Presenter – Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin (Center for Business Practices)
- The Big Debate
- Nature or Nurture?
- Experience or education?
- Hard skills or soft skills?
- The carrot or the stick? Is it the organization or is it the person?
- Aspects of Project Manager Competency
- Knowledge
- Skills
- Experience
- Personal Qualities – find out who is best and see what they do
- The higher you rise in an organization, the less you use technical skills
and the more you use facilitative skills
- People make better project managers
- When they focus on
- Listening
- Communicating
- Collaborating
- Being sensitive to the environment
- What research tells us
- Culture is the software of the mind
- Programmed, not hardwired
- Reprogrammable
- Most problems on projects are not technical problems, they’re “people
problems”
- Communications
- Politics
- Trust
- Beyond Either/Or (there’s “Both/And”)
- Experience AND Education
- Nature AND Nurture
- Hard skills AND Soft Skills
- Personal Competence AND the organizational structures that nurture and
develop it.
- Traits of best-practice Project Managers
- Recognized by stakeholders as the most important factor
- Truthful
- Exhibit eagerness to organize and lead
- Personal confidence
- What to look for in a PM
- Conflict Management Skills
- Decision-Making Skills
- Communication Skills
- Intrinsic Motivation
- A “Process Orientation”
- Thinking Skills – Critical and Analytical Thinking, as well as being a
Connected Knower
- Integrity
- Initiative
- Perseverance
- Humility
- Seven Habits for a good PM (See Steven Covey)
- Be Proactive
- Begin with the End in Mind
- Think Win/Win
- Put First Things First
- Seek First to Understand
- Synergize
- Sharpen the Saw
- Never Stop Learning
- Organizational Competence
- Organizational culture can make or break good
project managers
- Supportive executives
- An organizational home – the PMO
- Project-centered role design
- Fork in the Road strategy
- Split the project manager role
- Art
- Communication
- Analysis
- Methodology
- Science
- Use a competency model to determine best candidates for both