Generally speaking there are six leadership styles: authoritative, democratic, affiliative, pace setting, commanding and coaching. Each one of these has its time and place.
But for you and me as project leaders, project management coaching should be at the top of our list. After all, it is the people working on our projects who get things done, so we want to unlock their potential.
A little while back we had Susanne Madsen on one of our leadership podcasts to discuss how her Project Management Coaching Workbook can help unleash your potential. And today, we are going to do a deep dive into various coaching techniques and how it can make you a better project leader. The tips you'll pick up will help you get better at motivation and coaching skills and working with your colleagues.
This episode is sponsored by The PM PrepCast for The PMP® Exam:
Jeff Furman, PMP - Project Management Coach
Have you ever considered being a project management mentor to another PM in your network? I can tell you from personal experience that while project management coaching sounds like a lot of work the return on investment that you personally get out of it is immense.
And so, when I received an email from Jeff Furman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefffurmanlinkedin) and he offered to discuss some of the mentoring approaches that he uses as a project management coach I was all for it.
As you can probably already tell, none of these project management mentoring approaches are rocket science. But we still have some good best practices for you to follow.
Coaching and mentoring is useful for all project managers, but it's especially useful in emerging roles, or where you don't feel that your job description is particularly clear -- the role of project manager in SAFe agile springs to mind as an important position, but perhaps one that is less understood than 'traditional' approaches to being a project manager.
Let's continue our look at How to become a project manager.
And because Josh and I realize that many of you may already have some seniority under your belt, we are also going to take this to the next level: How you can help someone - maybe a junior project or even someone who is just now starting to think about going into project management - how to help this someone as a mentor and assist them with tips and tricks. So don't dismiss this discussion, simply because you are farther along in your career. Listen to it and use the discussion to help others.
Josh is the man behind PM Student and PM Student eLearning, which you can find at www.mypmstudent.com.
This Interview with Kristy Tan Neckowicz and Dev Ramcharan was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona.
In their presentation, Kristy Tan Neckowicz (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kristytanpmp) and Dev Ramcharan reviewed harnessing leadership skills necessary to advance your PM career and shine in your role, how to hone your interpersonal and communications skills to manage teams and stakeholders and discussed ways to realize the critical importance of coaching and mentoring in your career, to demonstrate value to your organization.
And in our interview we open the presentation slides and review the following parts: Why you should care about interpersonal skills, behavior styles and motivators, emotional intelligence, the emotional wake, organizational culture and politics, and we close with the all important look at conflict management and coaching.
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PMI, PMBOK, PMP, PgMP, PfMP, CAPM, PMI-SP, PMI-RMP, PMI-ACP, and PMI-PBA are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
