5: Leadership Skills for Project Managers

Negotiation

When dealing with conflicts, good negotiation skills are critical assets. When multiple people are involved in an endeavor, differences in opinions occur about desired outcomes. Negotiation is a process of developing a mutually acceptable outcome. A project manager will often negotiate on different aspects of a project (e.g., scope, schedule, budget, quality, purchases, conflicts with stakeholders) with the client, team members, vendors, and project stakeholders. Negotiation is an important skill in developing support for the project and preventing frustration among all parties involved, which could otherwise delay or cause the project to fail. Negotiation is used to achieve an agreement that supports the execution of a project or its outcomes and resolves conflicts within a team or with stakeholders.

There are four steps or principles involved in negotiations. They are:

1. Separate people from the problem and focus on the outcome:
   • Framing the discussions in terms of desired outcomes and not people, takes the emotions out of the way, and enables negotiations to focus on finding new outcomes.
2. Leverage common interests:
   • By focusing on common interests rather than differences, allows both parties to be more open-minded to find acceptable solutions.
3. Generate options that advance shared interests:
   • With project success as the primary shared interest and the reason for each party in achieving it is clearly understood, both parties can objectively focus on exploring and achieving solutions that serve the common interests.
4. Develop results based on project success criteria:
   • With the solutions identified, the parties can focus on achieving the results that meet the success criterion of the project. 

For project managers to successfully negotiate issues on a project, they must first seek to understand the position of the other party. Next, focusing on the team members or stakeholders with whom they will negotiate, figure out their business and personal drivers and their concerns and expectations. Also, seek to understand and establish the outcomes that are desirable to the project. Without knowing what outcomes are acceptable, it is difficult to find a solution that will produce that outcome.

Conflict Management

Conflicts in a project are to be expected due to reasons such as the level of stress, lack of information during the early phases of the project, personal differences, and role conflicts. Although good planning, effective communication, and healthy team building can reduce the amount of conflict, they will still emerge. Effective handling of such conflicts by a project manager can avoid destruction of the project and provide an opportunity to build energy, creativity, and innovation.

One of the well-known conflict management models is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) which assesses an individual’s behavior in conflict situations when the concerns of two people appear to be incompatible (2008). This model is based on two dimensions of a person’s behavior.

1. Assertiveness: The extent to which the individual attempts to satisfy his or her own concerns.
2. Cooperativeness: The extent to which the individual attempts to satisfy the other person’s concerns.

In other words, conflict management is a trade-off between cooperativeness and assertiveness.

The model shows five methods of dealing with a conflict across those two dimensions (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)).  

Competing (forcing) is assertive and uncooperative. An individual pursues his or her own concerns at the other person’s expense, using whatever power seems appropriate to win his or her position. It is power-driven and typically results in a win-lose outcome.

Collaborating is both assertive and cooperative. An individual attempts to work with the other person to find a solution that fully satisfies the concerns of both. It involves digging into an issue to identify the underlying concerns of the two individuals and to find an alternative that meets both sets of concerns. Typically, it results in a win-win outcome.

Compromising is intermediate in both assertiveness and cooperativeness. The objective is to find an expedient, mutually acceptable solution that partially satisfies both parties. Compromising might mean splitting the difference, exchanging concessions, or seeking a quick middle-ground position. 

Avoiding is unassertive and uncooperative. When avoiding, an individual neither pursues his or her own concerns, nor those of the other person. He or she does not address the conflict. Avoiding might take the form of diplomatically sidestepping an issue, postponing an issue until a better time, or simply withdrawing from a threatening situation. Results with no solution.

Accommodating is unassertive and cooperative, which is the opposite of competing. An individual neglects his or her own concerns to satisfy the concerns of the other person. Therefore, there is an element of self-sacrifice, which could stem from a variety of reasons including timing, some lack of self-esteem, and more.  

The situation on hand and the capabilities of a project manager determine the method that will be used to resolve conflicts. Here is an example of a real-life project situation illustrating the application of a conflict resolution method.

Resolving an Office Space Conflict 

In this example (Watt), two senior managers both want an office with the window, when only one such office exists. The project manager intercedes with little discussion and assigns the window office to the manager with the most seniority. The situation was a low-level conflict with no long-range consequences for the project and a solution all parties could accept. Therefore, the project manager applied the competing (forcing) method.

Decisiveness 

Decisiveness is the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively (Oxford Dictionary). As a project manager, you will be making multiple decisions on a daily basis. The key is to make them quickly and effectively. In addition to the basic emotional intelligence skills, this calls for having a clarity of the outcome, self-confidence, and courage. 

• Clarity of the Outcome: Know your project goals, success criteria, how they fit into the client's product, or program.
• Self-Confidence: Believing in your knowledge and having ability to evaluate options quickly and effectively. 
• Courage: Finally, the courage to make and communicate decisions on a timely basis is the skill that brings out your leadership.

