Leadership Skills: A Never Ending Quest

We never really arrive at the end of the road in our quest to become leaders. We may achieve leadership status in some way but it is always a moving target.

Indeed, I believe it is our own movement on a continuous basis that can enable us to maintain ourselves as a leader. One way that we can do this is by continuously evaluating our own leadership capabilities.

I have run across an interesting way to do this regular evaluation of ourselves and would like to share it along with a couple of thoughts about it. I found this simple evaluation in a “Leadership in Project Management 2007” publication of the PMI.


Here is the evaluation:

Rate yourself by selecting one of the choices “never”, “sometimes”, or “consistently” for the following six statements:

1. I verbally communicate with team members in a manner that gets my message across while grasping the message of the other person.

2. I coach and motivate my team.

3. I am able to identify different personalities on my team and respond accordingly.

4. I am able to resolve project conflict with various stake holders.

5. When crisis such as a death or natural disaster strikes a team member, I have resources and strategies to help them return to optimal levels of performance.

6. I use stress management tools to allow me to stay calm and maintain a high level of performance.

In my own experience, using these simple evaluation points is pretty to easy to do on a regular basis. I think that “regular basis” is something that we can each define for ourselves. For me, I simply do it “periodically”. And I find that it keeps my awareness of where I stand high and does influence my behavior in positive ways.

How do you get the work done as a PM?

When I was a novice project manager, I often wished that I could carry a baseball bat to the office, swing it and let people know about it's existence just in case they don't deliver on their commitments. Or, perhaps, settle such issues with a one-on-one confrontation in the parking lot. However, we all know that this not the way to gain people's commitments or to drive projects.

The only thing that you have at your disposal is the ability to effectively communicate with everyone including your clients, stakeholders, team members, executives and sub-contractors. Communication involves knowing when and how to use the different tools for communication including written, verbal and presentation skills.

In fact, the trick to getting work done is know first and foremost how to excel in communication skills. Outstanding project managers spend 70-80% of their project time and effort in some form of communication. They serve as nerve centres for projects by keeping communication channels open for collecting, analyzing, processing and disseminating needed information and decisions. They know how to delegate and provide the discipline, environment and motivation most importantly empower the team members to get the work done. I will soon write more on how we can empower our team members.