What Lacks in The Project Management Profession?
The Project Management profession has an abundant repertoire of digital tools, online and in-person resources, a stable framework from which creativity can be at play, an assortment of skilled professionals with varied academic & professional backgrounds, opportunities for scalable growth, and a community where ideas and resources are freely shared. The aforementioned often leads to proficiently orchestrated, skillfully organized project maps, tracked & documented execution, and successful delivery. But within the profession something critical is lacking.
A degree of emotional intelligence that informs conflict management and deepens trust amongst teams is a gap that contributes to project failure.
A Project Manager possessing all the hard skills required to coordinate and oversee a project but lacking emotional intelligence is more susceptible to failure than a Project Manager with honed emotional acuity who is yet to develop all the [easily learned] hard skills; this is because emotional intelligence prepares a Project Manager to:
smoothly lead teams through the tension of uncertainty,
remain grounded in empathy (the capacity to graciously understand and share in the experiences of another, in this case with one’s team and key stakeholders) in the midst of ambiguity,
earn the trust of their team, as they navigate through each stage of the project lifecycle,
confidently approach and carefully manage conflicts with stakeholders, especially when scope creep and unrealistic expectations arise; they don’t shy away from or ignore conflict.
Project Management is rarely an originally pursued career path, instead being a profession those on other career paths later come to. Thus, I assert is of those of people-helping and humanitarian professions that are best equipped to manage projects, as they are more inclined to inherently possess soft skills such as emotional intelligence, empathy, and an ability to skillfully respond to conflict.
The outcome of my own shift from an early academic & professional career in Clinical Social Work into Business Administration and Project Management has been a transference of the aforementioned soft skills into a profession where these skills do not often accompany the list of hard skills possessed by Project Managers, especially those with a technical orientation, or even skills listed on a job description. I consider this my greatest strength as a Project Manager, and without an early career in people centered industries I wouldn’t have as many skills or as much knowledge as I currently possess.
To Cite This Article in APA7:
Drost, A.R. (2023). The Braided Strategist. What lacks in the project management profession? https://thebraidedstrategist.com/articles/what-lacks-in-the-project-management-profession
Discussion Questions
What assumptions about leadership and authority are challenged by the idea that empathy and emotional acuity are central to effective project management?
How does the non-linear career path into project management shape the profession’s culture, and what strengths or blind spots does this create?
What organizational shifts are required for the unique contributions of Project Managers from people-helping professions to be integrated into hiring practices?
How might organizations redefine Project Manager roles to prioritize soft skills over [or perhaps equal to] technical expertise?
What are the long-term consequences of a Project Manager avoiding conflict in project environments? and what evidence exists to indicate whether a technical expert can develop soft skills such as emotional intelligence?
