Why soft skills are soft skills and what skills do we call soft? Sharing this and my top 3 project management soft skills that are extremely important.
Project management soft skills. What is that and why is this important? I’m going to share with you my top three soft skills that are crucial for every project manager. By the end of the page we are going to clarify why do we need to develop them.
Why Soft is Soft?
Why soft skills are soft skills and what skills do we call soft? Actually, soft skills are a combination of your personality and personal qualities. Here we could drop people skills, social skills, communication skills, your character obviously. Also, we could add social and emotional intelligence. Additionally I would include critical thinking, motivation and stress resistance. Basically, this is something that you cannot learn how to do mechanically.
Of course you can learn how to develop soft skills. There are a tone of techniques how to do this. You could also check this episode where I’m outlining the key skills for a project manager to be efficient on projects. Today I am going to let you know the top three soft skills that I allocate from this ocean. They are: social skills, communication and emotional intelligence. By the way, let me know which one you feel is the most important?
Social
Let’s check how do we apply this soft skill pack on projects. Number one in this list is social skill. Essentially, projects are delivered by people and for people. This is vital a project manager is able to socialize and interact efficiently. If you’re not going out to your team or to your clients, you are avoiding messages, emails, meetings, I doubt you can efficiently collaborate and push the project forward.
Communication
Number 2 is communication. Obviously, people communicate, and the more efficient the communication strategy on a project is, the more effectively we could move forward. Project managers are here to initiate and to facilitate communication. For building a project plan, for making an efficient progress analysis you need information. At the same time, for retrieving this information you need to build the communication strategy. Building the strategy is initiation of communication. While providing guidelines for the team, stakeholders and clients how to follow the strategy is communication facilitation.
Emotional Intelligence
Number three is emotion intelligence. Of course this is vital. As a project manager you need to remember the following.
Keep your heart on fire and your head ice-cold.
This is extremely important to be able to see the root cause of the problem behind the emotions. This helps to efficiently communicate and collaborate on projects. To resolve issues and to respond to risks you need to analyze the problem to define the root cause before making any decisions.
Now you know my top three projects management soft skills that I feel are vital for every project manager to be efficient on projects. And also you can know why I feel there’s so much important. Let me know in comments what is your must-haves soft skills pack.
Cheers!