The Eight Essential People Skills for Project Management

Veteran project manager and University of California professor Zachary Wong identifies the eight most common people problems in managing projects and offers a flexible, customizable approach to solving them, based on a lifetime of research. Being a team leader is a demanding job that is expected to get even more demanding in the coming years. You're expected to be part parent, part referee, part coach, part manager and part frustrated. And today's workforce is more diverse, more knowledgeable, more complex and more dynamic than ever before. So where are the new tools for this ever-more complex job? Drawing on decades of experience as a senior manager at Chevron, a management consultant, and an "Honored Instructor" at U.C. Berkeley, Zachary Wong identifies the top eight people skills that project team leaders need. To master these skills he doesn't prescribe specific habits or behaviors. Instead, he gives team leaders a tool or model to help them see and diagnose people problems more clearly and then offers different options and ideas to help them decide which actions best fit their situation and who they are--he empowers team leaders rather than constrains them. This book takes a uniquely flexible approach to the always-vexing problem of getting the best contributions from the people on your team.