Managing Projects Through Emotional Intelligence

Md. Abdullah Al Mamoon, PMP

Managing projects demands soft skills more than the hard skills. The most realistic rationale for this empirical maxim is due to the importance of people and relationship management for the successful delivery of the projects. Speaking from my thousands hours of project management experiences, I found most of the projects suffer heavily due to the mismanagement of project stakeholders including core project team. 

The critical project constraints like budget, schedule, scopes, and quality are impacted because of embedded inadequacies of required skills in the project leaderships more often than other factors like external dependencies, regulatory driven impediments, rapidly changing economy etc. While globally accredited project management standards consistently place greater importance in the stakeholder and human resource management, I firmly believe that incorporating Emotional Intelligence (EI) more explicitly in the project management standards and various certification programs would enhance the project success rate. This would also complement the knowledge resources of project management and empower project management leaderships to a greater extent. 

A project is a temporary endeavour with mandatory constraints. And a project team by nature is generally a highly diverse composition. These two unique inheritances in project management cause huge stress in managing and leading the project team. With the progressive elaboration of project works, stress level gradually intensifies. Unless otherwise effectively managed, such high level of stress for a shorter period of time creates serious imbalance and drive ineffectiveness in project management leaderships. 

As evidenced by many research findings, stress always invokes the activation of Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) that inhibits the function of Neurogenesis – a natural growth process of neural tissue. This also activates defensive mechanisms in our brain and closes the ability of creativity, critical thinking and idea generations, which are extremely crucial skills in handling various issues and risks of a project. This also contributes in the creation of many dissonant relationships within the project teams mostly due to the erratic and insensitive conducts of the highly stressed project leaders. Such behaviours of leaders are susceptible to invigorating the Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA) among the project team members that can cease the project progress and even jeopardize the project success. 

To deal with such situations, components of EI such as self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, adaptability, and social skills are much needed endowments. Mindfulness and compassionate coaching embedded in the project leadership styles could be significant in reversing the situation that would invoke the activation of Para Sympathetic Nervous System (PSNS), which would revive the dysfunctional Neurogenesis process. Project teams then would be leaded by the resonant leaders who would stimulate positive motivations, aspirations and hopes among the team members creating abundant sources of Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA). And a team with plentiful of positive emotions and inspirations would be able to deliver more than the expectations. 

Managing stakeholders is yet another very sensitive function in project management. Typically every project has a few influential stakeholders. Bestowed by the organizational political culture or in some cases positional hierarchy, these stakeholders directly and indirectly create huge challenges and impediments into the project works. Managing so called powerful stakeholders is imperative to project success. Social awareness and relationship management are two predominant EI components that can effectively contribute in managing the expectations of these stakeholders and pave the way forward for the smooth execution of project works. 

Prioritization and selection of projects is an important exercise prior to initiate any projects since project outcomes must be in congruent with the strategic objectives of the organizations. In my personal experiences of project management, I had couple of acrimonious experiences where projects had to be terminated almost in the middle of the project management life cycle causing a huge sunk cost to the company due to the wrong selection of the project, let alone other wastes of invaluable organizational resources. While a Project Manager may not always have direct influence in the decision-making, a Program or a Portfolio Manager can certainly play very vital role in the project selection process. Social Awareness of EI competency along with Pattern Recognition and System Thinking that are competencies of Cognitive Intelligence can effectively contribute in the pre-selection analysis and making a judgmental decision in project selection. 

Discovery (also a rediscovery!) of Emotional Intelligence is the blessing of the evolutionary changing world. I personally believe that EI is second to none in leadership especially in managing the most informed human resources of this century and so forth. Explicit blending of this powerful knowledge and practice into the project management knowledge can effectively leverage the success rate of all types projects across global industries. 

Writer’s Acknowledgements: I attended a course on ‘Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence’ organized by Coursera.org (www.coursera.org). Distinguished Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Psychology and Cognitive Science Richard E. Boyatzis, Ph.D. of Case Western Reserve University from USA facilitated the course. I am truly inspired to study and learn more and more on Emotional Intelligence (EI) after attending this course. As I am continuing my learning endeavour I am also finding the incredible implications of EI in almost every spheres of our life. During one of the video lectures Professor Boyatzis rightly mentioned that most of the aspects of EI are ‘Common sense; but they are not common practice’. This is indeed an imperial fact. This write-up is all about my personal understanding of EI and how components of EI are so invaluable in managing projects, programs and portfolios. Various terms of EI used in the write-up are incorporated from the reading materials and video lectures of the course.

Email: abdullah.mamoon@hotmail.com