Interpersonal skills of a good project manager

However, these skills alone may not guarantee a successful execution of a project unless the project manager complements them with other interpersonal skills such as communication, team building, decision-making, political and cultural awareness, leadership, negotiation, motivation, and trust building. In the contemporary business world, employers are also looking for ways of tapping talent and best interpersonal skills from their personnel. According to the PMBOK (2013), for a job applicant to win an employment opportunity, he or she must portray how he or she can achieve good communication, organization, teamwork, punctuality and critical thinking skills. After a critical comparison and contrasting of the PMI and the top five skills which employers expect from their workforce, it is evident that the employers and the PMI should be a good communicator, be a team player, and show critical thinking skills among others.

A project manager must have good written and verbal communication skills. If a person does all this, then, he or she should lead the team in executing a project. Like the PMI, employers also want to employ a person who builds one another and that the success of the project is attributable to every member of the group. The PMBOK (2013) warns that managers should be able to know how to handle those people who find it hard to accept other people’s ideas and inputs because if such people get frustrated and leave the organization, then, the company might have lost good employees to their rivals. Another similarity between the PMBOK and employers is that both parties look for critical thinkers and able to solve conflicts.

A project manager, for instance, is expected to apply his or her critical thinking skills to be able to handle a conflict that may arise at the site. Tyler (2017 says that when a project is aware of the environment in which they work, it is possible to speed-up their working rate such that they can finish the project within the timeline because of the cultural and political ties within that area. As much as this skill is important, employers do not give it a priority in their search for talent. Another difference in the results obtained from the web search is that the PMBOK requires good project managers to demonstrate good coaching skills but for employers, they have not given priority on this skill.