Eight Essential People Skills for Project Management Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

Eight Essential People Skills for Project Management helps project managers navigate work culture in a world where office hierarchy is less defined than it once was. Wong’s basic principles are all about sticking to your values and policies, being solution-oriented, and focusing on solving problems, not punishing people.

About the Author

Zachary Wong is the author of Eight Essential People Skills for Project Management and other books. He is a professor of leadership and business management at UC Berkeley, and worked for over thirty years as a manager and consultant at Chevron.

Topics

Management & Leadership

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Key Insights

In this book on the struggle to maintain a healthy work environment as a project manager, Zachary Wong explores the eight key skills that will help project managers navigate not only challenging employee relationships, but also difficult relationships with superiors. He explores how the horizontal or “wedge” shaped workplace has changed management practices, and how to effectively manage a team and maintain employee attitudes to guarantee project success. Each chapter explores a key principle or people skill that project managers can use to guide their management practices.

In recent years, we have moved from a pyramid to wedge-shaped work culture.

In the past, the office was a top-down, hierarchical environment. It resembled a pyramid, with upper management on top and employees making up the majority of the workforce on the bottom. Rules were expected to be followed, and employees had little say in the way the company was organized and run.

That model is no longer the norm, and project management practices have to shift to reflect that. The new model is wedge-shaped, with individual contributors at one end, working teams in the middle, and management at the other end. A good project manager is able to work within each section of the wedge, to help facilitate the tech-savvy and democratic environment that most managers strive to achieve. The wedge-shaped model is less hierarchical and allows each employee to realize their full potential and move smoothly between sections. Unlike the pyramid where the size of each section was based on numbers, in the wedge, the size represents the power and resources that each section holds.

As a project manager, it is important to understand how to navigate this new system. The wedge-model is not only a way of visually the power and resources in your company - it is also a way to diagnose problems.

Use the wedge-model to diagnose work culture issues.

The wedge-model lets you visualize your work culture, but it also can help you diagnose problems, and find solutions.

Say, for example, you have an employee approach you with a problem. Her colleague is saying cruel things to her at work and degrading her in meetings. She is struggling to work with this colleague, and can’t get her projects done. This might seem like a team problem, but it also has other repercussions - because of the legal ramifications of abuse at work, you should wedge up this problem to include an HR manager. This problem needs a specialist, or manager because management has more resources and power to solve the issue.

For individual problems that don’t need to be wedged up to management, you can use an alternative model: ERAM, or expectations, resources, ability, and motivation. This acronym will help you determine why an employee might be having a problem, and how to fix it. Listen to the employee describe their dilemma, and determine the source of the problem. Were you clear about expectations for the work? Does the employee have the resources and knowledge they need to complete the work? And finally,...