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Difficult bosses are everywhere. At some point in your career, you’re likely to have a difficult boss. So, what do you do when you find yourself in this situation? Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels. Bosses are people, situations are different, and each boss may have a different management style. You may assume that bosses get management training or they’re hired because of their excellent management skills.
Many organizations don’t fully understand the benefits of project management. Here’s how your skills and expertise help organizations deliver greater value for their efforts. This article was originally published on September 30, 2016, and has been updated. Can you easily explain the value you provide to an organization as a project manager?
The STAR method is a simple framework for answering behavioral interview questions. It formats your interview answers in a way that shows interviewers how your experiences make you an outstanding candidate for the job you’re interviewing for. It’s a great formula for crafting a success story that highlights your skills and experience. What Is the STAR Interview Method?
With remote work here to stay, virtual leadership skills are critical for productive teams. Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels. The trend towards remote work is rising. This means a huge transformation to the way businesses work in distributed workplaces where every member works from a separate location. As per Gartner’s research, about 47% of the respondents intend to allow employees full-time remote working opportunities.
These common cognitive biases are rampant and can easily skew your thinking. We’re all vulnerable to being misled and not thinking as clearly as we could – even when we think we’re behaving in our best interest. These cognitive biases can negatively affect our decision-making, critical thinking, and behavior, getting us stuck in ways that work against us.
Monroe’s Motivated Sequence outlines principles of speech you can use anytime you need to move an audience to act. This powerful communication formula is easy to understand and gives you a template for creating powerful messages. Alan Monroe was a psychology professor at Purdue University. He used the psychology of persuasion to develop an outline for speeches that deliver results.
The Moscow Prioritization method can help you and your product team decide what you need to focus on for your project. If you’ve got multiple key stakeholders lobbying for various features, having a way to score them can help determine which product features to focus on first. What is the MoSCoW Prioritization Method? Dai Clegg created the MoSCoW prioritization method while working at Oracle to help his team prioritize project requirements.
It can be tough to make your virtual meetings more engaging. But doing so can ensure you’re getting the most value from the session, and creating an experience your remote meeting participants will enjoy. Meeting participants are by now accustomed to meeting online. But meeting virtually isn’t the same as sitting across the table from your teammates.
The Tuckman model of team development describes the stages that groups go through as they mature. By moving from forming, storming, norming, and performing, your team will perform well and produce great work. Learn how to identify and help your team move through these stages of development to get the best from your team and your projects. This guide works even if you’re working with a virtual team.
As a project manager and team lead, creating psychological safety is an essential part of creating and maintaining high-performing teams. What is Psychological Safety? Psychological safety refers to feeling like we have permission to express our thoughts and feelings, even those that may seem unpopular or controversial. It also includes having access to information about others’ actions and decisions.
Learning how to appear more confident in meetings can help you get noticed and project a more polished and professional presence. It’s even harder to look confident and maintain a powerful presence in virtual meetings. But to get the most out of them, it’s important to know how to elevate your presence when you’re meeting remotely. It’s not always easy to look confident and get noticed.
Among the many productivity hacks out there, the Pomodoro Technique is one of the simplest and most effective. It’s a great time management tool for increased focus and productivity. It’s a simple method that involves working for 25 minutes, then taking a 5-minute break to relax or do something else. The idea is that it will force you to stay focused on what you’re doing without getting distracted by other things around you.
As a project manager, you’ll most likely manage multiple projects. And you’ll have to give each one the focus and energy to ensure it succeeds. You’ll have competing demands and new challenges each day. Unexpected problems emerge and tasks can get off track. It takes incredible organizational skills to manage conflicting workloads and competing priorities.
If you’re working with a group trying to choose among a large number of options, multivoting is an easy, structured approach to help your team make a decision. It’s a great tool to use with brainstorming sessions , but there are many times it can be useful. It’s a handy tool for your problem-solving toolbox. What is Multivoting? Multivoting is a way for a group to vote on a long list of ideas and narrow the list down to a few options for deeper analysis or final decision.
Time management skills help you work efficiently, get the right work done, and still maintaining a balanced life. Use these critical skills to manage your time well, and see fast benefits in both your career and personal life. This is a guest post by Lori Wade. Everyone craves career success. It’s the kind of success that is essential for having a happy, healthy life.
