Anthony Mersino asked - over at EQ4PM - What makes project managers successful?
Along with Anthony, I too am vitally interested in this question. Perhaps if I add a few words to Anthony’s challenging inquiry – I could put forward a brain based thought or two for your consideration. 
My quesion is ...
What makes a project manager successful, and could smart skills help to integrate soft and hard skills for more success?
First, let me say that I am in agreement with Anthony’s take on the value and centrality of emotional intelligence. What I say will hopefully add a few thoughts to Anthony’s excellent offerings
I’d like to address the issue of why we fail to help project managers to meet their successful peaks. My response relates to the way we framed skills to meet the needs of a factory like workplace, and the need to create new standards and benchmarks that meet the needs of managers who solve complex problems, for a competitive edge, in a fast paced, and global marketplace.
The field continues to grow through blogs like Anthony's. Researchers such as Ralph Muller and J. Rodney Turner also show how emotional intelligence is more important than intelligence in predicting project success. When managers apply ideas from Goleman's book The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace, for instance EQ helps to determine how well an individual does in a particular line of work. It's needed!
Anthony Mersino asked though, about additional factors at play, and I’d like to add one to his own excellent suggestions -- and to ideas from Elizabeth Harrin on Projects@Work. Both sites inspired my search for more capitalist creativity at work. How so? Through smart skills which reframe traditional hard and soft skills and add rubrics that measures both.
Smart skills, for instance, would ...
- help project managers with low emotional or personal intelligence, for instance, to begin to grow new skills in this area.
- meld problem solving strategies into part of neuron growth taught to project managers and evidenced in their teams.
-enable the PM dig for multiple perspectives for controversial topics.
- motivate, so that technology growth and application, as the driving force behind their benefits.
- propel project managers to become self-starters because of serotonin tips that accompany smart skills.
- create successful change pathways for ongoing growth, through for mind-bending process management.
- ensure timely project completion, and require in accuracy with truthful results.
In addition to EQ, they'd include multiple intelligence clinchers as a way to draw from a person’s unique full range of intellectual capabilities. Smart skills increase a project manager's opportunities to develop weaknesses as well of strengths among team members.
That’s my two-bits and it’s also why we should care about your work Anthony, Galba Bright’s topnotch work in this area, Elizabeth Harrin’s work, which I just discovered - and many other experts out there who inspire us with their research and practices.
Thanks for creating space to add another angle to EQ excellence ... such as smart skill standards that could bring evidence of the adventures you suggest, Anthony. When these tactics translate into visible operations that improve the workplace, ongoing success is already underway - for project managers and their teams.
Your turn....
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