Effective influence management during project delivery

The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and to influence their actions. – John Hancock

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One of the most important ingredients that every project manager requires is effective team management skills.

Assertive

There is an extensive debate about the skill sets of project managers in particular project management deliverables.

Some of the experts believe that humbleness and assertiveness are the main ingredients. According to certain studies, effective team management and control delegation is the winning combination.

However, in our experience as PMP trainers and project management consultants, impact and influence of leadership is the real game changer.

Leadership

The impact and influence of leadership is directly proportional to the culture and environment that the project manager creates.

Many people join the project without realizing the culture and values associated with the group of people committed to the project.

Let me give you an example. In one of our projects, there was a person from Ireland who wanted to join a project that was focused on the Japanese market. Due to the culture issues, the Irish could not successfully penetrate into the team and hence could not deliver the tasks.

However, it was the job of the project manager to fully integrate any particular person into the cultural and value system of the organization project. One of the most challenging yet promising attributes of any project is the variety of people that work in the project. In fact, many successful project managers enable the variant skill sets of different people in teams to fully complement success of the project.
 

In order to effectively influence your team, we recommend following the below project management skills steps (rif. ThinkFaculty):

Each team would have a controlled deliverable and certain key performance indicators associated with it.
There should be no ambiguity in terms of the deliverables. The deliverables need to be measured against time, cost, and effectiveness.

The best way to create influence among the team is to set the example yourself. One example, if you eat during lunch break, make it worthwhile for others to collectively have their lunches so that there is no wastage of time during projects.

Ask people how they want things to be communicated. Some of my team members in Africa really liked my SMS to them every single morning communicating their specific tasks. Some people still use the email methodology. Several people like to use complicated software ongoing programs.

Irrespective of what people want to, the effectiveness of team management will be on the burdens and shoulders of the project manager. We believe in consistent and continuously improving the skills of the project managers.
 

Zyma Arsalan

Zyma Arsalan is currently the Director Media for ThinkFaculty Company – a leader in project management training, customer service training and leadership and development.

She has a versatile experience in working for the top leading companies in USA and now focuses on building the intellectual network in Asia. She can be reached at www.thinkfaculty.com or at [email protected]

http://www.thinkfaculty.com/