Soft Skills, Hard Truths
By Dave Zielinski

In a world full of demanding, tear-your-guts-out jobs, few occupations can compete with the challenges and pressures faced by the humble project manager. A CEO might have hostile shareholders to appease, and a front-line trainer might have apathetic audiences to overcome, but project managers are regularly asked to perform a miraculous magic juggling act that David Copperfield himself might envy. These "accidental" managers must simultaneously satisfy the needs of often-finicky clients, adhere to tight deadlines, and marshal limited or sometimes nonexistent resources to get the job done—all while shepherding, motivating and cajoling a diverse universe of personalities up and down the organizational food chain. They are held accountable for project results, but often have little power over personnel or resource matters—and they must find a way to get things done without ruffling too many feathers, because the next project on the docket might involve many of the same people.

Traditionally, the focus of project-management training has been on the technical skills deemed essential to the position, from mastering planning or budgeting processes to cost containment and evaluating risk. People skills haven't been emphasized, and figuring out how to deal with the unpredictable human elements in any given project hasn't been much of a priority.

That's changing, though, because many organizations are beginning to wake up to the fact that when all is said and done, it's people who do the work, not software programs or metrics calculations. k

Having learned from hard-won experience, and armed with new insights into what constitutes effective project leadership, these organizations are making interpersonal or so-called "soft" skills a higher priority in their training strategies. Their guiding epiphany is that most projects rise or fall based not on a manager's facility with Microsoft Project software or work-breakdown charts, but on the manager's skillful and timely communication with stakeholders, their understanding of organizational dynamics, their ability to manage expectations, and the extent to which they can create working environments where team members can speak openly and candidly about problems before they reach a critical melting point.

Underlying most project-management training efforts are standards and practices created by the Project Management Institute (PMI), the Newtown Square, Pa.-based advocacy association for the project-management field. The group's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), a distillation of the knowledge, skills, tools and techniques generally accepted as best practice in the discipline, serves as a training blueprint for many organizations. PMI's popular certification, the Project Management Professional (PMP), also is a credential of choice for organizations preparing employees for project-management roles. In 2002 there were some 55,000 credentialed PMPs worldwide, says John Roecker, PMI's manager of professional development, and by April 2005 that number had mushroomed to 108,000.

The PMBOK details five key processes for the effective management of most projects (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling and closing), as well as nine supporting knowledge areas. It's in two of those areas—communication and human-resources management—where many organizations have started to migrate more of their training resources.

New Respect for Soft Skills

There's no denying the importance of technical expertise to successfully orchestrating a project. Managing an initiative's scope, cost, risk, resources and schedule are all essential skills. Indeed, the quality of up-front planning—and a project leader's skill at replanning as project conditions change—can determine a project's fate all on its own. But in rethinking skill hierarchies, many companies have come to view these more as baseline competencies. Now they regard soft skills (some prefer to call them "strategic" skills) such as communication, negotiation, conflict management and persuasion, as higher-order skills that are best taught the old-fashioned way—through low-tech, highly interactive, participation-oriented classroom approaches.

When Jennifer Stanford, director of professional development for Robbins-Gioia, a program management consulting firm in Alexandria, Va., asks project managers in her training seminars what their toughest challenge is, she usually gets the same response: expectations management.

"Often it's a matter of not nailing down all the project requirements correctly up front," Stanford says. "[Problems arise when] what the project team thinks and what the customer or sponsor thinks aren't aligned, and a project proceeds without a documented consensus. Things rarely go as planned on most projects, and if project managers aren't adept at managing client expectations and problem-solving along the way, they will struggle throughout a project."

Stanford believes any project-management training approach that doesn't stress presentation and meeting-facilitation skills, negotiation, conflict management and how to deliver effective performance feedback, is overlooking the most crucial piece of the project-management puzzle.

In ranking skills needed for successful project management, Kirsten Hale places communication skills squarely at the top, ahead of such time-honored tools of the trade as scope management, scheduling or budgeting proficiency. "Communication often determines whether a project succeeds or fails," says Hale, product director of project-management training at Global Knowledge, an information technology training provider in Cary, N.C. "Project managers need to know the most effective ways to communicate both up and down the organizational chain to a variety of audiences, and how to manage and influence people who don't report directly to them."

J.B. Hunt Transport Services understands the importance of emphasizing soft skills. The Lowell, Ark.-based transportation logistics company has created a new balance of interpersonal and technical skills instruction for project managers, says Phil Kindy, director of enterprise services and head of the company's project-management office. J.B Hunt found many of its new IT project managers were long on technical competence but often short on communication skills. "Coming from technical backgrounds, they know what needs to be done and are skilled at doing it, but they aren't always aware of the necessary level of communication with stakeholders or team members required to run a project effectively," Kindy says.

At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., project and line managers receive a heavy dose of soft-skills training during a three-year management development program. A complement to more technically oriented "essentials of project management" training, the first two years of the program feature 360-degree developmental surveys, conflict-management training and use of Edina, Minn.-based Wilson Learning's Social Styles instrument to give managers greater insight into others' preferred working and communication styles.

The centerpiece of PNNL's third-year curriculum is a course in reflecting on the future, during which small groups of managers engage in dialogue with PNNL's senior leaders. "It's designed to help them think about their purpose as leaders, how we define effective leadership at PNNL, and what they want from their management careers," says April King, manager of staff development and compensation at the laboratory.

Other organizations are even introducing a note of compassion to their programs. Acknowledging the emotional toll of managing complex projects, they include stress-management training in the project management curriculum. "Anyone who's ever managed a significant project can tell you that the work and stress don't stop, and leaders have to learn how to manage that stress for their teams as well as for themselves," says Hale.

