Interpersonal and Team Skills

General technique · See it on the map

Guide only — An umbrella of relational skills, not a procedure.

The general term for people-facing skills, like listening and influencing, a project manager uses directly.

When to use it

The process step depends on how people in the room behave, not just what data or document gets produced — running a workshop, resolving a disagreement, keeping a stakeholder engaged, or building a team's working relationship.

When to avoid it

When the situation is really a process or data problem dressed up as a people problem — 'facilitate better alignment' can be a euphemism for 'nobody wrote down the requirement,' and no amount of interpersonal skill fixes a missing artifact. Also avoid leaning on charisma or authority to push a decision through when the disagreement is substantive and needs to be resolved on the merits.

Steps

1. Identify which specific skill the situation calls for — several of these have their own catalog entries (conflict management, negotiation, influencing, team building) with concrete steps; use those rather than treating 'interpersonal skills' as one undifferentiated activity.
2. Read the room before acting: is this a conflict to manage, a stalled decision to facilitate, a disengaged stakeholder to re-engage, or a team that needs building?
3. Apply the specific skill deliberately, not reactively — plan what you're going to do in the meeting or conversation before you're in it.
4. Follow up afterward: confirm the conflict actually resolved, the decision actually stuck, the relationship actually improved, rather than assuming the interaction itself was the outcome.

What it produces

• A changed state in the people side of the project: a resolved disagreement, a facilitated decision, a re-engaged stakeholder, a team that works together more effectively.

Common pitfalls

• Treating a structural or data gap as a people problem and trying to 'facilitate' around it instead of fixing it.
• Applying the same default skill (usually negotiation, or authority) to every situation regardless of what it actually calls for.
• Mistaking a smooth meeting for a resolved issue — the tension resurfaces next week if it was managed rather than actually addressed.
• Using influence or authority to end a substantive disagreement without resolving the substance.

Worked example

Two leads on the retrofit disagree about sequencing the conduit and mezzanine work; the disagreement has stalled the schedule update for a week. The PM recognizes it as a conflict-management situation (not a scheduling one), pulls the two leads into a short session, has each state their concern, and gets them to a sequencing compromise neither had proposed alone.

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition. No clause number is recorded for it here — a guessed citation would be worse than none. An umbrella technique group PMBOK-6 names in many processes' ITTO tables across knowledge areas; its members carry the clause numbers, it does not.