The Socially Intelligent Project Manager


Book Description

This no-nonsense guide to social intelligence for project managers gives you a step-by-step process for building a bulletproof project team—no matter what gaps exist in personality, geography, culture, or communication style. High-performing teams don't happen by magic. You need processes that are designed in a socially intelligent way if your team is going to overcome the modern world's tough challenges with coordination. To be a star project manager, you have to communicate with people in their individual learning styles, provide accountability in ways that won't be demotivating, and run meetings and minutes that people won't tune out. Your processes must be constructed in ways that respect the complex realities of social dynamics step by step. You have to know your team before you can motivate them, and you have to motivate them before you can manage them. In this book are foolproof techniques to make sure your team connects with you, each other, and everyone they need to get the job done. After all, a team should be more than the sum of its parts—and it's up to the project manager to provide the glue that holds it all together.




The Socially Intelligent Project Manager


Book Description

This no-nonsense guide to social intelligence for project managers gives you a step-by-step process for building a bulletproof project team—no matter what gaps exist in personality, geography, culture, or communication style. High-performing teams don't happen by magic. You need processes that are designed in a socially intelligent way if your team is going to overcome the modern world's tough challenges with coordination. To be a star project manager, you have to communicate with people in their individual learning styles, provide accountability in ways that won't be demotivating, and run meetings and minutes that people won't tune out. Your processes must be constructed in ways that respect the complex realities of social dynamics step by step. You have to know your team before you can motivate them, and you have to motivate them before you can manage them. In this book are foolproof techniques to make sure your team connects with you, each other, and everyone they need to get the job done. After all, a team should be more than the sum of its parts—and it's up to the project manager to provide the glue that holds it all together.




Stop Managing and Start Leading--the Socially Intelligent Leader


Book Description

"Successful projects" is a much-argued term. Too many definitions and key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the different levels of project success. This paper is not intended to add more definitions or argue new KPIs. It explains the human factor of projects and its importance for project success, regardless of what or how the success is defined. According to a growing body of studies and research in the scholarly literature, business managers (including project managers) should develop new skills, particularly social and emotional intelligence skills, to deal with people and their evolving mindsets and changing attitudes. To sustain project success and consequently business growth, project managers should lead more than manage; should understand, influence, coach, trust, and inspire the people around them more than just craft schedules, control budget, manage scope, and monitor progress. This paper discusses emotional and social intelligence. Furthermore, it looks at social skills and project success as well as emotional regulation and the socially intelligent leader. The emotional and social skills framework is presented. The paper concludes by identifying 14 traits of effective and socially intelligent leaders.




Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers


Book Description

You’ve spent years gathering the technical intelligence you need for this challenging career--now separate yourself from the pack by increasing your emotional intelligence! As recent research has indicated that emotional intelligence (EI) now accounts for 70 to 80 percent of management success, there is no doubt that today’s successful project manager needs strong interpersonal skills and the ability to recognize emotional cues to lead their teams to success--the technical expertise the position depended on so greatly in the past simply isn’t enough anymore! Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers introduces you to all facets of EI and shows how emotions can be leveraged to meet project goals. Project managers strong in technical skills but needing help in the EI department will learn how to: Set the tone and direction for the project Communicate effectively Motivate, inspire, and engage their team Encourage flexibility and collaboration Deal productively with stress, criticism, and change Establish the kind of high morale that attracts top performers Now in its second edition, Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers includes several expanded sections on self-awareness and self-management, as well as a new chapter on using EI to lead Agile Teams and a close look at Servant Leadership.




Interactive Project Management


Book Description

As an industry, interactive is different. The work entails elements of software development, marketing, and advertising, yet it’s neither purely technical nor traditional “agency” work. Delivery methods are different, and because the industry is relatively new, the gap in understanding between the clients buying the work and the teams building it is often wide. Enter the geek girls guide. Nancy Lyons and Meghan Wilker don’t just tell you how to deliver digital work, they demonstrate how to think about it. Interactive Project Management: Pixels, People, and Process helps clients, agencies, and industry professionals better understand the critical role of interactive project management, and presents a collaborative, people-focused approach to delivering high-quality digital work. In this book, the authors: Define the unique characteristics of interactive projects Explain the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace Discuss communication techniques that help teams work together more efficiently Outline a process and specific deliverables that clarify how to think about critical aspects of a project Provide questions, tasks, tips, and advice that effectively move teams from initiation to launch