One Size Doesn't Fit All

While the project-management methodologies of most organizations are fairly standard, experts say there are some practices that exemplar companies use to make their projects—and their training strategies—consistently stand out from others.

Most use a common project-management language and framework across the organization, often adapted from external standards like those of PMI. The key distinction is that they leave considerable room for flexibility within that structure. Project life cycles and management structures are different in every organization, so pre-packaged solutions rarely work as advertised. In more flexible models, training is tied to project-management processes that are iterative and incremental rather than linear or "check the boxes" in nature. Training content also leans heavily on case studies developed from the organization's own experience, rather than hypothetical cases that offer generic lessons but have a tenuous connection to managers' real-life challenges.

J.B. Hunt culls most of its training case studies from its own project history. In one case that represents a composite of challenges often faced by project leaders, manager-trainees are asked to make a difficult decision about assigning oversight responsibility for a key project function. A team leader is told by a maintenance group that unless the function is moved under its control, they will not sign off on project results. But other subject matter experts say they won't ratify the results unless the function is moved under the auspices of human resources. If the issue isn't resolved in a few days, it will affect the scheduled end date for the project's analysis phase. To add another layer of aggravation to the exercise, key executives who need to review the issue are on business trips and unavailable for two weeks. Trainees are asked how they would address the conflict and what documents they would create or update to support their arguments. A trainer debriefs participants after the exercise, leading a discussion on appropriate ways to handle the situation.

Michael Greer, a project-management consultant and author of The Project Manager's Partner (HRD Press, 2001), says many best-practice organizations also steer clear of a one-size- fits-all approach to use of project "artifacts"—the tools, templates, or documents key to managing a project. Teaching managers how to pick and choose tools and processes as they see fit, depending on the unique project characteristics and organizational requirements, is a better option than requiring use of certain artifacts across all projects, he says.

"If organizations respect people enough to make them project managers, I think they should respect their ability to discern, with the proper training, which artifacts they need to use on their projects and which ones they don't," Greer says.

Developing Political and Sales Skills

Besides superb communication and problem-solving abilities, project leaders also need sound political instincts and effective sales skills, and some organizations are modifying their training approaches to address this oft-overlooked reality. Project managers often find themselves negotiating with sponsors or executives for more resources or time—or, in some cases, arguing against adding new projects so ongoing projects aren't compromised. They also need to know how to cultivate client confidence, persuade supporting departments to play their agreed-upon roles, and shield their teams from outside influences or unbudgeted work so they can stay on task.

For example, after identifying a need for improved influence skills, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed a two-day "consultative selling" class for project managers.

"Scientists often see selling as the antithesis of their mission, which is research, so we teach them how to interact with our clients in ways that are consultative and don't feel like overt sales pitches," says PNNL's King.

Author Michael Greer believes one of the most powerful sales tools in the project manager's arsenal is the "high resolution" project plan—a set of documents that shows in great-but-understandable detail the resources, personnel, time and work processes required to meet project objectives.

"The question I get again and again in my classrooms is, 'These training concepts are great, but how do I get the resources to make them work?' " Greer says. "I tell people that they can't just complain about a lack of resources to senior managers; they have use high-resolution plans to demonstrate the resources needed on comparable projects in the past and what will be needed on the current project. They have to view the interaction as a formal sales presentation. Senior people are often guessing from a distance about the time, money and effort it takes to pull off a project, and coming prepared with these kinds of plans can open their eyes to the realities."

Sometimes the best project-management lessons are learned not in classroom or e-learning sessions but by picking the brains of battle-tested veterans. Indeed, mentoring relationships are effective complements to—and in some cases replacements for—formal learning methods.

"Mentoring ensures that new project managers are not only learning the textbook version of how to do their jobs but also are getting real-world experience and guidance from those who've been in the trenches, which can be particularly valuable when they hit rough patches during projects, " says Jennifer Stanford of Robbins-Gioia. Mentors in her organization often relish the duty, she says, because it provides a chance to pass on hard-won knowledge and is a welcome change from the daily grind.

Mentoring often is used to help project managers develop along a formal career path, one that might progress from team member to technical lead to junior project leader and finally to senior project manager. But creation of such paths is still the exception rather than the rule, according to the Project Management Institute. In a recent international survey, the association found that only 50 percent of respondents had developed a career path for project managers, and three-quarters of those were informal in structure. "Even though they believe in the project-management discipline, and see career paths as good retention tools, executives haven't taken the next step to invest in creation of formal career paths," says PMI's Roecker.

Cures for upper-management myopia

As crucial as quality skills training or mentoring are to a project's success, it also can be dangerous to view project performance only through the training lens. Projects fail for many reasons other than poorly-funded or ill-conceived project-management training, and many of those causes can be traced to organizational support or structural issues.

Projects launched haphazardly without a strong tie to organizational strategy, for example, can lead to burned-out project managers who are juggling too many projects with too few resources. The outcome, predictably, is usually projects that fall short of quality goals or don't entirely accomplish what was intended.

Use of a "project portfolio" approach, which gives executives a broad view of ongoing projects across the organization, as well as creation of project-management offices that integrate portfolio tracking and oversee project manager training, can help avoid such problems.

"The biggest fix for what ails project performance often isn't training, it's getting people at the top of the organization to create a portfolio approach so they can look across the organization and see where projects are overlapping or aren't aligned with strategy, and track, sort, fund or kill them as needed," says Greer.

If you had asked project-management gurus five years ago to name the most important competencies project managers should have, most would have said technical skills. Today they'd be more inclined to place communications or negotiations acumen at the top of their lists. And that's good news for budding project managers, who require the best of both soft and hard skills instruction to prepare for jobs that will likely test them in ways they never dreamed of or expected.

Reprinted from Training Magazine

Dave Zielinski is a freelance writer for Training. edit@trainingmag.com