If you're wondering what the most important project management skills are, then stay
tuned because I'm going to share with you what skills you need to have and build to become an
amazing project manager. And if you need help building those right skills, I have some amazing
free training for you that's going to make you a superstar project manager. I'm going to provide
the link for you under this video below. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. My name
is Adriana Girdler and on this channel, you're going to get the best career and
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You are not afraid to say no. Now, project management is not all about saying yes,
and sometimes we want to do such a good job that we're always willing to say, "Of course we can do
that." "Of course we can take that on." But being a really good project manager is knowing when to
say no, especially to senior management who are probably asking you for things that is going to
negatively impact your project or worse yet, do a scope creep to your deliverables of what you're
trying to do in your project. It's just something you really need to understand that saying no is
just as important as being positive and optimistic and saying, "Yes, of course we can do that." Now,
if you're interested about scope creep and negative impact on projects, go search YouTube,
Adriana Girdler Scope Creep and you'll find another video that I have on that topic,
which I do recommend that you check out because that hand-in-hand with being able to say no
becomes really important. It's quite powerful for you as a project manager. So being able to say no
is just as important as it is in order to say yes. You are good at getting people excited and
motivated. Why is this so important if you're a project manager? Well, let's
put things on the table. No one directly reports in to you when you're a project manager.
All of your project team, your subject matter experts, they actually report in to direct
managers and they have a whole bunch of other tasks and deliverables that they have to get done,
including the task and activity on your project. So I wish in the perfect world people just get the
work done because they have to get it done, but there's going to be tons of competing priorities.
So I find if you actually have a fun project, even though it's work and you properly motivate
individuals, then they're going to want to work on your project because it just brings us lightness
to, let's be honest, sometimes work is work. So one of the things that I love to do in order to
inject some fun is we pick themes on Lego characters and if you've seen some
of my other videos, I talk about that. So for Superman, Wonder Woman, I use
Emmett here quite a few times. Everything is awesome. And we just have fun with it because
part of project management too is communication, and we've done things where we've had meetings
and we've had our character here guiding us along the way where we have fun. We interject a little
bit of either a Superman quote or whatever quote of our theme is into our PowerPoints.
We even taken them on trips and our own internal communications or even internal newsletters,
we've shown that. And I have an example here. A lot of fun stuff that we go over and above
just to make people connected to the project, particularly when they don't report in to you. So
there is a little bit of that that you have to do as a project manager, but it really is worth it
because people will want to go to your meeting and they will ensure that they get things done because
there's this funness and just this connectivity that they have with you that is not just work.
You perform well in high pressure situations. I would love to say that project management
was smooth and clear sailing and you only did your plan once and you would execute everything
according to that perfectly with no hitch. That's not the case. I've never come across a project
that's never had an issue or some high pressure scenario situation. The key is you're able to
remain calm. You have some discernment from it and that you can look at things logically in order to
find solutions. That becomes really important and a huge skill set for really good project managers.
Now, how do you go about getting really good and calm in high pressure situations?
Well, one of the things, and I've talked about this before is breathe through it and hold your
breath because when you hold all the tension, and that stays within you, so take some deep breaths.
You also want to be able to ensure that you have all your project documentation ready to look at,
evaluate, bring in the right people to come up with contingency plans. And if you actually did
my Slay Project Management course, you would have done your risk register which you could easily go
to in order to figure out what your mitigation and contingency plan for this high pressure
risk that just came to fruition. So really important to know how to stay calm and carry on.
You are willing to dedicate time and energy towards learning new skills
and continuously improving. I'm a big believer in continuous improvement. In fact,
I believe I will continuously learn up until the day of my last breath because that's a
fundamental belief that I have. And if you take that perspective, you'll be amazed with just
how much better you get at project management. The way I am today as a project manager and as a
leader is so much different than how I was when I first started, because I just didn't know.
I didn't have certain skill sets. I was a newbie. I was really green when it came to doing anything.
And how I am now is a progression of learning, getting new skillsets, continuously improving,
taking lessons learned, and actually doing something with it. So that becomes really
important. I really highly recommend, never stop learning. And because there's so much
constantly going on and changes constantly with us, there's always something that you can do to
become the best person you can be, which means you're going to be a better project manager and
in essence, a better leader for your team. You are organized. Now you may be saying,
"Adriana, that's a given." But you'll be surprised. It's not a given. So if you're
going to really improve the project management skill set, organization is key. When you're
project managing, you are leading lots of people who have dependencies on each other,
tight timelines, you're managing up, you're managing down. So it really becomes important
in order for you to juggle all those balls in a year to have really good organizational skills
and just really ensure that everything's clean and take the time after a meeting, for example,
to get all your notes done and send them out immediately or put them away immediately.
Don't let things sit. If you stay organized and you do things as they come through organization,
it only takes, I promise you, an extra minute to five minutes. It is worthwhile.
Don't let things accumulate because that's how you slowly slipped down into bad habits.
So definitely focus on organizational skills. Now, don't forget to save your seat to my free training
on the top five key secrets that are just going to make project management smooth and sailing for
you. Something I highly recommend that you do. And it's free. My goodness. How great is that?
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