Growth

Good project managers are hard enough to find, and great project managers are rarer still. Thanks to Andy Crowe (Alpha Project Managers), though, we now have a peek inside the top 2% of project managers, based on a study of 5,000 of them as rated by their peers/clients. Not surprisingly, great project management requires a lot more than the ability to move a milestone.

Here are the top ten traits of project managers who are really making ideas happen:

Qualities of a Great Project Manager

• Command authority naturally. In other words, they don’t need borrowed power to enlist the help of others--they just know how to do it. They are optimistic leaders who are viewed in a favorable light and are valued by the organization.

I'm 51, so I figure I'd better get this right pretty soon. :) I think about this a lot, though. The common thread through the last 25 years, though, is that I've worked for myself. That's a lot of years without a safety net, and it's also a lot of years to learn habits that would make it almost impossible for me to work for someone else.

About 20 years ago, though, I put together this list. At the time, I felt like most of my life was ahead of me and that I wanted as many options as possible. So there's very different from each other, and it was just me dreaming one day:

What leads to business success? If you’ve ever gone back to your high school reunion, you’ve probably seen some surprise success stories and scratched your head while asking the same question. For small marketing firms, success typically follows one of two paths.

What does it mean to build and then lead a staff? Few of us received any formal training for it, so we often model our own style on the examples we’ve had in other bosses (and parents). Too bad, really, because learning to do this ought to be a lot less accidental.

Burnout is widely felt in marketing field. So much so that every individual will face it at some point in his/her career.

Some of it stems from a propensity toward short attention spans, developed at an early age. Oddly enough, if you didn’t have access to a TV or hours of video games, you might be more creative now! (So much for the impact of your profession.)

The first step toward an improved business environment is stepping out of denial with a deep sigh of relief as you begin to use new found energy to fix the problems instead of mask them. We all have ways of talking about specific situations that make them a bit more palatable.

Using a database of hundreds of firms in about 90 different metropolitan areas across North America, what are the three things that principals struggle with the most? You might recognize yourself.

Many firms began facing a downturn early in 2001. Though it was immediately easier for them to find qualified employees with the tech implosion, their clients were making more conservative spending decisions. This affected design firms the worst, and public relations firms the least. (Advertising firms seemed to be between the two.) This position paper was written during that time, hoping that the lessons could be memorialized.