PMs Must be Leaders- Part 1: Personal Effectiveness

First step- know yourself. One of the best interview questions I’ve ever heard is “who are you?”. We should be able to answer this question quickly and effectively. I’ve known this intuitively but it really hit home at a leadership presentation I did with an organizational consultant in September. You can do this by taking an honest assessment of your personality in terms of what you tend to gravitate to. There are several personality assessment tests out there that you can use. If you haven’t taken one in awhile, do it again or look at the old test results. The challenge is to honestly use the information to come to a realization of who you are and how people respond to you. Then consider your value system and what you may be “saying” to others through your actions. Do you sacrifice your values when working to get ahead? Believe me, everyone “sees” this. You become less able to be a leader, less able to attract people to you, and therefore less able to get things done through people. I like to say that we’re all leaders- we can either lead in a good way or a bad way. In fact we are ALWAYS leading simply through our example. Knowing who you are, and remaining consistent, stable, and reliable reveals that you have confidence in yourself and breeds confidence by others in you.

Knowing who you are, combined with a proven value system, is the foundation for effectively leading on projects.