People: This is the way.

I was talking to a peer mentor the other day, and she was giving me some great food for thought on simple ways to add data to project reports. As I complimented her approaches, she told me that out of all the parts of her job, manipulating project data comes easily to her—but project team member personalities, quirks, and dynamics create a good deal of frustration.

Ah, people. The source of all our greatest project challenges. And yet, one of our superpowers as project managers is that we can lean in and deal with the challenges that come with people, so that we get to harness all the benefits they offer.

In fact, this could not be more core to our job as project leaders. In my earlier post where I define the term “project,” I argue that a basic element of the types of projects we manage is that they involve a team. By definition, our projects achieve outcomes that are too big for one person to accomplish alone. And also by definition, these projects need our specialized skills to coordinate multiple people working together toward the same goal.

The People Problem

I know, people are hard. Just this week, I had a particularly emotional “people moment” that took me some time to work through.

As project leaders, we deal with people who ignore us. We deal with people’s unrealistic expectations. We wade into people’s conflicts that wouldn’t have anything to do with us, except those conflicts are impacting our projects. We manage projects amid low motivation and low engagement.

People have inconvenient needs we need to meet in order for them to get back to project work. They will mistreat us, be less than helpful, and push their tasks onto our plates.

The Potential of People

And yet when we accept and address these issues head-on—when we, like Mandalorians from the Star Wars universe, embrace this as our role and say to ourselves, “This is the way”—we get team members who will work hard for us because they are loyal.

We get their brilliant ideas and magical team synergy. We get work completed in a fraction of the expected time when a deadline is at stake. We get sponsors who pave the way for our projects to move forward. We get to watch people thrive in well-defined roles. We get a team that takes pride in the project’s outcomes.

At the risk of sounding cheesy, we get to work with teams that achieve amazing things. We facilitate it—but we could never do it without them.

In short, people are your greatest asset on your project, and investing in them is one of the key ways you invest in great project outcomes.

So even on the days that people are hard, take a deep breath. Lean into the challenges of communication and relationships. Put on your helmet and say to yourself, “This is the way.”