8 Skills Every Marketing Project Manager Needs to Lead a Successful Team
Marketing Project Management requires a specific skill set and certain amount of experience to master the art. As a marketing project manager, you have to manage projects, plan campaigns, keep track of progress, report results, keep the budget in-line, and a lot more. This list is nearly endless! While some skills are inborn such as personality traits that cannot be taught typically, some skills can be sharpened and enhanced over time.
Project Management Skills You Need to Succeed
Project Management requires a lot more than just bossing around your team and nagging them now and then for status updates.
Let’s explore some of the primary skills that every marketing project manager needs to lead a successful team.
- The Leadership Quality
Well, this goes without saying considering that your job itself is to lead projects, the first and foremost skills you need to have is an excellent leadership quality.
Although there are other factors that make this skill necessary when it comes to project management. A person with an excellent leadership quality is capable of setting the vision for the project, sparking motivation in the team, and being available to solve the problems and overcome obstacles.
As a leader, your responsibility is not just to improve the team, but also to improve yourself. There are many types of leaders-
- Collaborator
- Energizer
- Pilot
- Provider
- Harmonizer
- Forecaster
- Producer
- Composer
All these leaders possess some extraordinary qualities, no doubt, but there is always room for improvement. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, and work on them to become the best of the best. With every project you accomplish, you will learn something new about yourself. Improvise your skills to become a good leader.
- The Ability of Negotiation
Negotiation skills come right next to the leadership quality. As a leader, you will always be negotiating. Starting right from discussing the final project scope with your managers to negotiating the everyday ins and outs with your team.
Some basic project management negotiation involves:
- Cost and Budget Discussion
- Project’s Output and Outcome
- Deciding the team members
- Addressing the hurdles
- Accessing the tools required to succeed
Negotiation will more likely than not make you uncomfortable. Obviously, because no one appreciates being in overly controversial situations, however, during moments like these, remember that the motive of negotiation is to finally agree on one beneficial decision mutually for the problem put forward.
- Communication Is the Key
The majority of the project manager’s time is spent in communicating. Meanwhile, many project managers have agreed on the fact that inadequate or lack of communication often leads to a failed project.
Actually, having excellent communication skills might be one of the best skills any project manager can possess. Be it leadership, negotiating, or solving problems, everything requires excellent communication.
However, communication alone is not enough. With it, you need a good presentation as well as listening skills too. And here’s why!
Having excellent presentation skills will assist you in everything, whether you want to make a pitch for your clients or managers, or report on current status or results. A perfectly designed presentation will help you in:
- Moving your project forward
- Easing anxiety about the progress of your project
- Giving clarity of your points so that there is less agitation to accomplish your project goals
About the listening skills, it is as important as the other two skills mentioned above. Lack of listening skills can make you end up with some silly mistakes or ineffectiveness in your work. As a result, this can lead to missed deadlines or poor outcomes.
- The Art of Organization
This is again a pretty obvious skill that a leader needs to have – being organized. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. As a marketing project manager, you will be struggling hard to stay on top of the daily specifics, obtaining status updates, planning meetings, and a lot more. Amid all this, staying organized is definitely going to require a lot of hard work.
However, we are in the world run by technologies. Many tools will make your work a lot easier – even if not wholly, at least it will reduce 50% of the workload.
- Being a Good Problem Solver
Every project, at one point in time or another, will face a problem. Whether the issue is as small as a cookie or big as a mountain, being a leader, you will need to solve them all. Problem-solving skills are usually put under the “hard to teach” slab as some people just have it in them naturally. However, if you are afraid that this might not be your case, do not worry. A little practice and dedication will help you master this art.
- Delegation Is an Important Factor.
As a leader, you will always strive for the best, and we completely understand your spirit. However, project management majorly depends upon delegation. You will want to complete all the tasks right on time while meeting specific quality standards, and so you wish to do it all by yourself desperately. It’s just that you cannot.
To make a project successful, you need to delegate. Having a solid plan, logged workflows, and task approvals, you can quickly appoint the roles to the right member without fear.
- Settling Into the Role Of a Coach
Having great coaching skills can make you a good project manager. You are responsible for the project’s progress, activities, delivery, output, etc. but you are also responsible for the performance of your team members.
Being a good coach, you can help your team become a high-performing one. You can help them accomplish their individual as well as professional goals.
- Prioritization Skills
In every organization, priorities shift often, but as a project manager, how you respond to it matters.
You need to have the ability to figure out what’s most important for your company and then get the team on track to accomplish the tasks.
You can polish your prioritization skills by ensuring that your team members are aware of the project schedule. This will help them to manage their workflow and set their pace.
Project Managers do require a lot of skills, but that is only because of the multiple responsibilities they carry on their shoulders. With this guide, we are pretty sure you will be able to become an even better version of yourself. You are all set to lead a successful team now. Let us know your views in the comments.