Knowing how to handle emotions at work can help you navigate tough situations. Humans are emotional creatures and embracing emotions as a part of daily life can help better you perform better when things get tough. Emotions are part of human nature, and they serve a purpose. Emotions can move you to action. They help you make decisions quickly without having to spend a lot of time thinking.
This is a guest post by Shree Krupa. Project managers do a lot of firefighting. Every day, project managers are putting out fires, both internally within the team and externally with clients. They juggle multiple tasks, manage stakeholders’ expectations, and navigate tricky situations. The road they tread on every day is never smooth. They constantly need to overcome several roadblocks to ensure that the project stays within the agreed constraints of time, scope, and budget.
Running a perfect meeting takes a lot of work. Running virtual meetings can be even harder due to added challenges. But it’s a skill that’s critical to master. Benefits of Running Virtual Meetings. What are the benefits of virtual meetings vs face to face? Virtual meetings offer the following benefits for a remote team: 1. Increased accessibility.
You may think you know how to run a meeting. But it takes more planning and effort than you may be doing now. This checklist of activities to do before, during, and after your meeting tell you exactly how to run an effective meeting that participants will actually enjoy. No matter what type of meeting you’re leading, it’s critical to run your meetings effectively.
You likely don’t know all the reasons why sleep is important for productivity, leadership, and health! Find out why it’s critica l to make it a priority! I’m writing this post while the world is still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Families and friends haven’t seen each other in months. Kids are attending school virtually.
Your teammates don’t want to sit through any more meetings that could have been an email. Follow these guidelines to avoid this mistake. You already – hopefully – know that it’s critical to run your meetings well. It’s not only import to your project, it’s a great way to showcase your leadership skills. And your teammates are tired of spending hours in unnecessary meetings.
If you need a fast, easy team building activity for your remote team, an indoor virtual scavenger hunt is the perfect choice. You may be a master meeting facilitator. But it can still be tricky to find easy and fun team-building activities. You may have used these 15 Easy Team Building Icebreakers for Meetings with great success. But sometime you need time fully dedicated to team bonding and fun.
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash. This list of project management job titles can help if you need to find other names for the role. When you’re thinking about moving into a project management career, you’re likely looking for jobs with the title “project manager.” But do you know about other searches you could be doing to expand your job search and give you more options?
Have you wondered if project management was a good career path for you, and if so, just how to become a project manager ? Do you find yourself naturally organizing, planning, and keeping track of plans of goals? Do you have a knack for coordinating events and ensuring everything moves forward as planned? You may be a natural born project manager. Have you dreamed of having a job that lets you use these skills in a way that’s meaningful, fulfilling, and pays incredibly well?
A focussed team is a productive team. And, a productive team is the one that gets things done. Working toward common team goals can help. The following is a guest post from Vartika Kashyap. Have you ever come across an instance where your focus seemed to be shifting from the goal itself? It might be possible that you find yourself putting out fires as they come but you can’t really get back on track to accomplish the larger, shared team goal.
Knowing how to network doesn’t come naturally for most pople. But networking – and building business relationships – is one of the most valuable things you can do for your career. After all, your network can help you grow in your career. And often in ways you can’t even know yet. But sometimes knowing how to network can be tricky.
This is a guest post by Adrian Johansen. In a matter of months, COVID-19 has impacted pretty much every aspect of our normal daily lives. It’s changed the way we educate our children to the way we socialize and how we get our entertainment. Even more, it’s changed the way we work. Those of us fortunate enough to be employed in fields that accommodate telecommuting are at least spared from the worst of the economic ravages that this pandemic has incited.
Do you consider company culture during your job search? A positive company culture can make a huge difference in how much you love your work. It can mean the difference between dreading going to work each day, or absolutely loving your job. But it doesn’t just happen by chance. Assessing company culture during your job search takes extra work.
A scrum master servant leader can lead his team to greatness with this advice from Geoff Watts’s wonderful book Scrum Mastery. The following is a guest post by Charlie Davidson. Please see the Editor’s note below regarding the variation in spelling of the term Scrum Master. Scrum’s framework is easy to understand but hard to master.
