Listen Up – People Skills For Pms
Improving Your People Skills as a PM
As a project manager, your technical skills and ability to plan and execute projects are crucial. However, your people skills—your ability to connect with, lead, and inspire teams—are equally vital for success. Honing your people skills allows you to foster the open communication, trust, and collaboration that transforms groups of individuals into high-performing teams.
Strong people skills also enable you to partner effectively with stakeholders across the organization. By finding shared goals and overcoming conflicts, you can facilitate the organization-wide backing that keeps complex projects on track. Furthermore, people skills allow you to read social cues accurately, understand personality differences, and regulate your own emotions intelligently. With robust people skills, you become an empathetic leader who listens without judgement, sees all perspectives, and creates a psychologically safe climate where people feel valued.
While some people managers have an innate talent for working with others, people skills can also be actively cultivated. As you strive to improve your people leadership, focus on connecting authentically with team members, promoting trust and transparency, showing compassion and vulnerability, finding common ground with diverse stakeholders, developing self-awareness, and listening deeply without bias.
Connecting with Your Team
Making true personal connections with the individuals on your team is foundational for earning their trust, motivating them, and gaining their buy-in for organizational goals. Rather than merely discussing tasks and deliverables, take the time to have real conversations about their talents and passions. Follow up on the personal details they share with you, and open up about your own life too. This builds rapport and a sense that you genuinely care about team members as three dimensional people.
Fostering Open Communication
To connect authentically with your team, focus first on establishing open, multidirectional communication. Make yourself highly approachable and encourage team members to provide candid feedback, share concerns early, and ask clarifying questions without judgement. Actively solicit diverse ideas and dissenting perspectives so people feel psychologically safe contributing fully. When you foster a climate where people can voice opinions freely, you gain valuable input that can reveal gaps and risks early while also making people feel heard and valued.
Building Trust Through Transparency
Striving for total transparency in your communications, decision making processes, and sharing of organizational information is key for building trust between you and your team members. When you are transparent about goals, roadblocks and sensitive issues, you signal that you trust your team with inside knowledge. You also reduce involuntary secrecy that can undermine morale and productivity. Aim to explain the “why” behind organizational decisions so people feel respected and included in the big picture vision. Admit freely when you have made missteps too – humility and vulnerability strengthen connections.
Motivating Through Compassion
Finally, you can boost engagement and motivation by showing sincere compassion for your team as fellow humans. Leadership is not just about driving progress on tasks – it is equally about appreciating team members as multidimensional individuals with lives, relationships and vulnerabilities beyond work. Make accommodations for personal/family needs when feasible, and sincerely convey that you want people to flourish in all areas of life, not just professional productivity. Knowing their leader respects work-life balance and cares on a human level is incredibly motivating for team members to keep striving.
Collaborating Across the Organization
While connecting closely with your immediate project team is crucial, expanding collaborative alliances across the whole organization is equally vital as a project manager. Identify key stakeholders in other business units whose decisions and contributions can critically impact project outcomes. Then focus on establishing shared goals, bridging communication divides and addressing conflicts promptly. When you build robust cross-functional partnerships based on trust and a spirit of goodwill, you gain the cooperation and resources to deliver large initiatives effectively.
Partnering with Key Stakeholders
Begin forging partnerships by clarifying which senior leaders, operational heads and subject matter experts have a tangible interest in your project deliverables and outcomes. Schedule one-on-one consultations with each key stakeholder to understand their goals, challenges and concerns related to the project. Identify explicit areas of alignment where your project outcomes would clearly aid their goals. Also discuss risks and interface points where misalignment could occur. This upfront bridge-building gives you insight into crafting project plans that address diverse stakeholder needs from the start, earning critical support.
Finding Shared Goals
As you plan and execute project deliverables, continually revisit how you can maximize value for diverse stakeholders. Have open dialogues about how certain features or project outcomes might specifically address organizational pain points and priority goals beyond your immediate user base. Identify areas where you can “over serve” on functionality because a capability could have cross-cutting benefits. When you maintain a big picture view aligned to organizational strategy – not just your narrow workstream – you catalyze cooperation that speeds reach and amplifies impact.
