Work Ethic as a Soft Skill in Project Management

Abstract

This essay discusses work ethics and the importance of maintaining a sincere approach to ethical conduct in the workplace. The essay starts by highlighting the role of individual employees in ethical behavior and how personal ethics impact one's behavior in the workplace. The essay also discusses the evolution of work culture and the importance of leaders setting ethical examples. The author emphasizes the importance of being both pessimistic and optimistic while working on a project, representing factual data, and not neglecting the limits of the group within sight. The essay also delves into the impact of emotions on ethical decision-making, suggesting that individuals should express their feelings and emotions at the beginning of any discussion. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of work ethics on attitudes towards work, as they impact human beings who are carrying out the tasks. Overall, the essay highlights the importance of maintaining a sincere approach to ethical conduct in the workplace and ensuring that personal ethics do not harm the individual's and the organization's interests.

Introduction

The code of ethics is rather simple. It is to possess and maintain characteristics like honesty, equitability, responsibility, respect, and morality. In the current times, most of the companies are it a small-scale startup or a business tycoon have focused and shed light on maintaining a sincere approach in taking care to keep the work ethics within the good margin. Every organization wants to propel an ethical atmosphere by applying a certain code of conduct and also relying on the individual to abide by his own terms of morality

“Since it is the individual employee’s personal code of ethics that influences his or her ethical behavior, the proper unit of analysis when investigating ethics should be the individual (Al-Khatib et al., 2004).”

There is a line between one’s own moral ethics and that of a company. An organization might impose their principles to a certain extent but then it comes down to a person to abide by it. This might again be different from ethics in personal life, student life compared to work life. As per the study (Glenn and Van Loo, 1993; Lawson, 2004). Business students usually deny cheating or any act to support it with a proper understanding regarding the ethics of business. However, despite the fact of agreeing to not follow it, they tend to end up being quintessentially less faithful. Let’s talk a look at work ethic from a different perspective. An individual’s life constitutes of several phases, with work covering up the major portion of it. An average human spends and dedicates over thirteen years of his/her life towards work. Similar to eating, sleeping and doing any other activities, work holds a big portion among it. However, this changed over a couple of hundred years. With the progression in time from the medieval age to the current era, a person’s dedication towards work which was once despised got more respect and earned better credit in one’s eyes. There was an evolutionary revolution in the system of work as it is with every other thing. With the evolution of man, natural occurrences changing the geography and conditions of the world, the period of war & reign followed by more social development. With the current time and pressure, one needs to build public relations while maintaining ethics which can be challenging. The flow of an ethical presence should flow from the top of the table. It is primarily important for the leader to set an example. While thriving in a project a leader should always be both pessimist and an optimist. This means it is very important to be conventional and reactionary and keeping into mind the deadline of a project. On the contrary, a PMO should also give liberty and keep everyone working in the project and look at them with equality and equanimity. Over the top, there is also a third quality which is about representing factual data. This is where a person can choose to be transparent or hide things. A partial way to hide a truth would be to not give it out until being asked for. This is where being ethical counts, by giving out a certain number, if an estimate or approximate figure then that. And the last thing to correctly be ethical is to see the limits of the group within sight and not neglect it. With a wrong perception of neglecting something and supposing it to solve by itself would be an internally wrong step against one’s organization. So, one needs to keep in mind to abide by al ethical laws that they pledge for and comply with it. (Max Weber) In order to emphasize the importance of work ethic on attitudes towards work, here is an example of a graph which states how