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash. This is a guest post Annie-Mei Forster. Many team leaders and managers have been leading their teams remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and it hasn’t come without its challenges. Many things that were once taken for granted, such as face-to-face interactions at the office and after-work drinks, are now only a distant memory.
Photo by Studio Republic on Unsplash. Stress at work is unavoidable. Use these ten tactics to ease the stress and love your work again! The following article is a guest post by Raymond Chiu. Raymond is the Director of Operations for Maid Sailors Commercial Cleaning Service New York. Stress at work is often unavoidable. But despite it being a challenge, it’s part of life that makes us stronger and helps improve our character.
Diversity in the workplace has multiple benefits for organizations. But diversity itself isn’t enough. Organizations need to demonstrate they value all employees. Diversity in the Workplace. Workplace diversity refers to intentionally hiring people of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and other demographics to create a varied and diverse workforce.
These virtual team building activities can help your team build stronger bonds and work better together. Even if they’re not in the same room or even the same city. Team building exercises are an intentional way of strengthening bonds across the team. And this is even more important for you as a leader if your team members aren’t all in the same place and can’t work face to face.
For project managers, leading without authority can be a challenge. Follow these guidelines for guaranteed success. The following is a guest post by Maxim Dsouza. People believe one needs authority to get actions and results from team members. But such an assumption is far from the truth. . In reality, a leader will fail sooner or later if he relies on authority alone to execute projects.
When your project has a tight deadline, follow these steps to deliver in a short time without sacrificing project quality or team sanity. photo source: Pexels. The following is a guest post by Heather Redding. Project deadlines are valuable to teams in multiple ways. Deadlines keep people focused and help them manage their time effectively. They also help with quality control.
If you’ve wondered how to develop empathy, it is possible. It may be challenging at times, especially when dealing with difficult personalities or in a charged emotional state. But practicing empathy has a place even at work, and it’s possible to tap into it in appropriate situations. Emotional Intelligence and Empathy. It’s well established that emotional intelligence is a critical trait for strong leaders.
You may be surprised at all the ways empathy can be your secret superpower in the workplace. I’ve worked with many project managers and leaders throughout my career. They’ve had different personalities and different leadership traits. I’ve work with those who were admired and loved. And I’ve worked with some who were self-absorbed jerks.
W orking from home with a disrupted routine and added distractions, these three tips will help you get focused fast. At the time I’m writing this post, life all over the world has changed. COVID-19 has impacted life everywhere. Many workplaces have closed their offices. Employees are working from home. People are stressed, worried, and trying to work under different circumstances.
Virtual teams need to put forth extra effort for effective collaboration. This list helps you cover all your bases. When you’re working with teammates on a project, you’ve likely got common understanding about how you’ll work together. Group collaboration can produce wonderful solutions to challenges and problem. But for the most effective collaboration, your team needs to follow certain behaviors and guidelines.
This is a guest article written by Ashley Wilson. Productivity is a big issue. When a workplace is inefficient, it leads to missed deadlines, eats time, and affects employee morale. In extreme cases, it can even make your company a less safe place to work. But productivity isn’t a standalone issue. It has various causes, including noise and lack of organization.
Networking is one of the most important things you can do for your career. Here’s why you need to prioritize it even when you’re not looking for a job. Many people don’t start to think about networking until they’re looking for a job. Networking can be incredibly valuable for helping you land that next position. As a matter of fact, most jobs are secured through networking.
Learn how to think better by using productive thinking approaches with Tim Hurson’s book Think Better – An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking. In the book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking , Tim Hurson teaches a step-by-step process for dealing with big challenges. . He explains the approach and gives tools and techniques for each step.
What Is Design Thinking? Design Thinking is a human centered approach to innovative problem-solving. Design Thinking seems to be a hot buzzword these days. You’ve likely heard it mentioned in meetings or hallway talk around the office. And you may be thinking that it’s something best left to engineers or the R&D team. But Design Thinking is a valuable problem-solving and design approach that can be used by many different teams.
Communication skills are critical for your career. And great active listening skills can serve you in valuable ways you may not have considered. It seems everyone spends a good chunk of their day with their eyes glued to a cell phone. Even when co-workers, spouses, or – saddest of all – kids are speaking, we’re not really engaged. And often, even when someone is speaking to us about something important, we’re often not really listening, but instead thinking about what we&
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