Since I'm in the business of providing project management training, it is of considerable interest to me to understand why people want to pursue the profession (assuming that it is one). What I've found is that all too often they want to be project managers because of the status and (sometimes) higher pay that they can get as engineers, programmers, and so on. But they don't really have any passion for managing. (I wrote about this in a previous post.)
First of all, I don't think anyone ever got really good at anything that they had no passion for. But the second aspect of this that troubles me is that I meet people who have the personalities of a barracuda, and I cringe when I imagine being a member of their project team.
There are two things that I think must be true for an individual to be an effective project manager:
- Have passion for the job itself, and
- Recognize that project management is more about dealing effectively with people than it is about administrative work.
So I suggest that, if your passion is for something other than managing projects, you avoid the trap of becoming a project manager. The same is true if you don't like spending most of your day dealing with people.
But if you must be a project manager, for goodness sake, work on becoming a more effective individual first. Read Stephen Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and then try to make those habits your personal habits. Don't just read the book. You have to live it.
And you know the nice thing about this--even if you later decide you don't want to be a project manager, becoming a highly effective individual will be good for you for the rest of your life.
Slange,
Jim Lewis
Hi Jim. I think a lot of folks just stumble into project management. Most people think of PM as engineers or IT folks, but people in all industries are project managers and don't know it. I work in higher education and have been managing projects for years, but my title doesn't reflect it. Sales people manage projects, marketers definitely do it and even someone writing a book is managing a project. We all need the skills that you teach so that, regardless of job function, we can effecitively do our jobs.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course managing projects also means managing people. One of the visual representations of a project manager could be the hub of a wheel. When you're in the middle, having to communicate with others (whether you're the boss or not), you need to know not only the subject matter and organization, but also how to best work with the "spokes" of your wheel.