There's a vast difference between an average PM and an excellent PM. Yet if you google "what makes a great PM?", you only get a list of lowest-common-denominator qualities: organized, good communicator, reliable, blah, blah, blah. Of course it's important to be organized and communicate well. But that's just the starting point. So what specific traits are we looking for to truly separate the top tier project managers from all the rest? BEYOND ORGANIZED: PROACTIVE Like a chess player, a great manager is thinking many steps ahead. They see all the possible pitfalls and are constantly taking action to dodge and mitigate. Some managers think ahead because they have experience. They've been burned before and they know what to look out for. Some managers have a natural aptitude for it for thinking ahead, visualizing the dependencies and risks that lie ahead. But mostly, anticipating what's going to happen many moves ahead comes from day-to-day work:
Interview question: Give me an example of a time that you were proactive. What techniques do you use to be proactive? BEYOND COMMUNICATION: ALIGNMENT Everyone knows that clear communication is the cornerstone of delivering successfully. So many delivery issues and delays result from the silliest of miscommunications. Communication has to be verbal, non-verbal, in writing and live, with the support of spreadsheets, powerpoints, and more sophisticated tools. But communication is also about listening. A great PM can listen and understand what each team member is telling them. And ultimately, it's exemplifying the right soft skills - empathy, collaboration, cultural sensitivity (country cultures and corporate cultures), assertiveness, negotiation - that allow them to arrive at an aligned plan where all team members and stakeholders are on the same page. Interview question: What's the most important thing about communication? What do you do at the beginning and end of every meeting? NOT JUST TAKING STATUS, BUT UNPACKING AND CHALLENGING From the article Good Project Manager vs. Bad Project Manager: A bad project manager is all over the place. They fit that stigma of "glorified secretary or an admin" because they only ask simple questions like, "When are you going to be done with that task?" Whether you do daily stand-ups, a weekly team meeting, you need to go beyond just asking team members "What's the status and when will it be done?" Indeed, 90% of projects go over time, and that's because so many sub-tasks within a project go over time. Team members are naturally optimistic and want to please, so they aren't always recognizing all that goes into a task and when it's going to be late. Being able to talk with team members using a Socratic method - asking lots of questions to surface all the sub-steps of an activity - is vital. "When you say it'll be ready next week, do you mean Friday? Do you mean a first draft or an approved version? Who has to approve it? Is there a meeting booked already with the approvers? Are there reasons why they might not approve? Are there other dependencies to this work - who else is involved in the draft?" Questions can become exhausting, but for really important tasks it's so important to talk through and understand exactly the steps to "done". Dependencies are the most crucial to unpack and highlight. When a task is entirely within the control of the team, the risk is lower. But in practice, whenever success depends on an external group, another company, a senior stakeholder, any other 3rd party - risk, proactivity and vital is suddenly at a premium. Interview question: what questions do you ask to figure out if a deliverable is going to be late? FOCUSED ON WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT A great PM should be thorough and detail oriented. Everything is captured in the WBS and accounted for. But across all of that detail, they also need to be hyper focused on priorities, spending almost all their time on what's most important. What is most important? Most likely:
Everything else is noise and distraction. The PMP exam is notorious for asking questions that are long-winded and filled with confusing, irrelevant information. That is to simulate the experience of being a PM, where you are constantly being confronted with new information and you need to filter out what's really important and worth your time compared from everything else that may just be a time waster. Interview question: how do you identify what's important compared to what is detail or noise? Give some examples. ASSERTIVE, BUT FLEXIBLE With so much focus on being organized, proactive, the project management profession tends to attract some rather rigid thinkers (ESTJs and ISTJs in Myers Briggs). And of course, it's important to be assertive about the plan and hold team members accountable to their agreed deadlines. But it's also important to remember that in practice, no project ever unfolds according to plan, and you constantly need to improvise and devise new ways of achieving the results with your team. If you think of all the aspects of project management - soft skills, stakeholder relationships, judgement, team leadership, keeping up with constantly changing priorities - being flexible in your thinking and open to deviating from the plan and process when necessary, becomes a primordial skill that easily sets you apart from other PMs. Interview question: Tell me about a time you had to deal with an unexpected change to the project. RADICALLY HONEST A project manager sees what's happening across all aspects of the project and should have the best sense of anyone whether the project is really on track, where the bottlenecks are, what's working and what's not working. And then they need to decide how to explain how things are going to their stakeholders. The manager could choose to shape the narrative in some way, emphasizing or downplaying some risks over others. Maybe they will prefer to "not worry" leadership with problems and try to resolve them on their own. Maybe they worry that exposing certain risks will reflect negatively on them or make their jobs more difficult. That is understandable if their workplace is full of unrealistic expectations, intense competition, or harsh consequences for failure. By my own bias is that the best managers are radically honest, erring on the side of exposing problems and risks whenever possible. If you have a hunch that something is at risk - and let's face it, on large projects, something is always at risk - shout it from the rooftops. Make it super clear what the problems are, even if it's bad news, or even if it reflects negatively on you. Of course, you ideally don't just point out problems, you also offer solutions. But sometimes there is no good solution. You just have to be the bearer of bad news, and that in and of itself is a valuable service you are bringing to the organization. In the long run, you build more trust, and your project will have more success, if you are consistently radically honest. Interview question: Tell me about a time you had to deal with an unexpected change to the project.
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