You will have bad days. You will be blamed for things that weren’t your fault. Projects will fail. People will let you down. You will find yourself thinking, “Why do I even bother?”
As I type this, I’m conscious that I’m making project management sound like a terrible job. It’s not, but I’ll leave the making of that case for another day.
The point is that you will take hits – plenty of them over the years – and you need to be able to get back up and get on with it. You can’t take everything personally, even when at the time it feels very personal. And sometimes it will be.
That’s what I mean by resilience.
A thick skin. But not too thick.
You need a reasonably thick skin in this job.
Too thin and every criticism, bad meeting or pissed-off stakeholder gets under it. You replay conversations in your head and carry things around long after they’re useful.
But you can go too far the other way too. If every piece of criticism gets dismissed as somebody else’s problem, or you’re completely indifferent to things going wrong, you’ve stopped listening.
That’s not resilience either.
You need to be self-aware enough to look at your own part in something going badly, put your hand up if you could have done better, and listen when the feedback is fair.
But if it’s just someone having a moan, or taking a cheap shot at you, you don’t have to carry that around with you.
Working out the difference gets easier with experience.
The rough projects teach you more
It’s a cliché that you learn more from failures than successes. It’s a cliché for a reason.
What do you really learn about yourself from a project that runs smoothly from start to finish? How much was down to the choices you made? How much was because you had a good team, sensible stakeholders and a project that just behaved itself? It’s difficult to know.
When a project goes badly, or even just hits some properly rough patches, there is more to look at. What did you miss? Where did you make the wrong call? Was there a point where you should have pushed harder, stepped in earlier or done something completely different?
You’ll never know for sure that a different choice would have produced a better result. But you start spotting the forks in the road.
I used to describe the scars you pick up on projects as maps for the next ones. It’s a bit dramatic, but there’s something in it.
You remember situations.
This doesn’t stop you making mistakes. Truth be told, I still make plenty. I think the difference with experience is that you tend to spot more of them yourself. Sometimes nobody else even knows you got something wrong. You do.
You file it away.
You build it as you go
I don’t know any shortcut to becoming resilient. You get better at it by dealing with difficult situations and realising afterwards that you’re still standing.
Having a supportive boss or an experienced PM around you helps enormously, particularly early on. But there are a few things I’d actively do:
- Be honest with yourself after a project. If something went wrong, ask what you could have done differently. Don’t obsess over every little mistake. Look at the decisions or moments that actually mattered.
- Talk to the people involved. Particularly where something didn’t go well. Ask what they thought and what they’d do differently next time. Start with people you trust to be constructive if you need to. Eventually it gets easier to hear criticism without immediately wanting to defend yourself.
- Have something else in your life. Family, a hobby, exercise, drawing, whatever. Something that gets your head out of the project for a while and puts it back into perspective.
On a bad day, that last one helps.you are doing great. Trust the process – and go easy on yourself. Everyone is learning as they go.