If you’re a Project Manager or have a project role, develop your soft skills! And if you’re not… you should too. The more Artificial Intelligence and automation advance, improving the technical aspects of Project Management, the more relevant personal skills and competencies become.
Project Manager skills impact critical aspects of project success! A good level of skills allows you to:
- Minimize risks.
- Improve stakeholder relationships.
- Improve productivity, quality, and optimize costs.
- Manage change.
- Manage high-performance teams.
But why put so much effort into developing soft skills? Here are some interesting facts:
- According to Harvard University, 85% of success at work depends on soft skills. However, organizations only invest 28% of their budget in soft skills training and invest the other 72% in technical skills (Guillem Recolons)
- The University of Manchester, in a study of soft skills in project management, highlights:
- El 92% de los miembros de equipos de proyecto cree que los soft skills son necesarios para trabajar en equipo,
- el 60% opina que los soft skills influyen en la gestión de proyectos,
- el 83% opina que los soft skills son relevantes para el rendimiento de los equipos de proyecto.
- 44% of projects are delayed or fail due to lack of communication (Economist Impact).
- Grammarly, reports that business leaders estimate that people lose 7.5 hours a week due to poor communication (which is a soft skill). Furthermore, their State of Business Communication 2023 report highlights other impacts of poor communication: 42% lack of compliance with deadlines and a 38% increase in costs.
- Forbes, suggests that in 200 companies, emotional intelligence (considered a soft skill) was four times more important than technical and cognitive ability.
- Rutgers University points to studies where leaders with emotional intelligence perform significantly better—in one study, they even scored 139% higher.
- Between 2019 and 2020, skills such as leadership and management became a much higher priority for most companies (McKinsey).
- In this rapidly changing world, IBM suggests that the average lifespan of a technological hard skill is 2.5 years. los soft skills son transferibles, es decir nos valen para distintos proyectos y roles: esto implica que invertir en soft skills es una línea de desarrollo siempre vigente.
The importance of soft skills is indisputable. However, as discussed in this PMI article, there is a discrepancy between this understanding and the allocation of resources to help project managers and teams develop the necessary skills. This allocation doesn’t just involve organizations: if we reflect on it, we as individuals may tend to prioritize learning other, more technical skills, leaving soft skills aside. Why? Why, knowing they are important, don’t we take action to further develop these aspects?
Finally, I’m not saying that technical skills aren’t important. But I do believe that there will be more and more tools available, and it will be personal skills that will make a difference. I hope that companies will begin to change their perspective on this, increasingly valuing skills and focusing less on the technical aspect, radically changing selection processes and career decision-making… but that will be the subject of another article and another reflection.
And you, do you think the future will increasingly focus on soft skills? Do you prioritize the development of these competencies?
Claudia Salas –
