EQ, leadership and project management

As you've learnt, effective leaders have good relationship skills. And, unlike IQ and some theories about EQ, these skills are social and cultural and are learned. They are not something that you either have or don’t have. Even if you’ve learnt bad relationship skills, you can learn again.

Managing a project requires leadership qualities. It involves developing and maintaining relationships, building project teams, collaborating with stakeholders and a lot of negotiating. So if you are going to bring a project in on time and under budget, you'll need to be perceptive and really notice how everything is proceeding. You will also need to know about:

• Teams
• Change management
• Leadership – including decision making, controlling emotions, managing fairly.

Project managers and their teams might be working on several different projects at once, including in other countries. Clearly, it is not enough for any team member to bring just technical skills to the project. This is especially true of the project manager: relationships need to be developed, teams need to be motivated, change needs to be managed. If we can improve our ability to perceive emotions of others, we can empathise, and adjust our style to achieve a better outcome.

Project management tools – like action plans, project charters, planning templates or Gantt charts – can help with communication, clear goals and milestones. All of these activities need to be managed intelligently.