Author: owltree

The issue of risk in project management is a crucial one but little account is taken of the unique contribution that people’s individual differences play in the management of risk. Research carried out to date has demonstrated that individual personality plays a part in the extent to which we are risk takers or risk averse. See Sharon’s article here to find out more: Personality & Risk
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Many projects encounter difficult project relationships but techniques from positive psychology offer a new way of designing and delivering projects in a way that facilitates positive emotions and good relationships. Positive Psychology provides some well researched, evidenced based techniques that you can use to increase the chances of your project being successful. According to Seligman, Positive Psychology has three central concerns: Positive Emotions, Positive Individual Traits, and P...
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Working with difficult stakeholders increases the stress levels of the project manager and the project team. It can also create more work, in having to chase up difficult stakeholders and invest time in trying to encourage them to contribute their element of the project plan. These consequences are bad enough but it can get much worse than this. A couple of years ago, I was contacted by a global construction company who were working in partnership with a local authority to deliver a PFI (Private...
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 We have all experienced them haven’t we, the stakeholder who is always negative about every aspect of the project or those stakeholders who just fail to deliver their elements of the project plan? Equally, there are those stakeholders who are downright unpleasant or even hostile. Take a look at why stakeholders can sometimes appear difficult and what you can to: manage them more effectively and promote harmonious relationships. WHY DO SOME STAKEHOLDERS APPEAR DIFFICULT?   Usually when ...
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Research into leadership styles suggests that we are moving towards a more ‘Transformational’ style which emphasis emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. Meanwhile, some studies have found that women have an advantage over men when it comes to the emotional aspects of leadership. Does this mean that women are naturally good at transformational leadership? If so, then “why are women still under-represented in leadership?” It would be easy to give knee-jerk answers to these questions,...
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Are your personality strengths getting in the way of you getting on? Are you a good performer who feels capable of greater things but just can’t seem to get to that next level?  Do you sometimes wish that you could behave differently in the workplace or manage relationships better? There is a fine line between strengths and weaknesses when we are talking about personality. Our individual personalities provide us with certain strengths e.g. the extent to which we are friendly and outgoing, the ...
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These days, many organisations have wellbeing strategies and some of these can be very sophisticated but do they recognise the differences between men and women, when it comes to mental health or do they treat everyone in the same way? There has been a wealth of research into the mental health of women but still relatively little into the mental health of men and yet the research that has been carried out, to date, suggests that there are some real differences in the way that men experience m...
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