Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers

by Mersino, Anthony C.

• ISBN13: 9780814474167
• ISBN10: 0814474160
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-01
• Publisher: Amacom Books

Summary

Technical knowledge alone just isn't enough to bring the toughest projects in successfully. You need good people skills. Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers introduces you to the basic concepts of emotional intelligence and shows how you can apply them to your project goals. You'll learn to use interpersonal skills to get more out of your people and achieve greater results with less effort.

Author Biography

Anthony Mersino, PMP (Northfield, IL) has more than 20 years of project management experience. He has worked at IBM, Ameritech, and Unisys Worldwide, and consults for clients including Abbott and the University of Chicago. He teaches courses for ESI International and Northwest University, and is a member of the National Speakers Association and the Project Management Institute.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
An Introduction to Emotional Intelligence	p. 1
My Growth in Emotional Intelligence	p. 3
A Dangerous Situation	p. 3
Emotional Mastery for Project Managers	p. 5
Project Management Is Competitive	p. 6
What Is Emotional Intelligence?	p. 8
Measuring Your Emotional Intelligence	p. 9
The Good News About Emotional Intelligence	p. 11
Applying Emotional Intelligence to Project Management	p. 12
Emotional Intelligence Is Vital to Project Managers	p. 16
A Brief Primer on Emotional Intelligence	p. 19
The Popularity of Emotional Intelligence	p. 19
Some Useful Definitions	p. 20
How to Improve Your Understanding of Emotional Intelligence Concepts	p. 28
Learning About Emotional Intelligence Is Only the First Step	p. 29
Project Management Begins with Self-Management	p. 31
Self-Awareness	p. 33
Introduction to Self-Awareness	p. 33
Emotional Self-Awareness	p. 35
Accurate Self-Assessment	p. 44
Self-Confidence	p. 45
Techniques to Improve Your Self-Awareness	p. 46
Self-Management	p. 52
The Emotional Intelligence Model for Project Management	p. 53
Self-Control	p. 55
Techniques to Improve Our Self-Management	p. 75
Additional Techniques for Self-Control and Self-Management	p. 77
Building Project Stakeholder Relationships	p. 81
Social Awareness	p. 83
An Introduction to Social Awareness	p. 83
Empathy	p. 86
Seeing Others Clearly	p. 92
Organizational Awareness	p. 97
Emotional Boundaries	p. 102
Techniques for Improving Our Social Awareness	p. 106
Relationship Management	p. 111
An Introduction to Relationship Management	p. 111
Stakeholder Relationships	p. 116
Developing Others	p. 130
Telling the Truth	p. 136
Additional Principles of Relationship Building	p. 143
Techniques for Managing Relationships on Projects	p. 149
Using EQ to Lead Project Teams	p. 155
Project Team Leadership	p. 157
Introduction to Project Team Leadership	p. 157
Communications	p. 159
Conflict Management	p. 167
Inspirational Leadership	p. 174
Additional Considerations for Team Leaders	p. 176
Techniques for Improving Project Team Leadership	p. 185
Creating a Positive Team Environment	p. 188
What Makes a Great Project Team	p. 188
How PMs Set the Tone and Direction for the Project	p. 191
The Team Within the Team	p. 199
Techniques for Creating a Positive Team Environment	p. 200
Leveraging Emotional Intelligence on Large and Complex Projects	p. 205
Are You Ready to Lead Large and Complex Projects?	p. 205
Characteristics of Large and Complex Projects	p. 206
Concerns for Large-Scale Project Managers	p. 207
Applying Different Leadership Styles	p. 209
Applying Emotional Intelligence to Virtual Project Teams	p. 218
Emotional Intelligence Techniques for Large and Complex Projects	p. 222
Epilogue	p. 225
Appendixes	p. 227
Emotional Tally Sheet	p. 229
Emotional Intelligence Assessment Checklist	p. 232
Stakeholder Management Tool	p. 234
Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)	p. 237
Emotional Intelligence Movies and Scenes	p. 238
Magazines and Journals on Emotional Intelligence	p. 240
Books on Emotional Intelligence	p. 242
Training Sources for Emotional Intelligence	p. 243
Emotional Intelligence Web Sites	p. 245
Emotional Intelligence Assessment Instruments	p. 246
Results of the 2005 Survey of Emotional Intelligence in PMs	p. 249
Index	p. 257
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1 My Growth in Emotional Intelligence

A Dangerous Situation

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is not to be in touch with your feelings?”

This question was posed to me in the summer of 2001 by Rich, a therapist

who has since become my career coach and mentor. His words stopped

me in my tracks. Dangerous? That was a curious word choice. What could be

dangerous about not being in touch with my feelings? I was thirty-nine years

old and had been a successful project manager (PM) for over seventeen years.

I had a record of slow but steady career progression. I had been certified as a

Project Management Professional (PMP) since 1995. I owned my own project

management consulting business and lived, taught, and even breathed

project management. No one had ever asked me about feelings before. No

one had ever mentioned that there might be danger involved. What could be

dangerous? What was so important about feelings?

Rich’s question resonated with me but I wasn’t sure why. It didn’t feel

dangerous to be out of touch with my emotions. However, I had a nagging

sense that he saw or knew things that I didn’t. On some level I recognized

that the way I approached work wasn’t always effective. Hard work did not

always make the difference in the outcomes of the projects I managed. I wondered

how others seemed to succeed with less effort. I also felt insecure

about the lack of personal and professional relationships I had built, and I

suspected that it was hurting me. As much as I wanted to deny that my career

and relationship challenges might be related to my emotions, I began to

suspect that Rich might be right.

