Play Now: Need Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam training? Have you considered PMP exam prep on your phone? Kim Wasson and Cornelius Fichtner At its core project management is all about effectively leading your team. Therefore emotional intelligence for project managers and project leaders can be just as important (if not more) than knowing how to interpret the latest earned value data. This interview about emotional intelligence in project management with Kim Wasson was recorded at the Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Congress 2016 in San Diego, California. We discuss her paper and presentation One Unhappy Person Can Ruin Your Beautiful Plan -- Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers. Here is the abstract: Just one unmotivated person on your team can bring everything crashing down. Unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and lack of motivation are highly contagious; ‘one person’ quickly turns into an unhappy and possibly dysfunctional team. We're all focused on getting the process right and there’s no doubt that process is important. What many of us don’t take into account is that the success of most projects depends largely on the teams actually doing the work Process is important but it’s not going to build anything on its own – it’s a team of satisfied, competent people working together who will actually deliver a product. The people side of the project management equation is critical. Managing effectively requires the ability to understand individuals and teams, establish working relationships, manage goals, and motivate team members. Effective tools and techniques discover what makes the team members and the team itself tick, to communicate effectively with many different people both one-on-one and as a group, and to generally balance the process part of the equation with the people part of the equation are critical to project success. PDU Tip This interview is 24 minutes long. This means that you can "legally" only claim 0.25 PDUs for listening to it. However... if you first listen to the interview and then also read the white paper on which it is based, then you can go ahead and claim 0.50 PMP PDUs! Click to download the white paper Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner:  Hello everybody and welcome to the 2016 PMI Global Congress here in beautiful and very sunny San Diego. With me is Kim Wasson. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner:   Hello, Kim. Kim Wasson:   Good morning, Cornelius.   Cornelius:  Hi. How are you doing? How’s the Congress so far for you? Kim:   It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. The keynote was incredible. Cornelius:   Yeah. I enjoyed it very much as well. We’ve had you on the program before, right? Kim:   I have been on the program before indeed. Cornelius:   Glad to meet you in person here. Kim:   As am I. Cornelius:   You are a speaker, “One Unhappy Person Can Ruin Your Beautiful Plan” is the title of your presentation and in the abstract, the first sentence you say is, “One, just one unmotivated person on your team can bring everything crashing down.” Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Kim:   I can. Emotional contagiousness is a fairly new concept in Management Psychology but this is what it is. One person is unhappy and it becomes catching. Cornelius:   Kind of like a virus. Kim:   It is very much like a virus and it moves really quickly and so it’s very important to catch it at the beginning and try to keep everybody motivated because once one person’s unmotivated, pretty quickly the next person is going to be because they have to work with the unmotivated person, right? It just spreads through your team very quic