Essentials of Anger Management (Essentials of a Subject Book 6)
Purple Comic Sans has a time and a place maybe? As for color, black is the safest choice. Just as jokes get lost in translation, tone is easy to misconstrue without the context you'd get from vocal cues and facial expressions. Accordingly, it's easy to come off as more abrupt that you might have intended --you meant "straightforward," they read "angry and curt.
To avoid misunderstandings, Pachter recommends you read your message out loud before hitting send. For best results, avoid using unequivocally negative words "failure," "wrong," or "neglected" , and always say "please" and "thank you. Don't write anything that would be ruinous to you or hurtful to others. After all, email is dangerously easy to forward, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
This story first appeared on Business Insider. Vivian Giang and Rachel Sugar contributed to earlier versions of this article. Include a clear, direct subject line. Use a professional email address. Think twice before hitting 'reply all. Include a signature block.
12 Essential Skills for Effective Project Management
Don't use laid-back, colloquial expressions like, "Hey you guys," "Yo," or "Hi folks. Use exclamation points sparingly. If you choose to use an exclamation point, use only one to convey excitement, Pachter says. Be cautious with humor. Know that people from different cultures speak and write differently. Reply to your emails--even if the email wasn't intended for you. Your mistakes won't go unnoticed by the recipients of your email.
Add the email address last. Double-check that you've selected the correct recipient. Keep your fonts classic. Your emails should be easy for other people to read. In the best cases, this influence stems from high moral character, not a charismatic personality or eloquent speaking ability, although those things can certainly help. It involves trustworthiness, which means reliability, faithfulness, honesty, and lack of pretense.
It means valuing the right things—choosing the long-term over the immediate, and often the difficult over the easy.
Most of all, it means sacrifice—setting aside your personal preferences, wants, and needs for the good of the people, whether they be parallel to or under you, and the flourishing of the project. There is authority to it, but it is exercised wisely and with the right goals. Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. This manifests in keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. Misunderstanding, misreading, and the like frequently create tension, anger, awkwardness, and failure.
This then creates a work environment harmful to unity, service, and the shared vision needed to accomplish the right goals. Good project managers know how to write and speak well.
WHAT IS ANGER?
They know how to explain things clearly and concisely, without confusing their listeners. Proper communication—honest, clear, concise, and effective—is one of the cornerstones of the leadership essential to a good project manager. Projects big or small require multiple steps to complete them. Sometimes, these steps are mini-projects of themselves with many moving parts which must be completed before the next larger step can be taken. This is where planning skill comes in.
Skill #1: Leadership
A good project manager must have enough of a grasp of the end goal and the pieces that make it up to know what to do when—and how. This sounds like a no-brainer, but oftentimes good planning comes only with experience. This is especially true because life is rarely predictable or problem-free, and so good planning also takes into account reasonable variables, and potential failures, and has a reasonable way of responding to them before they happen.
Great project managers can see how different steps of a project will intersect and then plan accordingly. Personal organization is essential because they carry over into how you plan and execute project goals.
Personal discipline is a large aspect of this, as is proper scheduling. If you constantly lose your bank statements, miss deadlines, and always show up late to meetings, brush up on your organization skills before you start telling others what to do. Not everything can be foreseen and planned for, but many things can if you have even a bit of common sense and thoughtfulness! Plan ahead for as much as you can and think through alternate plans and responses in the event of failure. Other components of effective problem solving include analysis—you have to be able to examine a problem minutely and thoughtfully to determine its root and how to fix it.
12 Skills for Effective Project Management
You must have awareness of possible solutions and the ability to judge their effectiveness and viability. You also must be able to define and articulate the problem and understand what a pathway to resolution would look like. Finally, careful oversight, to oversee the implementation and execution of the solution and then analyze its effectiveness. Closely related to problem-solving is risk management.
PMTI offers a course in enhancing and refining your risk management skills. Find out more here. Obviously, good decision making involves the ability to see the differences between options, their pros and cons, and the results that come from choosing one or the other. It does not include vacillation, self-doubt, or wallowing in concern! But what is effective decision making? Proper decision making is inspirational—it attracts and draws people to the rightness of the choice and creates within them the desire to see its implementation—especially because the right decision is necessary to the success of the project.
Whether or not the project has a deadline, good use of time is non negotiable and essential to project success.
5 Essential Self-Management Skills
Good management of the time of the project members starts with an example of good time management in yourself. Discernment is necessary for determining which tasks and goals are good, and which are best and essential. Good project managers are responsible for bringing together diverse people with potentially competing interests and priorities under a shared vision to accomplish a necessary goal. This, of course, requires good negotiation skills. Your managers, your staff, third-party suppliers, and others must all be negotiated with for the project to be completed well.