Earlier, you learned about the role of the project manager and the core skills you'll need to be successful in that role. You've also learned more about your role within
the project team. Now let's discuss
a few key skills that you'll use to build relationships with your
teammates and stakeholders. Using your interpersonal
skills is key to building relationships
with the people involved in your project. By developing these
relationships, you'll learn about the needs
and concerns of the team. This will help you determine the priorities of the project and motivate your team
throughout the process. Possessing strong
interpersonal skills is a huge part of
good leadership. Even if you've never held a
formal leadership position, having these skills will help you when you
need to guide a team. This is called influencing
without authority, which refers to a project
manager's ability to guide teammates to complete their assigned work without acting as
their direct managers. There's a few key interpersonal skills that you can use to accomplish this and guide
the project outcomes, even without the authority of
being your teammates' boss. These skills include
communication, negotiation, conflict mediation, and
understanding motivations. Let's break these down. First step is a key
skill we've mentioned a few times now, communication. In the context of leading a team, communication can
include checking in with teammates to
understand how they're progressing on a
task and providing clear feedback on the
quality of a teammate's work. Next is negotiation. Negotiation might include working with a teammate to compromise on a new deadline when
they tell you that they won't be able to complete
their work on time. Now, trust me, I know
this can be frustrating, but you'll need to use your negotiation skills often
with your teammates and stakeholders to
balance their needs and what is best for the project. Another important skill
is conflict mediation. As we mentioned, project plans can change and issues will arise. This can sometimes lead to tension and conflict
within the team. Conflict mediation
is a great skill to practice and develop to ensure the project does
not suffer as a result. This might involve setting up a meeting with two
teammates who are struggling to agree upon the best way to
handle a shared task. Finally, there's
understanding motivations. This means getting to
know your teammates and figuring out what pushes
them to do their best work. Understanding motivations
might also include learning how your teammates
prefer to receive feedback, and how they like to receive recognition for
doing a great job. You would use that
individualized information to motivate and encourage
each person on your team. To recap, communication,
negotiation, conflict mediation and
understanding motivations are all interpersonal
skills that will help you influence
without authority. During job interviews for
project management positions, you might be asked to discuss a time when you influenced
without authority, and it's possible that you've already noticed ways that you've used these skills in your personal life without
even realizing it. For example, let's say
you have a coworker who's constantly late to every meeting and I mean, every meeting, while you can't force
them to arrive on time, it's likely that you've
thought about ways to motivate them to
want to be on time. In doing so, you might
have also wondered how to change the way you
communicate with your coworker, to influence them to be on time. Maybe you've tried asking them to arrive 15 minutes
earlier than the rest of the group or maybe
you've told them how this behavior impacts
the rest of the team. Both of these strategies are examples of influencing
without authority, and they serve to encourage
specific behavior. Influencing without authority
is one of the most critical and one of the most
challenging aspects of project management. As you've just learned, you'll need to leverage
your interpersonal skills in order to do it effectively. In later courses, we'll review
and learn more about using your interpersonal
skills to manage various projects. We'll
see you in the next video.