Sunday 30 September 2012

Learn Leadership Skills and Maximize Your Productivity


By: David Shoemaker
Project management and project leadership require the ability to apply leadership skills to minimize uncertainty and maximize the contributions of a team. Project leaders learn how to build a cohesive and effective team able to execute successful projects by leveraging the team’s collective intelligence.

Project leaders are trained to manage the human challenges of forming and motivating a productive team. One way to ensure this is embrace differences within the group. There are ways to ensure that projects and objectives are met on time and it is important for managers to do this in an effective way.

Although project leaders should be concerned about making sure assignments are completed on time, it is also important for managers to understand the psychological contract between team members and between team members and the manager. In project leadership it is also important to understand what consequences not meeting a person’s expectations may cause. Within a team setting, this can cause problems between a project leader and team members. If a team member doesn’t feel rewarded for example, a cycle of demotivation may begin to occur. Demotivation causes team members and even the manager to become irritated, upset, disconnected, and resentment. However, demotivation sometimes occurs because not only are people unclear about their expectations, sometimes those expectations change and people are unsure about what they want until they do not receive it.

In project leadership training it is vital for the group that the project manager present detailed information to the development teams. To ensure the success of product and service design the leader should identify and eliminate risk factors in the design, preventing wasted development budgets, as well as future sales difficulties, product recalls, and bad press. It is important in project management that the leader continuously improves the system design to reduce waste and gain cost efficiencies.

An important aspect of project management and leadership is project leadership training. Training in systems design and training in project management teach you how to create sustainable competitive advantage for your business by improving your knowledge and usage of system design principles. This training helps you understand how to build better products and services while you also learn how to identify what customers want and how to address those desires in your products and services. Training in project management will help you understand how to build demand into your business.

An astute project manager constantly monitors the people on her team to find out what expectations they have for her and the organization. A properly trained manager will then also try to make explicit that which is so totally implicit, trying to make it very clear what people need and want. If there are unrealistic expectations, then the manager needs to find gentle ways to bring those expectations into clearer light, and to make explicit that which the organization can and will offer. People on the team may be disappointed, but if they are aware of how and why something is likely to play out well in advance of not receiving what they expected, they are more likely to avoid a cycle of demotivation and will continue to work to improve projects.

Copyright (c) 2010 eCornell
David Shoemaker is Vice President of Learning Solutions and Innovation at eCornell. For more information on project leadership training, training in project management, or eCornell, please visit www.eCornell.com

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