What practitioners consider to be the skills and behaviours of an effective people project manager

It is recognized by academics and the community of practice that the management of people plays an important role in project management. Recent people skills research expresses the need to develop a better understanding of what good people management is. This paper proposes what project management practitioners consider to be skills and behaviours of an effective people project manager. A combination of literature review, face to face interviews and focus group meetings was applied to complete the research objective. Six specific skills and associated behaviours were identified as being most important. The results suggest that project managers would benefit from adopting these skills and behaviours to strengthen their managing people skills and behaviours to improve the successful delivery of projects. The findings also suggest that some skill sets and behaviours may be more appropriate for application in certain project environments such as IT or the construction industry.