The Intelligent Company


Book Description

Today's most successful companies are Intelligent Companies that use the best available data to inform their decision making. This is called Evidence-Based Management and is one of the fastest growing business trends of our times. Intelligent Companies bring together tools such as Business Intelligence, Analytics, Key Performance Indicators, Balanced Scorecards, Management Reporting and Strategic Decision Making to generate real competitive advantages. As information and data volumes grow at explosive rates, the challenges of managing this information is turning into a losing battle for most companies and they end up drowning in data while thirsting for insights. This is made worse by the severe skills shortage in analytics, data presentation and communication. This latest book by best-selling management expert Bernard Marr will equip you with a set of powerful skills that are vital for successful managers now and in the future. Increase your market value by gaining essential skills that are in high demand but in short supply. Loaded with practical step-by-step guidance, simple tools and real life examples of how leading organizations such as Google, CocaCola, Capital One, Saatchi & Saatchi, Tesco, Yahoo, as well as Government Departments and Agencies have put the principles into practice. The five steps to more intelligent decision making are: Step 1: More intelligent strategies by identifying strategic priorities and agreeing your real information needs Step 2: More intelligent data by creating relevant and meaningful performance indicators and qualitative management information linked back to your strategic information needs Step 3: More intelligent insights by using good evidence to test and prove ideas and by analysing the data to gain robust and reliable insights Step 4: More intelligent communication by creating informative and engaging management information packs and dashboards that provide the essential information, packaged in an easy-to-read way Step 5: More intelligent decision making by fostering an evidence-based culture of turning information into actionable knowledge and real decisions "Bernard Marr did it again! This outstanding and practical book will help your company become more intelligent and more successful. Marr takes the fields of business-intelligence, analytics and scorecarding to bring them together into a powerful and easy-to-follow 5-step framework. The Intelligent Company is THE must-read book of our times." Bruno Aziza, Co-author of best-selling book Drive Business Performance and Worldwide Strategy Lead, Microsoft Business Intelligence "Book after book Bernard Marr is redefining the fundamentals of good business management. The Intelligent Company is a must read in these changing times and a reference you will want on your desk every day!" Gabriel Bellenger, Accenture Strategy




Cognitive Readiness in Project Teams


Book Description

Issues surrounding business complexity plague organizations throughout the world. This situation is particularly true of the numerous complex projects and programs upon which organizations embark on a regular basis. Current project management processes and standards are based on Newtonian/Cartesian principles, such as linearity, reductionism, and single source problem causation. However, complex projects exhibit both Newtonian/Cartesian characteristics and complex systems characteristics, such as emergence, self-organization, non-linearity, non-reductionism, and multi-source problem causation. To conduct successful projects, complementary ways of approaching projects are required, and new competencies for those who manage projects and for those on project teams are required as well. There are a number of books available to help project managers and teams address the issue of systems behavior. However, there are none that approach complex projects from a neuroscience-based approach to human behavior and ambiguity. This book does exactly that in order to reduce project complexity and thereby increase the probability of project success. Cognitive Readiness in Project Teams looks to the concept of cognitive readiness (CR), first developed by the United States Department of Defense to better prepare and manage teams of individuals in complex battlefield situations. Its intent is to make project managers and teams more focused, responsive, resilient and adaptive through self-mastery and the mastering of interpersonal relationships. It introduces a CR framework for project managers and teams. This framework has neuroscience fundamentals and theorems as the foundation for the three pillars of CR: mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. The book is a compendium of chapters written by renowned authors in the fields of project management, neuroscience, mindfulness, and emotional and social intelligence.




Socially Intelligent Agents


Book Description

Socially situated planning provides one mechanism for improving the social awareness ofagents. Obviously this work isin the preliminary stages and many of the limitation and the relationship to other work could not be addressed in such a short chapter. The chief limitation, of course, is the strong commitment to de?ning social reasoning solely atthe meta-level, which restricts the subtlety of social behavior. Nonetheless, our experience in some real-world military simulation applications suggest that the approach, even in its preliminary state, is adequate to model some social interactions, and certainly extends the sta- of-the art found in traditional training simulation systems. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the Army Research Institute under contract TAPC-ARI-BR References [1] J. Gratch. Emile: Marshalling passions in training and education. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 325–332, New York, 2000. ACM Press. [2] J. Gratch and R. Hill. Continous planning and collaboration for command and control in joint synthetic battlespaces. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, Orlando, FL, 1999. [3] B. Grosz and S. Kraus. Collaborative plans for complex group action. Arti?cial Intelli gence, 86(2):269–357, 1996. [4] A. Ortony, G. L. Clore, and A. Collins. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 1988. [5] R.W.PewandA.S.Mavor,editors. Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior. National Academy Press, Washington D.C., 1998.




Essential People Skills for Project Managers


Book Description

A Treasury of How-to Guidance for Project Success! People problems can really hurt your project, causing delays, eroding quality, increasing costs, and resulting in high levels of stress for everyone on the team. Yet if you're like most project managers, you've never been taught the soft skills necessary for managing tough people issues. Essential People Skills for Project Managers brings the key concepts of people skills into sharp focus, offering specific, practical skills that you can grasp quickly, apply immediately, and use to resolve these often difficult people issues. Derived from the widely popular original book, People Skills for Project Managers, this new version provides condensed content and a practical focus. • Apply project leadership techniques with confidence • Resolve conflicts and motivate team members • Help a team recover after a critical incident • Determine your team members' personal styles so you can work more effectively with them You'll also learn how to apply people skills for a more successful career and life! • Discover how to manage stress – personal and professional • Learn proven methods for managing your own career • Find out how to thrive in an atmosphere of change




Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers


Book Description

In order to run projects successfully, project managers need to master more than the requisite technical knowledge. The more complex the project, the more significant their interpersonal skills become to achieving a successful outcome. Without the people skills necessary to lead effectively, even the most carefully orchestrated project can quickly fall apart. Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers introduces readers to the basic concepts of emotional intelligence and shows how to apply them to their project goals. Readers will learn how to: * set the tone and direction for the project * communicate more effectively * improve listening skills * create a positive work environment * motivate, coach, and mentorteam members * productively handle stress, criticism, and blame * and more. Complete with checklists and self-assessments, this handy guide enables project managers to apply these important skills to their projects right away.