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Interpersonal and Team Skills

It’s time to look at the interpersonal and team skills that you will need as part of your project management career, and stakeholder engagement.

Interpersonal and team skills are the behaviors and tactics that a person uses to interact with stakeholders in a project effectively. The ability to establish a relationship with others and maintain that relationship is a key to the success of your project.

If you don’t get along with the people that you’re working with, or delivering the project to, there are going to be problems when your project comes to delivery.

Types of Interpersonal Skills

So what are these interpersonal and team skills? Well, we’ve got things like Conflict Management. This can be used to help bring stakeholders into alignment on the objectives success criteria, high-level requirements, project description and other things. We might need to manage that conflict as we’re going along and there are various techniques for that in the PMBOK guide.

We’re definitely going to need facilitation. Facilitating meetings or facilitating focus groups or requirements gathering sessions or reporting on the how the project is going – facilitation is very important. And that involves meeting management as well.

We’ve got active listening. So how we are mirroring the person that we’re speaking to and repeating back what they’ve said so we ensure that we understand what they’ve said.

General leadership is used to communicate the vision and inspire the project team to focus on the appropriate knowledge and knowledge objectives.

You will need networking. So this allows informal connections and relations among project stakeholders. Sometimes if you have a good network within an organization, you can actually just go over to someone at the water cooler and say “Did you get this? I actually need your support on this. Can you help me out?” And they’ll say yes without any need for formal communication.

You’ll definitely need political awareness. Who has those those networking relationships in the organization? Maybe there’s a group of people over here and they talk a lot, and so if you’re in the bad books was one of them, potentially you’re in the bad books with all of them. You need to be aware of the politics that are going on and how business gets done in an organization.

That leads us to influencing. Influencing is gathering the relevant and critical information to address important issues and reach agreements while maintaining mutual trust. Sometimes we need to get our way across to others but do it in a way so that everybody feels good about it, and that’s not often easy to do.

Which brings us to negotiation. Sometimes if we’re influencing it might involve a little bit of back and forth. Two teams might need the same resource, and now we need to negotiate for those resources, and we need to do it in a way that everyone feels good so that you can come back and work with them again. We’re using that stakeholder engagement and ensuring that your network is still okay.

We’ve got motivation in general as part of our leadership. It’s providing a reason for someone to act. We want them to know why they’re doing something. We do need to help motivate them to do what we need them to do.

That also involves team building. So now we’re building our team, conducting activities that enhance the team’s social relations, and that includes increasing their motivation. It builds a collaborative and cooperative working environment. That might be doing things like requirements gathering together as a team, or making sure everyone has an input during the team meeting, making sure that a team is being built and no one is feeling left out.

Now as part of that we need a high emotional intelligence. So high emotional intelligence, we want the ability to identify, assess and manage the personal emotions of ourselves and of other people, as well as the collective emotions of groups of people. Not an easy task as a project manager, but definitely essential and something that you will learn and get better at over time.

As we’re doing that were also we’ve got communication styles assessment, which is a technique used to assess the communication styles of people, identify the preferred communication method – do they prefer to catch up, do they prefer a telephone call? Do they email or do they prefer a daily stand up or meeting once a week. What is the preferred communication style? And can you work with that with your stakeholders.

We’ve got cultural awareness, again very similar to political awareness so how business is getting done. But also just general cultural sensitivity, which is more broad, things like different nationalities or different things going on in people’s home lives. We have to be aware of that and aware of the fact that not everyone is the same.

To ensure that we’re able to work together in a nice and positive way involves observation and conversation as well. So that’s used to stay in touch with the work and the attitudes of the project team members and other stakeholders. Maybe we are having conversations about something that’s going on, with different festivals for different cultures and different ways of work, different hours that people will need to work depending on the situation and that comes through observation and conversation.

And those are all of the interpersonal and team skills that you’ll need as part of your project management career.