With the advancement of time and workload, there follows imprinting of an individual’s state of mind of the work as a whole. The reason why this needs to be understood and taken into consideration is that the tasks are carried out by human beings. Everything comes in a package and with every different individual follows their aspects, traits, and emotions. Furthermore, emotions can be described as sentiments, feelings or perceiving of a subject as per their persona and experience in a certain manner. Corresponding to the work of Nussbaum (2004), emotions can be distinguishing and can have a perception component. In other words, an individual’s frustration or disappointment can result in some emotional turbulence but those feelings cannot be solely eliminated by taking the frustration out. This might mentally pose a challenge and lead the person to make a decision which might not be desired, which is why it is very important to see that the emotions don’t exhibit themselves and hurt the morality. Although research findings suggest that emotions influence moral decision-making, these findings do not unambiguously show when or how emotions come into play when people render a judgment or make a decision (Huebner et al., 2009). There are always ways when people turn out and turn everything against them in their favor. That is what a smart person can do here. In line with the studies of Mole Wijk, Kleinlugtenbelt and Widdershoven (2011), every individual should, at the beginning of any discussion, express their feelings and emotions. It can be elaborating what they are going through, their substantial effects on themselves and how it might affect the work environment. This is where the heat of being introvert is pushed out by applying extrovert personality. It is necessary and important to notice the emotional which might be in the way of making decision ethical. (Molewijk, Kleinlugtenbelt, and Widdershoven, 2011) have described an Aristotelian conversation method which helps one confront their emotional state of mind. This includes five steps and it helps individuals in elaborating what is it to be a proficient professional in their field and to open up about the perceptions, judgments & anything like halo-effect. I feel this is very effective in helping one manage emotions and vent it out while not suppressing it, in turn, affect their moral and ethical decisions.

Let us now examine a chart which describes the ethical work among students from the military. As described above, work has been categorized as is subject to be relative. In the search engine company, a worker might have the freedom and independence as a part of his moral code and might apply to the ethics for that particular field of interest. However, this varies. The graph below shows that hard work stands first, followed by non-leisure, asceticism followed by independence at the end. Thus, the work ethic is very contextual.

“Our society would have fewer problems if people had less leisure time” (Townsend & Thompson, 2014). This might not intend to mean, in any way that a person should not relish, but rather focuses on having a proper percentage of time one allows to subjective matter in their own field of work. The whole topic of work ethic is thus very relative and might differ in the case of a white-collar job office environment, to something that is at a live construction site versus a set up for students and might be totally unlike with those in the army.

Team Building

In one way or another, every working person will be a part of a team or group that may be a count of two or more. However, it doesn’t mean every group will work together and can be considered as a team. Usually, groups in the working environment will be two or more individuals who are not depending on other and will communicate when it’s necessary or over the time, for example, let’s say in a restaurant we see more than 3 or 4 people will be serving different tables depending on the size of the place and we can consider them as a group. They only interact with each other when it’s necessary or when the customer asks for anything, they do not depend on other waiters to do work but together they will work for running the restaurant successfully. Groups do not have a vivid plan of action so conflict is very common like waiting for the table in a non-assigned area like that.

Teams, on the other hand, can be considered as a special group of people who has different set of skills and each person can do a specific part of the same project and others team members will do their specified tasks in that project. We can differentiate the teams and groups by another way like teams perform their assigned work in the context of a common goal that is the project given, whereas, groups might do the same work. Let’s take the example of a restaurant that we discussed in the above paragraph, the waiters, they all do the same job and does not have a common goal.

A group of individuals come together and work as a team to achieve their organizational goals and it’s important to have an understanding in between them. However, to successfully bring that we may need some team bonding activities which helps employees to better understand each other strengths and weaknesses. This understanding will help them work even better together.

When a project involves teams in different countries, it is important for every team member to be aware of cultural differences among themselves to enable successful project execution. Team building should be one of the main focus during the process of the Project planning so that it can also help having team members get to know each other at a personal level which is helpful for project success. Having a good knowledge of the cultural differences of the team members also helps to level set the expectations from different teams in the global environment. Building diverse teams helps the organization to go succeed its goals even effectively.

The extreme changes that took place at the organizational business models have placed team spirit as the top priority for them. Nowadays most of the top business hierarchies are replacing themselves with more agile and flexible team-centric systems. Since multiple teams involved in a project each team acts as a building block of it, as Alison Bloom-Feshbach and Marie Poyet (2018) has mentioned in their journals : “ Studies demonstrate the rising importance of collaboration; a 2015 survey of knowledge workers reveals that over 90 percent collaborate on a weekly basis, with 65 percent collaborating multiple times each day.2 Organizations are taking notice, with “agility and collaboration” cited as critical to success by 94 percent of companies surveyed in Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report”.

