This post is part one of two where I'm discussing how project managers almost always end up using diverse skills to manage (not control) projects. (Part 2 is here!) I'm writing it because one of the most common flags I see in early project managers is this idea of wanting to "control" teams, schedules, and budgets and in doing so "control" the project.

And yet the discourse pretty overwhelmingly agrees that we can't control pretty much anything outside ourselves. For example, here are a just a couple of project-related examples of things we can't control:

• Whether other people do their work well
• Whether other people do their work on time
• Whether people attend your meetings, or read their email
• Whether people on your team are friendly
• Basically anything else about what other people do, or don't do, or are like, or enjoy, or or or or or.

So what's a project manager to do, if our job is to control the project?

This is a tricky and nuanced answer, but the short answer is: we don't "control" the project. We cultivate and use a set of skills that allows us to manage the project. (Welcome to that feeling you get when you're watching a movie and someone says the title of the movie.)

This is an important distinction for two reasons: First, and internally, it gives you a place to start if you're thinking about pivoting into project management but not sure which pieces of your own professional development to invest into. Second, and externally, you will run into so many hiring managers and colleagues who really do believe that your job is to just... control things. Including all of the items on the above list and then some. So the clearer you can get internally about what we're actually doing and the skills we're actually using when we're managing projects, the better we can get about dispelling those misconceptions up front.

Managing involves creating an environment that is hospitable for a project to thrive, making a plan to help it thrive, monitoring it carefully as the project team gets the work done and implementing risk responses as necessary, and then analyzing the work after it's been completed to see what we can learn. That's it. (For the record... this is also a very plain-language translation of the project management life cycle.) So we're looking here at: what are the skills that allow us to do this?

There are many, many frameworks we can use to explore this, and I've simply picked one of many that will work: in this and the next blog post, I'll be going through each of the four CliftonStrengths domains (executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking) and mapping them generally against the role of a project manager.

This will help you with the above: internally understanding how you're already set up to get into the true nitty gritty of PM work, and then externally communicating that to ✨interested stakeholders✨. (Like.... perhaps... a hiring manager. You do what you want, but I'm just saying!)

When I say you're probably already doing project management, I'm not messing around.

Project Managers Use Relationship-Building Skills

Whenever you're thinking about how to leverage relationship-building skills in framing your project management experience, I want you to come back to two main concepts:

1) Stakeholders. Anyone with a "stake" in a project's success is a stakeholder. These folks can be internal to the organization, or they can be external, like customers, or people with stock in a company, or community members impacted by a project. You can imagine that a project manager will need to build strong relationships with each of these groups! (I link a longer post about stakeholders below.)

Managing stakeholders is one of the two things that is almost guaranteed to come up in a PM job interview (the other is managing scope, which we'll talk more about when we talk about Executing and Strategic Thinking strengths), so you truly cannot over-prepare to talk about your relationship-building skills... as long as you're talking about them in the context of managing stakeholders.

2) Coaching vs supervision. Often, project managers are working with project teams that they don't directly supervise. This means that it becomes even more important that PMs understand how to give strong feedback and coaching without it being based in authority... because you may not have authority over the people you're working with to get things done!

Often, Higher Ed/Student Affairs folks have this experience baked into our roles (think about every time you've led a committee with someone who didn't report to you, but still needed your coaching), but I also often see it relegated to the infamous "soft skills" bucket. Getting clear on how these skills strongly relate to project management is the first step in speaking about them with confidence!