– David McLachlan

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Power and influence models, versus the Salience model for capturing stakeholder engagement

During your PMP exam you will come across many different stakeholder engagement techniques, and it’s important to know the difference between these various Power over Influence or 2D models, and the Salience model, which is known as a 3D model because we’ve got three particular parts to that particular model.

The Salience Model

So the Salience model itself describes the classes of stakeholders based on assessments of their Power, Urgency and Legitimacy. So power is the level of authority or ability to influence. The Urgency is the need for immediate attention, so how urgent is the stakeholders involvement in the project? And legitimacy is how appropriate is their involvement.

The salience model is useful for large projects where there are complex communities of stakeholders, or where there are complex networks of relationships within the project or the organization itself. Here’s an example, as you can see it’s known as a 3D model or a cube model, but the best way to represent it is through these three circles. So you’ve got Power, Legitimacy and Urgency and you can simply note all of your stakeholders within within these three circles and where they fit in the three circles to make it that easy graphical representation.

Power over Influence Models

We can also look at that in conjunction with the two dimensional classification models. They are more useful for small projects, or projects with simple relationships between stakeholders. We’ve got Power over Interest, or Power over Influence, and Impact over Influence. All of those you might use depending on which one fits you the best or fits the project the best.

My personal favorite is the influence of the stakeholder over the impact to that stakeholder. So does it have a high impact and does that person have a high influence? So are they an executive within that particular area, and is it having a high impact on them? We probably want to manage them very closely.

If it’s a high impact but they have a low influence on our project or the organization, then we just really want to keep them informed. If it’s a low impact to them and they have a low influence, then we can just monitor their involvement. If they have a high influence, but a low impact you still want to keep them satisfied, because with a high influence they may be able to influence the project, derail it or even help it under the right conditions.

So those are the power and influence models versus the salience model in your project.

– David McLachlan

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Communication Skills

You may not see too many direct questions on this on the PMP exam, but you will definitely have to use this in your project management career. Communication is the exchange of information, whether intended or involuntary. Sometimes we’re communicating something and we’re actually not aware that we’re communicating it. It might not be verbal, it might just be body language or that sort of thing. The information is exchanged and it can be in the form of ideas, instructions or even emotions. 80% of a project managers time is spent communicating in some form or another, trying to get support for your project, trying to elicit ideas or gathering the requirements, checking how everything is going, meeting with the team members.

Factors that Affect Communication

There is so much going on in a project that we really need to be really good at communicating. Here are the skills and the techniques that we might use as we go along through our project. First of all, factors that can affect the choice of communication might include the urgency or the need for the information – so do we need to meet straight away, or can it just be an email? Can it be an SMS or can it be a slack message? This will change during the different phases of a project as well. The availability and reliability of technology – is email actually reliable, or should we send a letter? Can we pick up the phone, or can we use other forms of technology?

The ease of use for that particular technology – what’s going to be easiest for everyone to get the message in your project, not just one person but everyone that you need. It a SharePoint page, or is it a Confluence page, or is it a web page or is it a teleconference communication method. What’s the easiest way for everyone to get the message?

And of course the project environment – whether the team will meet and operate on a face-to-face basis or in a virtual environment, whether they’ll be located in one place, or multiple time zones with multiple languages.

And whether there are any other project environmental factors involved, so the sensitivity and confidentiality of the information – can we actually shout it from the rooftops, or should we have to meet and discuss it in private. This might also involve the social media policies for employees to ensure appropriate behavior so that we’re not telling the project details on social media, when it’s a secret project or something that we don’t want everyone to know about, it might be proprietary information.

Types of Communication Skills You Can Use

Communication skills include communication competence in general – this is a combination of tailored communication skills and it involves things like clarity of purpose, effective relationships with the people that you’re sharing the message with, and leadership behaviors. Really starting with “why”, or why are we doing things, making sure everyone is really clear and getting the message across.

