Any competent financial advisor will tell you that financial success isn’t about mathematics. You learn most of the math you need for personal finance by third grade. Instead, the critical skill is mastery over your emotions and your behavior. I argue that managing a project is the same.

Distilled to its essence, project management is:

1. Get agreement about the goal.

2. Make a list of the steps needed to achieve the goal.

3. Put them in the right order.

4. Get the resources needed to perform the tasks.

5. Keep tabs on progress.

6. Communicate progress to stakeholders along the way.

7. Adjust the plan and/or the resources to detect and deal with any surprises (ideally BEFORE they actually impact the project).

8. Get everyone to agree that the goal was accomplished when the tasks are done.

If you’ve gotten an A on a middle school group project, you have at least the basic version of all of those skills. So, why do we so many college graduates in their 20s, 30s, and 40s struggle to bring projects in on time? There’s ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that it’s mostly a matter of failing to communicate bad news and have tough conversations with project participants and stakeholders. Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence in part as the ability to identify, manage, and express our emotions appropriately.

How might that manifest in a project, where an issue arises. Let’s consider the case of an underperforming team member (one who consistently delivers late or with gaps in quality). Here are several ways a lack of emotional intelligence can lead a PM to delay or skip confronting the team member:

- Failure to recognize that reluctance to confront the team member with facts about non-performance may be driven in part by fear of his reaction

- Failure to recognize that reluctance to communicate the impact on the project to stakeholders may be drive by a fear of how stakeholders will perceive you or how they might react

- Failure to act with courage and conviction once the fear has been identified

- Failure to communicate the message with an appropriate balance between objective facts and emotional context or with an inappropriate emotional tone. In my experience, presenting the issue too positively (sugar coating) is more common, but my tendency is to go overly negative. The fact that there isn’t a common term for that suggests that over-positivity is indeed more common.

I went down the rabbit hole looking for any scholarly research on the relation between emotional intelligence and successful project outcomes. There are plenty of articles that support my point of view, but the vast majority are qualitative rather than quantitative. Frankly, a lot of them were heavy on assertion and light on evidence. It seems like there’s some nice blue ocean for any business academics who want to explore this in depth. If you know of one I might have missed, please point me to it!

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Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/mohamed_hassan-5229782/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=3269655">Mohamed Hassan</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=3269655">Pixabay</a>

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