Valuable individual skills that are usually associated with managers are creativity, the ability to negotiate, risk management, and strategic thinking. Creativity allows such people to boldly make decisions that often look marginal and risky at first glance. Such specialists know how to offer the customer an innovative product. The ability to negotiate is important for internal relations between departments and external relations with customers and investors. The best negotiators tend to be proactive, friendly, and highly detail-oriented professionals (Jena & Satpathy, 2017). It is no secret that misunderstandings can arise among specialists with diverse experience and education, and it is usually essential to eliminate them in negotiations. This ability increases project completion speed and helps avoid conflicts and toxic relationships between colleagues.
The next, third, individual skill is risk management: this requires responsibility and critical thinking. Without risk management, the team will not be able to complete the project or will never be able to move from small, simple projects to large ones. Strategic thinking is vital for managers because product development is a staged process, and each stage is a complete system. Specialists must understand a few moves ahead, what may happen to the project and what product will result if certain conditions are not met. Other functional individual skills include conflict resolution and time management (Magano et al., 2020). Separately, leadership should be noted as an extensive skill that provides for various behaviors and psychological aspects.
Important team skills include trust, understanding and awareness, dialogue as part of effective communication, and brainstorming. Trust among members is the most critical team skill for bringing a project to a close. Since of the high level of trust and responsibility to each other, it is possible not to break deadlines and warn colleagues in time in case of unforeseen problems. A basic understanding of the design challenges is essential, so awareness should not be underestimated (Gardiner, 2017). Some specialists single out team conversation or dialogue as a different talent, part of large-scale practical communication skills. Effective communication lets people quickly convey information between elements of a large team. It includes brainstorming as a process and as a particular skill in which people within the group share ideas without hesitation. All such statements must be patiently listened to and discussed; people in business believe that often even the silliest of them are worthy of consideration.
References
Gardiner, P. (2017). Project management: A strategic planning approach. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jena, A., & Satpathy, S. S. (2017). Importance of soft skills in project management. International Journal of Scientific Research and Management, 5(7), 6173-6180.
Magano, J., Silva, C., Figueiredo, C., Vitória, A., Nogueira, T., & Pimenta Dinis, M. A. (2020). Generation Z: Fitting project soft management skills competencies – A mixed-method approach. Education Sciences, 10(7), 187-199.