This is the fourth of six articles that discuss key skills for successful project managers. The extract posted here will be published in its final form in a forthcoming book, Delivering Value with Project Management, by Woods & Marshall (2023).
Skill #1: Leadership, Delegation, and Influence
Skill #2: Motivation and Teamwork
Skill #3: Negotiation and Conflict Management
Strong interpersonal and technical skills help project managers excel at their work and enable others to see them as effective leaders and managers. In this series of articles, I will share six key interpersonal skills that project managers should focus on developing.
The fourth skill important for successful project managers is emotional intelligence. Humans are designed to feel emotions, which are mental and physiological responses to environmental and internal stimuli. In the workplace, emotions are important to generating energy around a concept, building commitment to goals, and developing high-performing teams. Because emotions are important to high-performing project teams, project managers should be aware of their level of emotional intelligence (EI), or awareness of their emotions and those of their team, and be able to manage their and the team’s emotions.
EI includes the following:
- Self-awareness: recognizing your emotions and how they affect you and your interactions with others
- Self-regulation: managing your responses to your emotions in your interactions with others
- Empathy: recognizing the emotions held by others
- Relationship management: managing emotions in relationships for more effective interactions
EI is important to a project manager’s ability to build trust among the team members and stakeholders and to establish credibility and open dialogue with project stakeholders. On projects, trust is the filter through which we screen the information we share and receive. When team members feel like they are being heard emotionally, they may be more likely to trust the members of their team. The more trust team members feel in a team, the easier it is for information to flow between team members. Conversely, as trust diminishes, data has a harder time getting through, and projects highly dependent on an information-rich environment will suffer from information deprivation.
A project manager who empathizes with team members is perceived as more trustworthy than one who does not and creates an environment where both positive and negative information can be shared without fear of retribution or disregard.
Emotions can be passed between team members, especially if strong team cohesion exists. Emotional contagion, or the sharing of emotional states between individuals, can create shared emotions within a team. If a project manager is not aware of the emotions felt within the team and the potential for emotional contagion, they may be unable to prevent any conflict that arises within the team or between the team and project stakeholders.
The more complex a project, the more important the project manager’s emotional intelligence becomes to project success. As the number of team members and project stakeholders increases, so does the opportunity for misunderstandings between stakeholders. These misunderstandings may lead to “hurt feelings” or the increase of negative emotional responses. If the project manager is not aware of or empathetic to the emotions felt by the team, they will not be able to resolve potential interpersonal conflicts that may arise. As we talked about in the article on conflict, unresolved conflict leads to project failure as a result of an underperforming team.
Deeper Dive: How emotionally intelligent are you? Learn more about the importance of emotional intelligence and assess yourself at the website below.
Institute for Health and Human Potential. (2022) What is emotional intelligence? Retrieved September 16, 2022, from https://www.ihhp.com/meaning-of-emotional-intelligence/
About the UNG Press
The information presented here is an excerpt from a forthcoming book that will be published by the University of North Georgia Press, a scholarly, peer-reviewed press. UNG Press is an extension of our sponsoring university, the University of North Georgia. Their primary function is to promote education and research, with a special emphasis on innovative scholarship and pedagogy.
For media inquiries, please contact the University of North Georgia Press at ungpress@ung.edu or call (706) 864-1556.
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