To meet your day-to-day challenges or the overall end goals we should build a team capable of overcoming all the challenges. Two most important reasons that might lead a project to its failure are lack of team-building activities and the language barriers. The reason for considering language barriers will play important role in the failure of an organization is having good communication between team members will lead to sharing information and having constant interactions, respecting one another leading to entire team having a clear vision of the project increasing willingness to work better to achieve the same goal which increases the probability of creating successful companies.

As McKEEBY, J. W. (2012) said in his journal due to the rapid expansion of organizations, employees need to have unique skill sets and the team should be able to be managing even one system. Even though the teams are using standard methodologies and tools, we can still see that teams do not share information, goals and their priorities with other departments and gaps in communication and we see members of the team function individually. To overcome this leadership group should set some goals like “learning to work better together” and “communicating better”. Stanier, M. B. (2018) “Communication should be the easy element in managing the tension between individuals and teams, but we often get it wrong. Communication should reflect our actual reward strategy.”

Levasseur, R. E. (2011) in here he discussed how Tuckman studied the process “ by which groups develop and categorized this process into four stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. In the forming (F) stage, a group of individuals comes together for a specific purpose and spends an initial period adjusting to one another and the stated group goal. Fueled by resistance to group influence and to task requirements for achieving the group goal, the storming (S) stage is generally characterized by a significant relationship (i.e., interpersonal) conflict”.

Before the team is formed, it is going to be a group of people with individual entities. Once the decision is made to form a team(stage1) then the members have concerns about their team members like how they are going to be, will they cooperate with the work, the purpose of the mission and what takes to get the most out of each other etc., During the forming(F) stage each member should try to understand and ask others questions so that each can learn from other.

The next stage that we have is Storming(S). This is considered a conflict stage, usually, team members will be struggling with their individual work. To be a highly successful team you shouldn’t want your teams to be at this conflict stage which will affect the progress of the project.

Levasseur, R. E. (2011), “depicts the connection between storming (S) and performing (P) discovered by John and Mannix, which is that P is moderate or high only if S is low. Note that the shape of the curve follows the 80–20 rule, as my experience in working with groups

as an organization development (OD) consultant suggests, thus showing that even relatively moderate levels of conflict (storming) prevent a group from performing effectively. Tuckman’s model of group development acknowledges the critical role of norming as an intervening variable between storming and performing.

Conflict Management

Conflict is defined as a disagreement among group members where an individual or a group interferes in the attempts of other individual or a group (Robey et al., 1989). Conflicts can occur among team members or among different project teams within an organization.

According to Jiang et al, 2014 Conflict Management is defined as “the ability of the team to reach agreements among members”. Conflict resolution is obtained when all the members display a positive attitude, resolve their differences and settle on a mutual agreement (André, 2018)

Why conflicts occur?

Differences in opinions and Misunderstanding other person’s intention can create conflicts. Following are the different conflicts that could arise among team members or among different teams.

• Goal Conflicts: These conflicts arise when the team members disagree on the project goals.

Interpersonal Conflict: This is an occurrence where an individual experience an undesirable reaction when the other individual interferes with his/her attainment of goals.

• Task Conflict: Task Conflict is the disagreement regarding views, opinions and ideas on how to complete a task

Inter-team conflicts: These conflicts arise when teams with different goals interfere with the other teams attempt to achieve goals. This usually occurs due to the scarcity of resources, lack of cooperation. (Jiang et al, 2014).

Perception of Conflict

Each individual in a project has a unique personality trait which can describe how an individual is going to handle and manage conflict. According to the big five personality trait theory, there are five personality traits (Ayub, AlQurashi, Al-Yafi & Jehn, 2017).

