The Project Management Podcast

Episode 418: Essential Business Management Skills (Free)

09.29.2018 - By Cornelius FichtnerPlay

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Play Now: For Project Management Professional (PMP)® Students: PMP Exam Prep : All interview guests Last year at the Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Congress 2017 in Chicago, Illinois I recorded about a dozen interviews. They have all been published over the past year and you've probably heard some or all of them. But what you don't know is what happened once each interview was complete. I pressed the recording button one more time and asked each of my guests the following question: What business management skills are essential for today’s project manager if they want to become more and more involved in strategic projects for their organizations? And today you are going to get all the answers. In one nice mashup. Here are all the presenters in the order you will hear their answers Andy Kaufmann Betsy Stockdale Laszlo Retfalvi Justin Fraser Jen Pfaff Sarah Gallagher Kim Wasson Darryl Hahn Jeff Kissinger Niraj Kumar Oh, and spoiler alert... the answer that I received most often was "Flexibility". Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: In this episode of The Project Management Podcast™, we introduce you to the essential business management skills that we project managers need in order to become more strategic. Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to The Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com. This is Episode #418 and I am Cornelius Fichtner. It’s good to have you with us. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: Last year at the PMI Global Conference in Chicago, I recorded about a dozen interviews. They have all been published over the past few months and you’ve probably heard some or all of them. But what you don’t know is what happened once each interview was complete because I pressed the recording button one more time and asked each of my guests the following question: “What business management skills are essential for today’s project managers if they want to become more and more involved in strategic projects for their organizations?” And today, you are going to get all the answers that I have recorded in one nice mash-up. We begin with Andy Kaufmann who says that assertiveness is one of the keys to success. Cornelius Fichtner: Andy, what business management skills are essential for today’s project managers if they want to become more and more involved in strategic projects for their organizations? Andy Kaufmann: You know, I had a coaching client who is a director level at the time and he said to me. He goes: “Alright! So this is like summer, mid-year by next Spring. I need to be a Vice President.” And it surprised that he was so focused on title. Because most people maybe it’s more on pay or something else. But he goes: “I got to have that title by then.” So we talked about it that you can’t go in titled, but you can sometimes ask. For example: “I want to get there. What does it take to get there?” And then you have to do it. You can just you know say it. By the way, he got it and it wasn’t brilliant coaching. It was that he did the stuff that he had to do. One of the things I find especially for project managers who grow up from individual contributor to maybe some sort of team, some sort of project manager where as they grow up one of the business management skills that is missing is assertiveness. As they get more and more responsibilities, sometimes they become a little bit more ensure of themselves. Like I read this thing that said: The biggest fear of CEOs is the impostor syndrome that people will find out that we’re not as good as we think of. And so as they get more and more, sometimes they start pulling back on the assertiveness and if anybody would like some advice on that, there’s this woman named Sarah Robb O’Hagan who wrote a book called “Extreme You” and she is like, here are some ways to ramp up your assertiveness. And too often we think sometimes asserti

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