How to Deal with Difficult People

As a Project Manager you will run into difficult people to work with on your projects and to be an effective PM you need to master the ability to work with these people since they are part of your Project Team.

Typically these situations are best dealt with effective communication skills. I like to do the following:

1. Listen the person and their problem.
2. Restate what you heard from the other person.
3. If you are asking them a question frame the question, if they still do not understand re-frame the question.

As a last resort if the person is toxic to your project(using candor in your project), ask to have them replaced (the sooner you can do this the better).

Below is a 9 minute video on How to Deal with Difficult People at Work



More blogs about this topic:

http://www.confidencecenter.com/art12.htm

http://stress.about.com/od/relationships/ht/difficult.htm

http://www.how2dealwithdifficultpeople.com/coping-with-difficult-people

Project Management 2.0 ...

I love technology, but many times my project teams do not! So how do we try out these new web 2.0 concepts like Mind Mapping, Twitter, Blogging, Wiki's or even using Facebook to help manage our projects? Baby steps.

Over the years I have found out that you need the right team of people on a project to try out these new concepts to see if they are effect at communicating your project details.

The 2.0 phenomenon for project management may be common project management practice in the next 10 to 20 years and now is the time to try out some of the basic tools that are out there now.

Currently, my favorite Web 2.0 tool is SharePoint. It offers many out of the box tools that are customizable and allows other off the shelf application to plug into it to play nicely. I like SharePoint because it is easy to share documents with and has a great project communication tracker built in so you can keep track of your project emails within your project SharePoint site (or use it to Tweet your project updates, and set up user profiles for your staff to add details and photos of themselves; or send a photo from your blackberry from your construction project to an email address that is tied into your project and your team).

Times are a changing and the new social networking on the web will give us a taste of where this technology may be adapted for project management.

Podcast on Project Management 2.0

Podcast on social media and project management

Blog on Project Management 2.0

Project Shrink