The Scenario  

Two weeks after I joined a company as a vendor relations manager, a reorganization placed me reporting to my colleague, who was promoted. He assigned a different set of vendor accounts to manage. My job was to get the vendors to certify our simulation software as a sign-off solution, and to get a press release out of the work. Sign-off guarantees that a chip validated using our simulator will meet the predicted performance on the manufactured silicon. This validation and certification require up to 6 person-months of work by the vendor, and they work with more than one leading simulation vendor to maximize their exposure to customers. 

Among the vendor accounts assigned to me, he had identified the top three vendor accounts. At that point, I asked my new manager for additional information about the accounts. This case study is about the top account. He responded by saying that he could summarize the information in three sentences. They were: 

1. The two companies had been working on sign-off for 4 years and identified 20 items for certification.

2. Fifteen to be completed by the vendor and five by us, and that the vendor had already completed 13, and we were almost done with one item. 

3. In the latest meeting where VPs from both companies were present, it almost ended in a fist fight.

Right after, he asked me how soon I could get the vendor to sign off. My spontaneous response was that I would get back to him after I spoke to the vendor.

Next Steps

Right or wrong, I felt the account was totally mismanaged and under-delivered by us. Also, knowing that we were only a tier 2 simulator vendor, I could empathize how the vendor felt after completing 13 of the 15 tasks while we had barely completed one. I could have spoken to my engineering team to find out more information, but I decided not to do that because, to me, the vendor's expectations were much more important in this case. Being technically familiar with not only the requirements of sign-off, the vendor's priorities as well (I had the experience of working for a vendor), I could see how they felt with the relationship. All this took just 10 minutes.

Right after, I called the point person at the vendor and my conversation went like this:

"Hi Mr. Edward (name changed), my name is Ravi Ravikumar. I joined .... (my employer name) two weeks back, and just 10 minutes ago I found out that I will be your new account relationship manager. I thought of reaching out to my engineering team to find out more as to what the status is of the work between the two companies, but decided not to. What matters to me the most is where you think the work and the relationship are. Hence, my call to you."

His response, with some sense of anger in it, was: "Ravi, we will never give your company the sign-off certification. We started four years ago and identified a bunch of requirements and we have completed most of them and you guys have barely completed one. All you guys want is sign-off. We will never give you a sign-off."

Wow! that was an emotional outpour! I could sense frustration and anger in Edward's voice. This happened on a Friday afternoon.

Because of my technical knowledge, I noticed the work the vendor had already completed was very close to what was needed for sign-off. At that moment, I made a decision to achieve the working kits as milestone 1, and immediately follow up with sign-off as milestone 2. With confidence and that clarity of thought, I responded by saying, "Mr. Edward, thank you for being candid. I am not interested in sign-off. All I am interested in is a working design kit that will allow mutual customers to use our simulator. Going forward, let's take the word, 'sign-off' out of our conversation. Also, if I could deliver only three things for you in the next three months, what would you want them to be? You don't have to tell me now. I will call you again in two days so you can think it through." 

We ended our conversation at that point. In my mind, I was willing to stage the project by getting a working kit in stage 1 and going for sign-off in stage 2. 

When I called two days later, he had identified the top three items he wanted me to deliver. He also told me that I was the first person from our company that was not for sign-off, and that he was totally surprised to hear that from me. 

Next, I started working with my engineering team on the three requests from Edward, while actively engaging with vendors two and three. I had also told my manager that I could get vendor #1 to the sign-off state in 6 months (with some built-in extra time to make it happen). He was not happy with the 6-month window. Despite all that, since I understood their work was almost sign-off ready, I continued to work with Edward on the 3 deliverables. My manager was not happy that I was continuing to work with vendors. Interestingly enough, he wanted me to work with vendor #1. I delivered all three items to Edward within two months, which surprised him. At that point, he said, "Thank you. With these deliverables, we have a very good working design kit. Also, I want to share another piece of information. I have decided to go back to the engineering team, and that transition will happen in the next three months. I wanted to let you know because you are the first person from your company that I enjoyed working with." Feeling good, I responded saying, "Is there anything else I can do for you before you move back to engineering?" Edward said, "Yes. Technically speaking we are sign-off ready, and we can announce that." My response was, "If that is the final task you want to accomplish before you move, I will do everything I can to help you with it." He wanted to proceed. I requested him to create the first draft of the content for the press announcement. He did.

When I took the draft to my higher-level management and our marketing communications team, they could not believe that I was able to turn around the relationship and even obtain the sign-off certification from the vendor in less than three months. 

Analysis

• Skills applied include technical understanding, emotional awareness, self-confidence, self-management, active listening, empathy, building trust, decisiveness, persistence, and last but not the least was the courage to proceed despite manager's push to drop the account. Was it because he realized that I might turn around the relationship that he screwed up over the last four years? Maybe! Yes, not dropping the account was risky, but under the situation, I felt that it was worth taking that risk, and that certainly was crucial for the success.

Outcome

• Sales people started receiving calls from mutual customers for more simulation licenses - the ultimate success metric!