People, Perception and Personality: What Color Is Your Project Manager?

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People, Perception and Personality: What Color Is Your Project Manager?

Mark Mullaly, PMP

February 26, 2001






One of the hardest challenges any of us deal with in life is knowing how others see us. The face we project to the outside world is driven not just by our thoughts and emotions, but also by the situations we find ourselves in and how people interpret and perceive us in the context of those situations.  

As kids, we all played the "telephone game" – whisper a sentence in someone’s ear, and have it go around the circle and come back to you as something completely different. You may have meant something very specific and precise, but it is extremely rare that our words – or worse, our behaviors – are interpreted precisely as we intended them.

Now, you may be saying to yourself that this all sounds touchy-feely and not terribly related to project management, but let’s be honest – project management isn’t just about Gantt charts, budgets and bending Microsoft Project to our will. The best project managers I know are the best communicators – the ones who can recognize what needs to be said, how it needs to be interpreted and how best to present the information so the recipient really does perceive it the way it was intended.

Most of us like to think that we already are great communicators.



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"Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as muscles grow flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it."
- Walt Disney