Feedback is also one of the skills that we need. Feedback is information about the reactions to those communications, so how did they receive it? Was it received well, or received badly? Sometimes we need to ask for that feedback and we need to take it on board, even when it’s bad. That’s part of being a project manager. Feedback supports interactive communication between the project managers, the team and all other stakeholders.

Other communication skills you’ll see are nonverbal communication skills. Appropriate body language to transmit meaning through gestures. If we’re all closed up but we’re trying to get people pumped up for a particular project, maybe that’s not going to work. Our tone of voice needs to be appropriate, our facial expressions need to be appropriate, mirroring the people that we’re talking to and eye contact are also important techniques in communication skills.

You’ll definitely find yourself presenting during your project management career or the projects that you’re working on at the moment. Presenting as a formal delivery of information and/or documentation such as progress reports, background information for decision-making for the stakeholders in your project, and information aimed at increasing the support for your project with all of the stakeholders as well.

Taking the audience type into consideration. Is it a group of executives, do you need to be more formal under those scenarios? Or is it your a few people that you’re delivering the project to? You need to be considerate that it might be affecting them and take that into consideration when you’re communicating.

Lastly, there are communication artifacts and methods that are really useful as you go along on your project. You’ve got noticeboards, and that could be your virtual notice board or a physical notice board, newsletters, staff letters, press releases, annual reports, emails and intranets. Accompanying web portals – can we display the information that we need in that particular place? We might have phone conversations, presentations, team briefings and group meetings, focus groups, face to face formal or informal meetings between various stakeholders, consultation groups or staff forums and social computing like slack for example, technology and media.

And those are the communication skills that you will come across in your project management career.

– David McLachlan

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The Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix

The Stakeholder Engagement Matrix is a very useful tool, and it supports the comparison between the current engagement levels of your stakeholders and the desired engagement levels required for successful project delivery.

It asks and answers the question – how engaged do we need our team, or the people around the project, to be to ensure successful project delivery?

There are five different levels through which we can measure this stakeholder engagement. First of all, we’ve got Unaware, then Resistant, then Neutral, then Supportive and then Leading. Let’s look at them in a little bit more detail.

Stakeholder Analysis

An Unaware stakeholder is when they’re unaware of the project completely, or its potential impacts. They simply don’t know that it exists.

Now if they’re Resistant, they’re aware of the project and its potential impacts but they’re resistant to any changes that might occur as a result of the work or the outcomes of the project. These stakeholders will be unsupportive of the work or the outcomes of the project, and we really need to communicate more and manage the relationship for those particular stakeholders.

We might have Neutral stakeholders, where they’re aware of the project but they’re not supportive and they’re not unsupportive. They’re just going with the flow.

We might have supportive stakeholders, where they’re aware of the project and potential impacts and they’re supportive of the work and its outcomes. This is ideally where we want to be leading to and ultimately the next step is when we’ve got stakeholders Leading, where they’re aware of the project and its potential impacts and they’re actively engaged in ensuring that that project is a success. They’re really helping us out, they’re not hindering us. And that’s where we really want our stakeholders to be.

A stakeholder engagement assessment matrix involves mapping our stakeholders against those descriptions. We might have stakeholders over here on the left where are they are currently (C) unaware, but we actually need them to be supportive as our desired state (D).

Most of them really need to be supportive or leading. An executive might need to be leading, or a sponsor might need to be leading, so we need to really make sure that we’re communicating properly and helping get them up into those upper levels of stakeholder engagement.

Current and Desired Stakeholder States

The gap between the current (C) and the desired (D) state for each stakeholder will direct the level of communications necessary, and to effectively engage that stakeholder so do we need to communicate a lot more, in a way that’s best for that stakeholder. Now we really need to use those soft skills that a project manager has to have, to increase the engagement of those project team members or the the other members around the project. The closing of this gap between the current and desired is an essential element of monitoring stakeholder engagement. You will definitely be using this in your project management career, and you will also see it as part of the questions for the PMP and the CAPM exams.

And that is the stakeholder engagement assessment matrix.

– David McLachlan

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