Dear Members and Friends of PMG-G,
About twenty attendees joined our event this time as Christine Petersen got a great topic to tell and to discuss with her. She is a professional trainer and cooperates with our partner, THE CONNECTING DOT founded by Mona Rosenberg and Evelin Arian.
Robert Baumgartner, President and VP Sponsoring @ PMG-G, kicked off our online event to welcome all attendees, to first introduce everyone to our common ground rules and to share the agenda of our webinar before handing over to Christine.
Emotional Intelligence and its importance in Project Management
Executive summary: Emotional Intelligence (EI) sounds like a buzzword, but it does have a lot of more to tell you. Christine Petersen did go through its definition with us, explained its implications it can have on our job as a project manager and what we can do to get our own hands on it for better. Finally, she showed us a few real case studies of EI from well-known projects in the past. Something that got quite attractive to our audience as a dialogue went on with her via the chat tool of our webinar platform and even talking to her directly on stage. That made our evening wonderful and quite interactive.
Christine Petersen
Christine Petersen has over 35 years of multinational company experience, working as both a Project Manager, Director, trainer, coach and consultant.
In 2002, she founded VIRAK, a consultancy and training company specializing in project management and people skills. Born in Denmark, now also Swiss and living in Lugano, Switzerland, she speaks 6 languages and is able to train fluently in Danish, English, French and Italian.
Christine Petersen introduced us into the definition of EI that comprises of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills that are all needed to effectively communicate and creating trust for fostering good interpersonal relationships with and within a team. Everything starts with yourself, your habits and behavior that will be mirrored for enabling high-performing teams.
To emphasize the importance of these EI elements, Christine Petersen provided us a few real examples from our project management world. Well-known examples such as missing team collaboration, slow adaptability to change, missing information in the client relationship management system, delayed conflict resolution, and how to communicate bad news are quite common in today’s life of a project manager, always seeking for solutions and the way ahead to the project end.
Of course, if a manager or even a project manager cannot manage his/her emotions such as fear, anger or being overwhelmed it will get difficult for him/her to also inspire the team and others for influentially taking them on a journey (project lifecycle) to reach common goals in a project. So, self-awareness, knowing of our own strengths and weaknesses, and being empathetic are key for showing commitment to yourself, your team, and other stakeholders in the project. Here, Christine Petersen gave us a very practical tip on how to calm down in a stress situation by breathing more mindfully for a little while taking a pause.
In a 2nd part of her presentation Christine Petersen shared known real examples of project endeavors such as Appollo 13 mission (1970) and Pixar’s “Toy Story” (1995). Both case studies did extraordinarily show the importance of EI in practice to clear those situations by igniting team collaboration for immediate problem-solving in tense situations. While open communication, empathy, inclusiveness, and a collective focus helped to get attention and commitment in a team, leaders at the forefront could make tough decisions under intensive time pressure that were mutually taken into actions of everyone being involved. Considering these examples as a role model Christine asked our attendees whether they faced something similar in their experience and how they resolved their situation for better. After two or three hand signs with associated stories from our attendees Christine finished her presentation by also providing us additional material that you can download as a member of PMG-G for free: EI Test, and reference list of EI publications.
It was an excellent presentation from Christine Petersen by which she inspired us as leaders and project managers to firmly incorporate EI into our own toolbox, and we’d like to thank her for a wonderful and inspiring evening full of impressions to consider for our own project endeavors.
Finally, Robert Baumgartner finished up our webinar by just sharing our new events that are upcoming till end of 1st quarter of 2024. Big thanks to Mirko Peters, VP Data Science, PMG-G, for his assistance, Mona Rosenberg for her active participation, and to all attendees for listening and giving comments during our event.
Presentation
As a member of PMG-G you do have the privilege to download Christine’s presentation from the following weblink.
PDU Reporting
Our workshop took 1 hour of speech and dialogue which enables you to claim for 1 PDU as distributed over distinct categories below. The acceptance of your claim fully lies on responsibility of the PMI – Project Management Institute. You should follow the PDU allocation below when logging on to CCRS: https://authentication.pmi.org
| Way of Working | Power Skills | Business Acumen |
| 0 PDU | 1 PDU | 0 PDU |
If you’re not so sure how to claim your PDU’s on CCRS you can follow our guideline below:
https://pmg-g.de/beantragung-ihrer-pdus/
Looking forward to meeting you at our next webinar held in German on Feb 29, 2024.
On behalf of the board of Project Management Group – Germany (PMG-G)
V.i.S.d.P. President & VP Sponsoring
Robert Baumgartner, SAFe 6 | PMI-ACP | Prince2
www.pmg-g.de
Ways of Working: Whether it’s predictive, agile, design thinking, or new practices still to be developed, it’s clear that there is more than one way that work gets done today. That’s why we encourage professionals to master as many ways of working as they can – so they can apply the right technique at the right time, delivering winning results.
Power Skills: These interpersonal skills include collaborative leadership, communication, an innovative mindset, for-purpose orientation, and empathy. Ensuring teams have these skills allows them to maintain influence with a variety of stakeholders – a critical component for making change.
Business Acumen: Professionals with business acumen understand the macro and micro influences in their organization and industry and have the function-specific or domain-specific knowledge to make good decisions. Professionals at all levels need to be able to cultivate effective decision-making and understand how their projects align with the big picture of broader organizational strategy and global trends.
