Published
The clue is in the name. Soft skills are soft: malleable, adaptable; can be stretched and can successfully reconcile ambiguity and uncertainty. Increasingly, we appreciate the human ability for compromise: to accept what you can deliver rather than what might be perfect; to reconcile the different, often apparently conflicting, aspirations of different stakeholders; to recognise the risks in a course of action and be willing to accept them.
Andrew McNaughton and Mark Coates’ make this point very cogently, as part of their article Project Success through Model Leadership which advocates a far more imaginative approach to leadership development than that which we currently pursue.
Meanwhile, the ability to communicate at all levels within the team and with a multitude of stakeholders—aligned with skills to mentor, coach, negotiate, and influence to support high performance and collaboration—are key characteristics.
And it’s a sentiment that is behind the latest Major Projects Association Study Report: Better Early Project Conversations – the Human Side of Project Initiation.
The East Bank Board meet quarterly over dinner (pre pandemic), with leaders from East London’s boroughs also invited to ensure they are involved in the conversations about how the benefits to local people – particularly the education and training objectives of the programme – are progressing.
It is our soft skills that underpin the communication, the rapport and the shared understanding between the stakeholders on a major project but that also enable us to recognise that, benefits realization theories not withstanding, project outcomes are never guaranteed (however good the plan) nor are they ever unambiguous. The ability to ride ambiguity and celebrate major projects, which can never be a solution but always only a few steps along the path to the further development of economy and society, will lead to happier citizens, happier project delivery teams and, more importantly, a more realistic, less bombastic approach to project selection, initiation and delivery.
When Andrew and Mark cite the ubiquitous research findings that “the outcomes of over 70% of major infrastructure projects have disappointed their owners” that should encourage all of us to reflect in several different ways: what was it about the project that failed to deliver? But also, what was it about the project delivery that failed to manage the owners expectations, to help them reconcile themselves to the reality of the outcome rather than clinging to the promise of the business case.