The truth was that I wasn’t aware of my feelings or emotions. I was about

as emotionally aware as a small green soap dish. If I could have taken an emotional

intelligence test at that time, I would have been considered the village

idiot.

With Rich’s help, I began to see a connection between my lack of emotional

awareness and my limited success in project management. Up to that

point, my project management career had been a bumpy road. While not quite

a dead end street, my career path hadn’t exactly taken a superhighway either.

Lately that road didn’t seem to be taking me anywhere. I had recently been

passed over for a key promotion at Unisys. My career ladder had literally run

out of rungs. Perhaps I had been promoted to my level of incompetence and

was therefore living proof of the Peter Principle.

Eventually I found I could no longer ignore Rich’s question about the

danger, and I decided to do something about it. I knew I needed to make some

changes. I was ready to make more of an investment in my emotions and relationships.

Initially it wasn’t for personal reasons. It was all about ROI, my

return on investment for improving my emotional intelligence. I believed

that my career would benefit from it. And after spending most of the last five

years working on my emotional intelligence, I am happy to report that my

career has benefited significantly.

As I grew, I learned how my work relationships reflected my world view.

Up to that point, my relationships with my project teams and other stakeholders

were weak or non-existent. That was largely the result of my project

management style as a taskmaster. I was all business. Unfortunately, I placed

a higher value on tasks, productivity, and outcomes than on relationships. I

lacked empathy. I had a way of driving the people on my project teams that

was hostile and irresponsible. My coworkers may have called me driven but

they would never have characterized me as a warm and fuzzy relationship person.

At best people warmed up to me over time.

My big shift came when I began to recognize the value of emotions and

relationships in the workplace. I became aware of feelings and learned to trust

them as a source of information. I learned to recognize and acknowledge

when I felt angry, scared, or happy. I also began to pay attention to what those

around me were feeling and to consider that information when making decisions.

By doing this I was able to better manage my projects, and to be a

better leader of people.

I learned the importance of stakeholder relationships and invested in

relationships with friends, co-workers, and other leaders. I learned how critical

relationships and support were to be successful on large projects. My relationships

began to grow as did my ability to lead others.

The results were nothing short of impressive. The investment and

changes I made began to improve my effectiveness as a PM. Within a year of

beginning my work on emotions and relationships, I was asked to lead a fastmoving

project of twelve people. As I demonstrated success with this team,

my responsibilities grew until I was managing seventy-five people across the

United States and internationally. As I continued to learn and apply my skills

in this area, I was able to effectively lead large teams, build strong relationships

with project stakeholders, and achieve the goals of the projects I was

managing.

Emotional Mastery for Project Managers

I am quite sure that many of you are thinking “of course, you idiot” when I

talk about mastery of emotions leading to success as a PM. You were probably

among the five million people that bought one of Daniel Goleman’s

books on emotional intelligence and then actually read it. Yes, of course emotions

play a role at work, no matter what your position. They are of special

concern to those of us in project management and leadership. Emotions play

a direct role in our success as PMs and leaders.

I was not one of the five million people who bought Goleman’s first

book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ when it came

out in 1997. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what emotional intelligence was when

I first began working on my emotional awareness. It wasn’t until I decided to

include emotional intelligence as part of the curriculum for the project management

course I taught at Northwestern University that I began to read the

published materials on the topic. By then I had accepted the fact that I lacked

emotional intelligence; proving, I suppose, that admitting I had a problem was

the first step toward recovery. More than that, I had begun to grow and make

changes and to experience greater success as a project manager.

After my own powerful experience with emotional intelligence, I conducted

some research to see what experience other PMs had with emotional

intelligence. In late 2005, I conducted a survey of over 100 PMs to determine

their beliefs and attitudes about emotional intelligence. The results

were very interesting (see Appendix K for details). Most of the PMs I surveyed

thought that emotional intelligence was important to success as a PM and

were interested in learning more. However, the survey also indicated that

most PMs didn’t know very much about emotional intelligence.

Was this surprising? Not really. Sure, PMs understand basic project

management techniques and the contents of the Guide to the Project Management

Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). They have also pursued PMP

certification and become black-belt masters of project scheduling tools like

MS Project, Artemis, or NIKU. In fact, those are prerequisites for success

even as a junior PM; consider them entry criteria. But in order to advance

your career, you will need strong interpersonal skills or soft skills. Emotional

intelligence provides the framework for those interpersonal skills.

Do you see a connection between emotional intelligence and your own

success as a PM? Are you trying to advance your career? Do you ever feel frustrated

by lack of opportunity even though you have done all you can to improve

your technical project management skills? Perhaps you are doing things

the hard way as I did, working harder to make up for soft skills.

You cannot make up for

soft skills with hard work.

To advance as a PM requires understanding and mastery of emotional

intelligence concepts. Yes, mastery of emotional intelligence. PMs who

master emotional intelligence can develop their careers by delivering more

consistently and by taking on larger and more important projects. In fact,

success with large and complex projects depends largely on the level of emotional

intelligence of the PM.

PMs who master emotional intelligence will set themselves apart from

other PMs. They will be able to achieve more with the same team. They will

excel in their careers. And they will feel more satisfied with themselves and

their relationships with others.

PMs that master emotional intelligence will set

themselves apart from other PMs.