Leadership Style

You need to know and understand the soft skills to get people to work for you. Some of the leadership skills you have to develop include:

1. Having the vision to plan, organize and set objectives
2. Being inspiring, making people proud to be on your team.
3. Being assertive.
4. Keeping calm during a crisis, avoiding visible panic.
5. Learning from your failures - this is where experience comes from.
6. Understanding the skills of your team and delegating tasks accordingly.
7. Motivating your team members.
8. Mentoring and coaching junior members of the team.
9. Providing constructive criticism.
10. Making logical decisions (need to know project management fundamentals to do this)
11. Persevering when things are not going well.
12. Being able to respond to changing situations.
13. Accepting responsibility for the mistakes and wrong decisions

What Is Expected Of You

As you are aware, if you don’t know what direction the team has to go in or how to get there, people will not follow you. You can have all the leadership skills but unless you know what comes next, what happens months or years out, you could lead the team in the wrong direction. As Seth Godin says, “Leaders take responsibility.” So, you need to know what your responsibilities are. No matter the size of the project, following is typically what management is expecting when they ask you to manage a project:

1. Developing and implementing the project execution plan and project schedule 
2. Communicating the project status to management
3. Contracting for engineering services
4. Project team leader for project contacts and organizing drawing reviews.
5. Responsible for reporting to management.
6. Manage engineering and procurement
7. Review construction bid packages
8. Coordinate construction contracting
9. Manage permitting
10. Provide constructability expertise
11. Assist field efforts during construction
12. Coordinate commissioning and startup
13. Coordinate all technical issues during construction
14. Handling project change and tracking change orders
15. Responsible for project close out.

As you can see from the above, being a project manager is not easy-peasy as there is a lot to know and understand in order to lead your team.