Project manager personality as a factor for success

Most of us can recall people from our environment for whom everything seems to be easy. Such acquaintances or friends succeed at everything they touch in work or private life. Everything seems to fall into place for them, like if they had their private Project Management Office in the backyard.

Contemporary psychologists assume that for professional success and performance a combination of our personality and cognitive skills is a decisive factor¹. Professional success is not only of interest to individuals, but also brings benefits on the organizational level, since academic and professional growth comes together with increasing of the expertise level, positively influences income and at the end of the day leads to a better job and life satisfaction.

What types of skills does Project Managers need?

Project Managers deal with projects in almost all industries in the world. Understanding the Client’s organizational needs and then clarifying them together should always be the first step when starting to cooperate with a client. Many Project Managers help organizations define the project goal, they usually plan scope, work structure and timeframes for projects, map the required resources and skills, keep an eye on the project costs and risks with mitigation measures. As an external professionals, experienced in many projects in various industries, they are coping better with avoiding mistakes related to inadequate estimation of the project budget, the implementation time of future projects and variable external factors influencing project realization than internal organization employees involved in the project implementation.

In planning and delivery of the project they take on management responsibility for the executive team, report to the respective accountable managers and communicate with stakeholders. Through experience a Project Manager develops a professional skill set, which consists of two parts:

hard skills, which are technical or methodological know-how’s, and
soft skills: as a Project Manager leads a project team.

Project Manager should be able to motivate the group, negotiate between different (sometimes conflicting) parties and be able to communicate on different levels in an organization.

What is more important from the set of project management skills - soft or hard? The answer is: it is like a sandwich with bacon - you can’t get it done without both. Unfortunately, it is still a situation in some companies that the need for social competences for these professionals is neglected and project specialists are appointed without the appropriate soft skills training. As a result, underdeveloped competences of Project Managers may cost companies potential losses of revenue, time, knowledge resources or even human capital. Employees nowadays pay more attention to a well-balanced and sustainable working environment which demands the right project manager in the right team with a handful of soft and hard skills and who also take care of their wellbeing and personal development.

Personality allows Project Managers to succeed

Some Project Managers succeed at their workplaces without any sufficient soft skill training, just by learning from their experience and relying on their intuition how to lead a group of specialists, manage conflicts and adjust the communication style. Together with them the whole project team succeeds and often organization prospers with the development of its members. What helps such professionals in their daily challenges? The answer is simple - their personality traits.

One of the most common known leadership traits personality models is The Big Five framework, proposed by Costa and McCrae; and Goldberg in 1992. The model describes personality traits with 5 factors, first letters of which build the acronym CANOE - conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism openness, and extraversion or OCEAN with another order of factors. Let’s take a deeper look at every one of them and how they may affect the Project Manager’s work.

Conscientiousness
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Openness
Extraversion

Conscientiousness

The nature of project management is professional organization of work for others, which requires from an individual a high level of self-organization, discipline and being persistent and reliable. These are exactly the traits from which the conscientiousness factor consists. Project Managers with a higher level of this trait enjoy having a schedule set, organized structure prepared, tasks in the project scope prioritized, so that they tend to finish the most important ones first.

Agreeableness

People with a high level of this trait usually enjoy helping people and care about others. They have a great deal of interest in other people, tend to be altruistic, kind, cooperative and trustful. Project Managers have to deal with many different specialists on different organizational levels and introduce the change related to their project. If he or she cares about people, whose work life is affected by the project scope, and demonstrates a high level of people-focus, they are more likely to succeed. In personal life such people usually have a strong need for harmony.

Neuroticism

People with a low level of neuroticism stay calm in stressful situations and are usually in general very stable emotionally. Project Managers with inner balance tend to cope better with various perturbations, which usually appear in projects on a different scale, they don’t worry much, do not tend to feel the worst, are resilient and not likely to lose their temper. A project management team, which is led by an emotionally stable and resilient leader, is more likely to prosper and not to waste their vigor and energy.

Openness

Project Managers with a high level of openness tend to have inner curiosity in the field of managed projects, they usually have many different interests, use creative solutions and are inquisitive.In other words - they tend to ask a lot of questions. These people usually have many interests in private life, they are rather adventurous, easily get inspired and enjoy new experiences

Extraversion

Typical extravert likes to start a conversation, feels energized around people, likes to make new connections and enjoys being in the center of attention. A Project Manager with high extraversion is more likely to enjoy hours of project calls, meeting new people and is eager to start conversations with them, when he/she has to get the things done. People with high extraversion traits are usually people-oriented, have a wide range of contacts and are enthusiastic, especially, while making new connections.

Personal development should be based on the inner talents

Personality traits are not the sole elements, which define how a person realizes their potential. According to CliftonStrengths research, the best way to achieve success at work is to invest time and effort into the natural talents. Spending more time on natural talents multiplies them and creates a real strength and is a more preferable way of development, than trying to compensate for what is less natural.

To illustrate the idea let’s think about a Project Manager Anna. Let’s agree that Anna has strong talent A and weak talent B: A=100x; and B =20x (where x are just variables, measuring the talent)

Than investing 10h into the talent A, Anna will get 10h x 100x = 1000y of outcome for talent A
At the same time investing 10h into talent B, this person will get 10h x 20x = 200y of outcome for talent B

Spending the same amount of time for development of the strength is much more preferable than the compensation approach. Gallup research shows that people who use their strengths every day are 6 times more likely to be engaged at work, therefore you can select the right people for the project and a team who will not only be engaged, but more likely to succeed.

At PwC, we not only relying on and supporting all the strengths of our Project Manager and PMO Specialist in the development, but also helping to develop their less leading talents and enable them to upskill their competences as well as providing appropriate support in their path of development. Managers are able to stand for and lead their colleagues in the right direction because they know that the combination of natural talents combined with growth on less leading strength allow them to bring even more benefits, personal success and also positively influence on their afterwork life.

Successful Project Managers have leaders traits and develop them further

Most of the inner traits of project leaders, helping them to achieve great results, are related to the interpersonal relationships and ability to influence and motivate others. There was no Project Manager in history who achieved great project results without a group of skilled professionals working in the same direction. Leadership traits are absolutely essential for Project Managers and they may be greatly supported by good soft skills training.

Based on their experience Project Managers build widely developed leadership competences, which are usually considered as a combination of gained skills, demonstrated behaviors and attitudes (based on values) of a person. The attitudes and behaviors may be influenced by personal traits, such as resilience, inner stability, being organized or people-oriented. At the same time developing soft skills is affected by personality characteristics and talents, while investing the same amount of effort into the different levels of talents gives different results. Another important success factor for a Project Manager is cooperation with other project professionals, knowledge and expertise sharing and access to gained experience on the organizational level.

At PwC we start with building our team of project management specialists based on their personal traits and competences. Further we support them with development of their competences with theoretical knowledge and practical expertise. At the same time, in the PMO team they have a safe place to exchange the experience and good practices from various range of projects and different Clients in different industry sectors, scale of projects and level of management in the organization.

Moreover, PwC Project Managers and PMO specialists can support the project on the level the organization needs on the ad-hoc basis, without the need from the Client's side to take organizational risks of establishing an internal PMO team. At the same time, having an experience of building our own PMO team, establishing standards and processes for project management, PwC team has enough experience to propose for a Client the “all-inclusive” support with building and introducing PMO well balanced to the existing structure of the Client.