Overcoming Conflicts
Finally, expect that despite best efforts misalignments with stakeholders will sometimes occur and be ready to address them transparently. If priority shifts force you to de-scope functionality others were counting on, give advance notice explaining tradeoffs. Revisit conflicts openly when emotions have cooled and find reasonable compromises. When communication breakdowns still threaten progress, suggest mediation sessions focused on conflict resolution tactics. With persistent good faith efforts to find common ground, you can overcome ephemeral tensions to continue collaborating smoothly long-term.
Developing Emotional Intelligence
Strong relationships and collaboration hinge profoundly on emotional intelligence – your ability to recognize emotions in others while managing your own feelings and reactions adaptively. Emotionally intelligent leaders read social cues and subtle body language accurately in order to discern feelings and sensitivities “beneath the surface.” You must understand how to tailor communications for varied personalities while monitoring and regulating your own state calmly despite stressors and disruptions.
Reading Body Language and Facial Expressions
Start strengthening your emotional intelligence by becoming more observant of physical tells and micro-expressions that reveal inner feelings people may not voice openly. For example, notice when a furrowed brow, clenched fist or loss of eye contact signals displeasure, anxiety or distrust even when someone claims to feel fine. Listen for extra emphasis or sarcasm that imply suppressed resentment. Once you notice a “leakage cue”, tactfully ask open ended questions to invite elaboration on the real concern. Your ability to recognize unspoken emotions early prevents tensions from escalating and barriers from solidifying.
Understanding Different Personalities and Working Styles
Sharpen your emotional intelligence by studying communication styles and preferences that typically correspond to common personality types. For example, detail-oriented analytical people tend to prefer ample data to reach conclusions but get frustrated with vague directives. Big picture visionaries think conceptually and gravitate toward possibility over practicality. Expressive extraverts desire constant collaboration while introverted deep thinkers prefer quiet focus. Once you understand these fundamental orientation differences you can tailor communications appropriately without taking behaviors personally. This facilitates harmony and productivity.
Regulating Your Own Emotions
Finally, stellar emotional intelligence requires developing mastery over your own state. Learn tactics to self-soothe frustration when plans go awry and criticism feels personal. Be self aware of days when external stressors are dragging you down and proactively mitigate spillover effects. Role model resilient optimism during setbacks but also human vulnerability during victories. Finding balance between professional leadership and authentic self-expression builds trust and connection while keeping projects on an even keel despite volatile emotions all people naturally experience.
Becoming an Empathetic Leader
Empathy is the capstone people skill that catalyzes personal connection, smooth collaboration and organizational cohesion. An empathetic leader seeks first to deeply understand how others experience reality before reacting oneself. You listen without judgment, validate all perspectives, and create psychologically safe contexts where people comfortable express vulnerabilities knowing they will be met with compassion.
Listening Without Judgment
Practice empathetic listening by giving team members and stakeholders your complete focus when they are speaking instead of mentally rehearsing your own responses. Eliminate distractions and make regular eye contact nodding to convey attention. Ask thoughtful follow up questions about emotions and impact – not just logistics and facts. Refrain from interrupting and be attentive to hints you may have misunderstood something. Then restate the essence of the others viewpoint to confirm you comprehended correctly before responding. This mindfulness helps people feel truly heard, building connection and alignment.
Seeing All Perspectives
Additionally, lead with the mindset that diverse vantage points held by team members and stakeholders likely have some validity. Seek first to understand the reasoning behind why alternate opinions may seem perfectly rational through another lens. Ask curious questions, suppress knee jerk defensiveness, and hold space for respectful debate. Make concerns feel welcome at the table while also reiterating standards. This inclusive approach makes people feel respected even when disagreements persist, preserving community.
Creating a Psychologically Safe Environment
Finally, proactively foster contexts where people know prejudgement and harsh consequences are off the table. Given the assurance of good faith understanding, team members will more readily reveal sensitive needs and admissions of struggles that may otherwise remain hidden. You can then provide accommodations and support early preventing crises later. With foundations of safety assurance and compassion in place, people take interpersonal risks intrinsic to creativity and evolution, catalyzing innovation.
