How to be a highly successful project manager

The right work behaviours can help you to improve your performance and get ahead in your career. Wendy Shooter identifies the three most important ones and how you can make them work for you.

The more senior you become, the more your role is about how you work with others to make things happen – and it is your behaviours that largely dictate how successfully you do this. Most people behave in the way they think is most helpful and appropriate in that situation or context (although it might not always appear this way to others). Our behaviours begin to develop as soon as we are born, and we quickly learn that certain behaviours will bring certain results. When our behaviours bring us the results we want, we will reuse them. If not, we quickly discard them.

As we are very young when this first starts to happen, we tend not to have conscious recollection of why we chose the behavioural approaches we did. If a behaviour is used over many years it will become deeply ingrained, and if it is then deemed unhelpful by colleagues or organisational needs, trying to unlearn and change it can be tricky. Part of the problem can be that we don’t know how to get the outcomes we want by another means, even if we recognise that our current approach is not helpful.

If an individual has been using bullying behaviours to get their needs met since they were very young, and this has gone largely unchallenged, they are less likely to have developed other ways to get their needs met. This is part of the reason it is hard for them to change. They may have the intention, but they don’t know how to do it in a different way and be confident to get the outcomes they need.

It is possible to change our behaviour, but it does require effort and dedication to make it stick. Intent alone will not deliver this for you. A key element in this is self-awareness and having an honest conversation with yourself about how effective your work behaviours really are. When we have good self-awareness, we can watch out for our own behaviours and make constructive adjustments as we go.

Here are three behaviours of high-performing project professionals.

1. Using both divergent and convergent thinking styles

Are you good at opening things up, asking great questions and going wide with your scope definition and problem analysis? How about closing down options, limiting discussion and analysis, and making the decision? These two thinking styles are called divergent thinking (widening) and convergent thinking (narrowing). Both are equally important if you are to be a high-performing project manager, so it is important to hone skills in both areas and develop judgement about when to use each. Some people are naturally good at both styles, but you are much more likely to have a stronger inclination toward one over another. If you don’t know which is your default style, ask anyone who has worked with you a lot, and the chances are they will give you a very quick answer.

Do you let discussions go on for longer than others consider necessary, believe there is more information needed when team members say you have enough and like to take time over-decision making? If it is a ‘yes’ to most of these, you are probably more of a divergent thinker. Do you take action quickly, think most of the information you need is already in your head, believe most meetings could be done and dusted in 10 minutes and sometimes get accused of being too quick to solutions? You are probably more of a convergent thinker if it is a ‘yes’ to this list.

To be a high performer:

Determine your preference and watch out for it.
Identify when it would be beneficial for you to use different behaviours and commit to giving them a try.
Think through which behaviours you will use more and less of, and ask a colleague to give you feedback.
Build a reputation for being able to do both! This will get you that promotion.

2. Truly being able to collaborate

There seems to be a broad misconception that anything that involves engagement with another human counts as collaboration. To define exactly what collaboration is, let’s first examine what it is not:

Instructing and sharing information: telling project colleagues what they need to do and defining your expectations, as well as allowing questions of clarification.
Gathering information: asking project colleagues to supply you with information, ideas and recommendations so you can review and make decisions.
Consultation: sharing your plans and ideas and inviting comment. You still get to make the decision.

A key feature of collaboration is shared decision-making where the needs of all involved are considered in the process. What does real collaboration look like? When you are working in collaboration with your project colleagues, you have awareness of the other projects they are working on and associated deliverables. You will be thinking about priorities in terms of what is best for the whole organisation or programme overall, not just the needs of your project. You will create the plan with project members and get their genuine buy-in to deliverables and the schedule. This means allowing them to be part of the process from early on and influence the creation of the plan.

So, what is getting in the way of collaboration? On the surface, collaboration can seem like it takes longer, but in actuality it means outcomes are achieved faster as you engender genuine commitment to deliverables when you take this approach. This means you don’t waste time and energy chasing people up, which is a huge waste of organisational resource as it adds no value.

When we work collaboratively, it means we allow others power and influence, and this can go against the grain for many of us. It takes a confident manager to invite others in and loosen their level of control, as they are being asked to hold back on the behaviours that have previously gained them recognition, such as problem-solving and having the answers. You need to be courageous to push through this.

To be a high performer:

Be inclusive and involving from the beginning.
Have adult-adult conversations and relationships rather than parent-child.
Understand the qualities and strengths of your team members.
Build a reputation for involving others, sharing power and driving value in the project.

3. The PM should drive the schedule

This sounds obvious to a project professional, but actually it is not always in your DNA. It could be because you have come from another discipline or your early organisational experience was, for example, to prioritise technical excellence over delivering on time. The behaviours that will support you to drive the schedule, and therefore your performance, are:

Focus on the present: always know where you are. A high-performing project manager will know exactly where their project is against schedule and be continuously reviewing progress. This equips them with information about where to invest their energies to ensure the schedule is maintained.
Focus on the future: know what is on the horizon and anticipate impact. A successful project manager will have awareness of potential opportunities and threats to the schedule, but this information then needs to be acted on. Project managers can fall into the trap of having endless conversations about the problem and possible approaches without actually putting plans in place.
Enable delivery with a sense of pace: stay focused on outputs and timely progression. The conversational focus for an effective project manager will be around outcomes and the outputs that enable them. They will convey a sense of forward motion and pace without needing to create an emergency scenario daily.

To be a high performer:

Build schedule review time into your day.
Keep a conversation diary for a week – review how many of your conversations are about technical detail versus how to achieve outputs and make progress. Were there actions? Or, as you walk away from each conversation, ask yourself how that has helped the project move forward (just having a better understanding doesn’t count) and how confident you are that they are going to meet commitments.
In your conversations, ask: what is getting or could get in the way of you delivering on time? What could you do? How can I help?
Build a reputation for being the one that delivers.

The key to being a high performer is to regularly reflect on and find out how your approaches are impacting on others and the outcomes you want. You need to invest energy in trying out different behaviours and improving your ability at those that seem helpful. The world is ever changing, and no two situations or people are the same. All behaviours are helpful in some situation and less helpful in others. The more behavioural options you have available to you, the greater the chance of you using the one which is beneficial to the situation in front of you.

Wendy Shooter is a business psychologist and MD of Unicorn Consulting