The Glowan Consulting Group

How can Project Managers move from just managing projects to leading projects and cross-functional teams? An important step is by mastering 6 Key leadership skills called Smart Skills™.

These skills are necessary to build, lead and manage project teams. Acquiring theses skills allows you to exercise influence without authority, stay emotionally intelligent in the face of ongoing project challenges, utilize negotiation skills for win/wins, and monitor and control project performance. All this is accomplished with high-level communication skills and the use of appreciative inquiry.

Smart Skills™: The Art of Project Leadership Program Description

Smart Skills™ creates Project Leaders who are more than just Project Managers; they become talented individuals that have mastered the 6 Smart Skills necessary to build a high-performing project team, leverage the collective intelligence of the group, manage it through the process of completing a project, and exercise influence with out authority to ensure superior results.

This six-course teleseminar series is designed to build the critical Leadership Skills that Project Management Professionals (PMPs), project managers, need to lead a project team to success.

Smart Skills™ offers Project Managers what they need to know and do to make a project or cross-functional team perform at the highest level. It does this by educating the PM with the know-how and skills they need to be able to lead and mange the uncertainty inherent in today’s complex project management environment.

Smart Skills™ are those skills relating to a Project Manager's Emotional and Social Intelligence. These skills are a cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, personal habits, interpersonal skill sets, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people, customers, stakeholders, and colleagues.  Smart Skills™ complement hard skills (part of a person's IQ), which are the occupational requirements of a job.

A person's Smart Skills™ Quotient (aggregate of this cluster of skills) is an important part of their individual contribution to the success of any team, project or organization. Particularly organizations dealing with customers face-to-face are generally more successful if they train their staff to use these skills. Assessment or training for Smart Skills™ habits or traits such as emotional intelligence and influencing can yield significant return on investment for an organization.

For this reason, employers, in addition to standard technical qualifications, increasingly seek out Project Managers well skilled in Smart Skills™.

Current research has shown that a core set of Smart Skills™ may be more important over the long term than technical or occupational skills.

The project management profession is one example where the ability to deal effectively with people, provide positive influence, and manage change can determine the true success of the project manager and the Project Management Office at large.

The Smart Skills Core Competencies

Emotional Intelligence
Influencing with Integrity
Interest Based Negotiation
Stress and Change Mgmt
Appreciative Inquiry
High Level Communication Skills

By participating in the Smart Skills™ program they close the "know-do gap" and access the true success factors of high-performance project management. Smart Skills™ are the leadership and interpersonal skills that enable them to get team members to work collaboratively and perform at the highest level.  The Smart Skills program modules are designed to introduce and distinguish the concepts of project leadership and develop the critical leadership skills necessary for the success.

The tele-seminars in this series are action learning oriented utilizing self-assessments, 360 Feedback, coaching and mentoring (individual and peer groups), educational tips, practical cases studies, and a toolkit for on-going development.

Smart Skills™ The Art of Project Leadership will enable you to:

• Utilize Smart Skills™ to manage the uncertainty inherent in projects
• Use Influence, Negotiation and Communication skills to maximize results and reduce barriers inherent in projects in matrix organizations
• Build a cohesive project team
• Leverage the collective intelligence of the team
• Understand and prevent the issues that can fragment and undermine team performance
• Monitor and control team performance
• Motivate team members to perform and achieve objectives
• Exercise political and personal influence when you don’t have the formal authority to mandate action
• Mitigate and resolve conflict to ensure the success of the project

Smart Skills™ incorporates the essential leadership skills that lead to improved project management performance recognizing that projects require the use and balance of hard and soft skills. The most effective Project Leaders understand and know how to manage the human dimension of project management and are able to exercise their own power, influence, and authority to ensure the success of projects.