaster for your company.

Having excellent project management skills can make all the difference in the success of a project. Evaluation in the project management environment is another important aspect of project management training. Florida Tech offers a program designed to help project managers excel in their work. Learn more about our project management degree program to see how our expertise can become your expertise.