No one wants to admit their people skills need improving. All too often, we tend to focus on the technical aspects of project management and forget that projects are delivered by people. Without the right people skills to lead your project you may be at risk of project failure.
Below we look at three categories of people skills and provide you with some easy to apply tips and reflection points to help you better understand what skills you might need to focus on developing. And for those of you who are already enjoying the benefits of having great people skills, consider how you might be able to use your skills along with the tips below to coach or support your project team members to also grow their people skills.
Connect, Communicate and Collaborate: the key to success stakeholder relationships
- How to connect with project stakeholders
The first step to connecting with project stakeholders is to establish rapport and trust. Take a moment to observe the non-verbal signals the other person uses when communicating (i.e. their body language and how they say things). For instance, do they speak quickly and use strong hand gestures? If they do, then you should replicate (or “mirror”) this behaviour to a degree that is similar to your natural non-verbal behaviours, being not so obvious as to make the other person feel as though you are mimicking them in an unnatural way. The intent here is to narrow the difference between your natural preferences and theirs.
Why do this? Because we feel safe with people whom we perceive to be like us, and our non-verbal behaviours are a strong clue about what it’s going on inside the other person. The more messages we can convey that we, too, are like them, the more likely we are to establish rapport and trust. We aren’t faking anything here but rather making conscious something we do with people all the time. To test this, next time you’re with people with whom you have very different relationships (i.e. a friend versus an acquaintance or family member) take a moment to reflect on the subtle shifts you make in your behaviour as part of rapport building. We do this all the time. We just don’t realise we are doing it.
- How to ensure you are heard and understood every time you communicate with project stakeholders.
Difficulties in communication can occur during any human interaction and the chances of this derailing a conversation increases when we start to deal with people whose values, beliefs and priorities might be quite different to our own. To engage stakeholders in communication we firstly need to know how the other persons prefers communication to be delivered. We’re not referring to whether a person prefers email over face to face communication, but rather do they prefer a conversation to initially begin with small talk or do they prefer you get straight to the point? Do they need time to reflect on what you have just said before answering you or do they talk enthusiastic and start telling a story triggered by your communication? If you communicate with the other person using their preferred style of communication, then communication will flow much easier. The challenge for some people is when the person with whom they are communicating has very different (and possibly even opposite) ways of communicating to them. What do we do in these instances? We need to deliver communication in a manner that suits them. As foreign as this might feel it’s up to us to change our behaviour to meet the communication needs of the other person. Similarly, the tips for building rapport mentioned above apply here also. We need to take our cues from the other person and lead our communication in a way that meets their needs and not just ours.
- Be the type of person your stakeholders want to collaborate with
Not everyone knows how to collaborate effectively. My personality preferences are such that I would rather work alone than in a team and yet all my career successes have resulted from teamwork. I had to learn how to collaborate with other people - it didn’t come naturally to me. These are the four things I had to learn to do to be an effective collaborator; to speak up in meetings, to ask for what I needed from my colleagues, to have some humility, and finally when dealing with senior people in the business and key stakeholders I had to build relationships with these individuals prior to needing to collaborate so that the right conditions were present for both parties to achieve an outcome. In short, I had to become the type of person others liked to work with by being someone who was easy to communicate with, flexible, respectful, volunteering to help others and trusting in the principle of reciprocity which has never failed me. Collaboration is driven by effective relationships and to have effective relationships we always need to know how to connect and communicate effectively with people – and not just when we need something from them to benefit our project.
Practise your people skills when the stakes are low so that when you reach a critical point in your project and you need to use your people skills to help get a task or relationship over the line, you can connect, communicate and collaborate with skill and confidence.
