You couldn’t believe how much money could be saved every day with clear communication. If you can’t meet in person, call, if you can’t call, chat, mail, pigeon post, … but arrange a point in time where you can talk person to person.

It just works. We even had a hotel desk bell at Nascom that we hit every time we called with a client as a novelty.

• When some bad news for your team stresses you out or makes you angry for some reason, take care not to contaminate other people on the project. Take some time to cool down before you bring the message. Keep things objective and focused when you do.
• If you need to get a higher sense of urgency in a team, emphasize goals, values and time constraints. Hard situations always have an optimal directions to steer things into, never panic.
• If a stakeholder (any kind) screws up badly, it’s still a stakeholder who most probably wants the best for the project. When you talk about this in your team, play the ball, not the player.

A mood is a contagious thing, when you see happy people you tend to feel happier, everybody does, it’s the way our human brains work. In that light you as a project manager are regarded as a kind of mood barometer of a project because you are supposed to have the most parameters to be happy or sad about the way things are going. Happy people are good.

Think about this when you are having a bad day. It’s easy to get caught in complaining about something to team members, don’t do it, you don’t have to lie when things are looking bad but that doesn’t mean you have to moan about it or start a speech and list your personal frustrations. You have your own boss to do that to

Watch “Saving Private Ryan”, there’s a part where Tom Hanks says complaining always goes up the ladder, it’s true.

Try some of these:

• in a stressful moment: What next thing makes the most sense at this time given the current situation?
• someone complains, ask: What can we do about this?
• when in doubt: What are the next steps?
• when things surprise you: What are these things telling us?
• after a setback: How can we learn from this?

I got inspired by a post by Steve Pavlina I remembered from long ago, in the recent past I started noticing that my CEO and other senior project managers ask these kind of questions quite a lot.

It’s funny how common sense this is, all you have to do is do it.

Here’s a list of good PM behaviors that I think are important:

1. communicate with all the people who are influenced by the project
2. monitor and control the scope, budget and planning constrains
3. understand the content of the project in enough detail to communicate, monitor and control efficiently
4. create situations that allow the team to focus on the project goals
5. help people to get the feedback they need to grow (not the same as coaching)

To give you some context on my list, in my company we create teams around a project most of the time, it’s what the Project Management Body of Knowledge would call a projectized organization.