PMHUB-G Becoming a Complete Project Management Professional: Balancing Hard and Soft Skills

 Whether a PMP or considering earning one, we must all come to grips with the balancing act between hard skills and soft skills.  We can become highly trained in the tools and techniques of project management, yet our ultimate success as Project Managers will be attributed largely to soft skills.  In fact, many experts in the field agree that PM's spend up to 90% of their time on interpersonal relations and activities requiring strong soft skills. 

 

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) 4th Edition contains Appendix G, , 'Interpersonal Skills', which outlines interpersonal, or soft skills, that complement the rest of the PMBOK, which is more hard skill oriented.  While this provides seemingly scant appreciation for the soft skill set we are using 90% of the time, it is not meant to be the focus of the PMBOK.  So how and where do people build these soft skills that are so critical to our success?  In other words, how can we tie together the hard skills that define the profession - like project management tools and techniques - and the soft skills that largely define what we actually do with our time? 

 

In my personal experience, I have found that younger project managers tend to have project management knowledge skewed to hard skills, such as project management tools and techniques.  More experienced project managers tend to have stronger soft skills, where managerial, leadership, and communication skills have been finely honed with experience over time.

 

Balancing hard skills and soft skills is a powerful combination, but it is a unique challenge for each individual to determine how to strike that balance.  When that balance is struck, hard skills and soft skills tend to support each other!

 

The key is to tackle the challenging situations that we see in our day to day world as project managers by using strategies for applying common sense managerial and leadership in each problem we face.  In other words, in addition to the hard skills of project management, we need to apply soft skills in the world of stakeholder management, scheduling, negotiating with suppliers and service providers, recruiting team members, accumulating and analyzing performance data, and much more!  

 

I find that most soft skills point eventually to leadership. Whether it is communicating an unforeseen risk to stakeholders, dealing with performance issues with a supplier, integrating a new team member into the team, or meeting with the team to build an effective plan, we need to think like leaders in order to leverage our combination of soft skills and hard skills to truly produce results.

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For PMP candidates, our current Special Offer encourages you to focus on preparing for the PMP exam and building the necessary hard skills...but also provides a year to add add key soft skills with out "Project Management from a People Perspective" course series - and earn your first PDUs.  See our Special Offers page at http://www.pmtrainingonline.com/site/1648622/page/1584835.

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