High Performers Value These Skills. Hint: They Aren’t What You Think

April 6, 2023 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Last week, I presented a sneak preview of the results from our newest research study, Project Management Skills for Value Delivery, on the Great IT Pro platform. This report is still being finalized, and will be released to the public in a few weeks. Here’s a recap of what I shared with them.

Project managers need to grow professionally in order to serve the value delivery expectations of their organizations. As Eric Foss—one of the SMEs involved in creating the survey questionnaire—noted in my interview with him, some of today’s project managers—despite good credentials and a lot of experience, do not seem to be living up to the roles their organizations need them to fill. At the EPMO level, project managers need more than the fundamentals. They need superior knowledge of the industry, tremendous communication skills, the ability to think strategically, and a knack for working with others to resolve difficult problems. For a good project manager to be a great consultant, in other words, he or she needed to have a range of higher-order skills that we don’t usually think of as being “project management.”

These are the skills that were rated most critical by the high performers in our study.

As you can see they tend towards the personal mastery, creative thinking and interpersonal skills side of the scale –the art of project management, rather than the science. They also get right to the heart of some persistent problems that organizations face.

For example, trustworthiness has shown up numerous times in studies as a key element in both project and business management. Lack of trust is a primary reason why employees leave their jobs; trustworthiness is one of the things that project managers have said they most respect in their leadership. Since hiring and training personnel is hugely expensive in time and money as well as lost tacit knowledge, the ability to radiate trustworthiness is not merely a "nice to have" in organizations.

I'll write more about the joys and trials of "working collaboratively in teams" and "sound judgement under pressure" in next week's PM College blog. Today, I'd just like to stress that these study findings underscore that organizations must stop thinking of skills around interpersonal dynamics and Emotional Intelligence as “soft.” Indeed, they are harder to teach and learn, harder to replace when someone skilled in the arts leaves, and harder to hire for. Yet they will make the difference to project and organizational performance. In fact, we saw a strong correlation in this study between the skills ranking and organizational performance scores.

For more detailed findings, stay tuned for the imminent release of the full research report.

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About the Author

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin is editor-in-chief for PM Solutions Research, and the author, co-author and editor of over twenty books on project management, including the 2007 PMI Literature Award winner, The AMA Handbook of Project Management, Second Edition.

View Posts by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

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