Agreeableness: Agreeable people are kind and co-operative. Individuals with low agreeableness tend to be suspicious and rude which are the causes of conflicts. High aggregable people can regulate conflict as they are capable of handling a negative situation.

Extraversion: Extroverts are sociable, active and self-confident. However, these individuals are not as likable as agreeable individuals, as they are likely to dominate a situation. But these people can manage conflict effectively as they are always ready to confront a conflict instead of avoiding the conflict.

• Emotional Stability: Individuals with high emotional stability can handle stress. These people can manage conflict effectively.
• Conscientiousness: Conscientious people are hardworking and systematic. These people get easily upset about task-related conflicts.
• Openness: open-minded people are willing to express and share their opinions with others which can cause task-related conflicts as the others might not be willing to accept his ideas. But open-minded people are ready to discuss the differences which can reduce relationship conflicts.

Ways to Avoid Conflict

Following are the different ways to avoid conflict (Greengard, 2018). Gather all the individuals: It is very important to bring all the team members together and discuss regarding the issues creating conflicts. Sometimes simply arising the issues will help individuals understand and resolve them.

• Listen: Coordinator and mediators must pay attention and listen carefully to the concerns of all individuals.
• Acknowledge: It is important to communicate the understanding of the situation. Ask everyone if she/he understands the conflict correctly.
• Validate feelings: After acknowledging the issues it is very important to understand the cause of the issues. Try to confirm if the negative feelings like frustration or anger are the reasons behind the cause of the conflict.
• Apologize: Always apologize for mistakes. This will help people move on and forget the anger.

Conflict Management styles

The way in which a conflict is managed determines the success or failure of a team. There are different models to analyze the conflicts. The following are the different types of conflict management styles (Aritzeta, Ayestaran & Swailes, 2005)

• Integrating: Individuals are highly concerned about their own self and are also concerned about others. Team members collaborate, share information, solve differences and find ways to satisfy each other
• Compromising: In this style, the individuals show moderate concern for self and for other others. All the Individuals of a team settle on a middle ground, where each one of them has to give something and take something
• Obliging: Individuals show high concern for others and show a low self-concern. They try to understand other party’s opinions and satisfy their needs. These people are ready to make concessions in a conflicting situation.
• Avoiding: Individuals have low self-concern and also low concern for others. Individuals hide their disagreements and avoid confrontations with other party involved in the conflict
• Forcing/ Dominating: Individuals have high concern for their own self and are least concerned about others. This type of individuals put all efforts to obtain favorable solutions for their self-interests regardless of others.

The Relation between team roles and conflict management styles

Each team member uses a different conflict management style regarding the way in which they want to approach a problem. The following describes different team roles and their conflict management styles. (Aritzeta, Ayestaran & Swailes, 2005)

• Completer: These individuals correlate avoiding and obliging styles for conflict management. Individuals who are completers are self-controlled and submissive. This team role does not have a forceful behavior, so they are more likely to have a negative correlation with dominating style.
• Implementers: These individuals correlate integrative, avoiding and compromising conflict management style. Implementors are systematic and controlled but at times they are also defined as being uncompromising and conventional. These individuals oppose new ideas but show interest in joint solutions and they also try to understand the problem. As these individuals are sincere, they are open for negotiation and are likely to settle on a middle ground.
• Team worker: These individuals correlate avoiding and obliging styles for conflict management. Team workers are not assertive and are less competitive. These individuals always try to satisfy others needs and they also avoid direct confrontation. Instead of trying to focus on the problem and find the right solution, these individuals often accept what the other party wants.
• Specialists: These individuals correlate dominating, avoiding and obliging styles for conflict management. These individuals are defensive and are not interested in the others. These individuals show less interest when the conflict is not related to their area of expertise. They make concessions and are open for negotiation.
• Monitor Evaluator: These individuals correlate integrating and compromising styles for conflict management. Monitor evaluator understands other’s problems and will try to resolve the problems in the best possible way. These people build bridges between opposing parties.
• Coordinators: These individuals correlate dominating, integrating and compromising styles for conflict management. Coordinators try to find middle ways to solve a conflict. When necessary they try to influence others and make them accept ideas. They clarify goals between opposing parties.
• Investigators: These individuals correlate dominating, integrating and compromising styles for conflict management. These individuals investigate, integrate ideas and try to find a middle ground in order to break deadlocks.
• Plants: These individuals correlate dominating style for conflict management. These individuals do not consider others concerns and do not settle on middle grounds.
• Shapers: These individuals correlate dominating style for conflict management. These individuals are extroverts and are very impulsive. These people avoid discussions.

