8 traits of a successful project manager

Although successful project managers can carry a variety of traits, we can summarize the top traits and characteristics of the most successful project managers.

1. Organized – Without organization skills, project management would be virtually impossible. Project management seeks efficiency and the first key to being efficient is to have your ducks in order. One of the main roles of a project manager is to take chaotic data and to convert that data into meaningful and organized documentation and project plans. Organization is what makes it so the project life cycle can be tracked and measured. The more organized the data, the easier the data, and hence the project, is at being managed. It’s very similar to the old saying, what you measure, you can manage. In this case it’s, what you organize, you can manage.
2. Communication – The ability to communicate is high up on this list and for good reason. I once worked for a company in which the people in different departments virtually hated working with people in other departments. This made it so that face-to-face communications were virtually eliminated. This led to all sorts of problems in capturing requirements, executing deliverable reviews/testing, and which led to virtually no proper organizational documentation let alone no lessons learned feedback. When I created a bridge for the departments things started to flow. Things that were originally would have been issues were easily shutdown and handled. It’s the same reason that horrible and corrupt politicians get elected, because they know how to communicate with the voters they need to vote for them. A lack of communication can make a wonderfully smart person ineffective, or proper communication can make a not-so-talented person look like a PM god. Ironically communication is highly correlated with the organized bullet point above. Without good communication, it’s often hard to become well organized in anything, let alone business projects.
3. Integrity – I struggle to even put this in the #3 spot as it’s vital to any and every project, let alone firm. Without integrity and trust, project managers lose traction and support. This is especially vital for projects that contain cross-functional teams as people across an organization need to have trust in someone before they drop functional work to do more projectized work that they might not get recognition. Stick to your commitments, do what is ethical and just. It’s important to be dedicated to honesty and truth, even if the truth is hard-to-swallow. People rally around those they trust, and projects that have people rally around them are successful.
4. Leadership – One of the most important things for a project manager is to rally a team around a vision and/or clear goal. Leadership is osmotically communicated in many concurrent ways, including but not limited to being methodical, logical, articulate, a problem solver, creative, and inspiring. In order to fulfill these traits, a project manager needs to have a good understanding of what’s going on inside the project. With good leadership, the need to continually pump up the team is mitigated, as with good leadership the team is already continually pumped up.
5. Ability to delegate – The top 4 items above all make it easier to delegate tasks. There’s a reason a doctor doesn’t transcribe their own work. Their time is much more valuable seeing patients, doing surgeries, researching, etc…. so they outsource the work to those of which it makes sense to delegate. In order to delegate properly, scope must be well defined and accountability must be kept. Good project managers know what they need to delegate, when to delegate, why to delegate, and whom to delegate.
6. Problem solving – There’s a reason project management can be so stressful. This is generally because PMs realize that even when not on the clock, they are still responsible for the results of a work project. They are continually thinking of ways to get things done faster, cheaper, while still adhering to the requirements. It’s impossible to have an answer to everything, but the more problems they can solve, the better off (a) project(s) will be.
7. Negotiation skills – This is one that most people don’t think about, but this goes hand-in-hand with the most important soft-skills. Project managers needs to know how to get their way in a way that also helps others reach their goals as well. Project management is not a zero-sum game. Additionally, PMs have to deal with an assortment of stakeholders: customers, employees, local/affected communities, vendors, executives, etc… and each stakeholder has different wants and needs. A good PM knows how to negotiate with each to achieve a win-win with all involved.
8. *Time management – As the old saying goes, “time is money”. If there was ever a profession where this is true, project management is it! The ability to manage time is vital, not just for the schedule constraint, but also for the budget constraint as well! Good project managers understand that they need to make the most of every minute available to them. Time management makes time definable, which helps schedules across all cultural differentiations. After all, not all cultures have the same concept of time. Time management gets everyone on the same page and aims to increase productivity relative to work time.

Although I could spend hours going through the various traits of successful project managers, these make the short-list for the most valuable.

*8 was not included in the original post. H/T to David Brezler for recommending it for adoption into this article!