Did you know that the majority of people aren’t natural-born leaders? Only about 10% of Americans fall into this category.
That doesn’t mean that the other 90% can’t assume leadership positions. They can still take on the role of project manager as long as they’re willing to work at it.
To tackle project management, they’ll just need to aim to develop some of the top skills for project managers. These skills will put them in the perfect position to assume all kinds of project manager responsibilities.
We’ve put together a project management skills list to help you begin to develop these skills for yourself. Check out the five top skills for project managers below.
Table of Contents
1. Communication
Communicating effectively will obviously be one of the top skills for project managers. It’s going to be your job to keep everyone involved with a project on the same page.
If your communication skills aren’t the greatest, it’ll be challenging to get projects off the ground and keep them moving along. Whether you’re communicating with people in-person or by phone or email, you should make sure you’re communicating with them in the right ways.
2. Organization
Nothing will knock a project off-course quite like a lack of organization. It’s why skilled project managers need to make it a point to keep themselves and their teams organized.
Before a project even starts, you should set up a foolproof system that will keep every aspect as organized as it can be. It’ll make things easier for you and those working on a project with you to find the things that you’ll need to keep a project moving forward.
3. Critical Thinking
As you’re working on a project, you and your team will likely hit roadblocks along the way. They’ll force you to think outside of the box to push past them.
In a perfect world, your whole team will have the critical thinking skills that it’ll take to make this possible. You, in particular, will need to know how to think critically to get around unforeseen issues.
This might be one of the most underrated project management skills on this whole list. You may find yourself in a world of trouble if you aren’t able to think critically on the fly as a project manager.
4. Scheduling
There are almost always going to be deadlines associated with just about any project that you’re working on. As a project manager, you’ll have to create a schedule that will allow you and your team to hit these deadlines.
You’ll have to think ahead and plan out your project to prevent your team from falling behind at any point. You’ll also need to make adjustments to your schedule as necessary to account for any delays that you experience.
5. Sense of Humor
If you’re in serious mode throughout the course of an entire project, you won’t be much fun to work with. It helps for project managers to have a sense of humor so that they’re able to laugh when things go wrong as opposed to getting angry about them.
Project management is a serious job, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from having a good laugh every now and then. It’ll ensure that you and your team don’t get too stressed out as you work to complete a project.
You Need to Have the Top Skills for Project Managers to Succeed
Some people think that you need to be a natural-born leader to be a great project manager but this isn’t the case!
Even if you weren’t born to be a leader, you can still serve as one by working on developing the top skills for project managers. These project management skills will help you take charge of a team and get great results.
Browse through our other blog articles for more tips on becoming a better leader.