Does conflict management help?

Conflict management is an important factor as it affects job satisfaction and improves productivity in the team members. It also helps build relationships and improves commitment. Many studies show that using the right conflict management style will help in developing high-performing teams.

Communication Skills

Communication skills play a vital role in project management. It is one of the mandatory soft skill that a project manager should have. Project managers should have the ability to convey the ideas clearly and effectively and should also allow the team members to speak openly and honestly. It is the key to success in areas such as software development where people are involved. Each project should have a good communication plan. Each project can have a same or different method for delivering the information. The communication plan includes the type of information the project manager delivers and the timing of the release and distribution. The methods of communication can be in many forms such as emails, written reports, conversations, meetings.

Communication plays a major role when it comes to mergers & acquisitions (M&A) performance. Using project management tools like project logs, progress reports, and periodic reviews can help better communication and responsible documentation of individual and teamwork. By documenting and following this process can evaluate the progress of the project and team members. This, in turn, enables regular and systematic description and evaluation of individual contributions and overall team performance. The regular documentation of individual input helps to push all team members to act ethically throughout the project, that is, to contribute their fair share of work to the project. The frequent use of documentation helps to cultivate the habit of reflection in action by enculturating students to the practice of regularly examining individual and teamwork and constantly evaluating the amount and quality of work done. It also facilitates frequent reflection on strengths and weaknesses demonstrated in individual and teamwork, lessons learned during the project, and possible ways to work more closely and efficiently as a team in the future.

Literature Review

Belzer (2004) discussed the importance of Communication skills for project managers. According to him, Communication skills are one of the mandatory skills for project managers and they should have the ability to express the ideas clearly with their team members for the successful execution of the project.

Jerome Kanter and John J. Walsh mentioned in their article that Lack of communication with management is the main reason for project failure. Several workshop attendees referred to the lack of communication within management — “what the project manager tells the functional manager, what the functional manager says, and what senior management hears appear to be different.” A major problem was that people were afraid to upset the VP by disagreeing with proposed completion dates. Communication with the contract programmers was also cited as a problem area. After a workshop, they mentioned Know and respond to the “real” status of the project. “Shooting the messenger” is counter-productive to open communication. Management must encourage honest feedback through the management chain. The system must accurately report project status, identify problems, and assign accountability for problem resolution.

T.J. Bond-Barnard1* & H. Steyn2 (2013) mentioned that one of the most important and most frequently-mentioned challenges to program management is that of communication between project team members Pinto & Pinto and Pinto & Covin explain that effective communication between team members is very important in a project, as this communication fosters cooperation between the team members, which is so vital to project success. Communication in a program or project environment is defined as the transfer of information between the program or project stakeholders; it involves a person or entity transmitting a message, and another person or entity receiving and successfully understanding the message in response [9]. Cross-functional communication in a program occurs among a group of people with different functional specialties or multidisciplinary skills, who are responsible for carrying out all the phases of a program or project from start to finish . For the purposes of this study, ‘cross-functional communication’ refers to communication between the project team members, rather than to communication between groups of people with different functional specialties.

Discussion

Communication is the most relevant factor to implement the project. The other critical success factors found were: project communication, consulting the client, acceptance from the client, support from the upper management, project schedule, and mission of the project, project execution, troubleshooting, staff management, monitoring, and control. Communication in the projects was the most important critical success factor in large companies, while the most critical one for small companies. All pieces of evidence in this research support the idea that individuals who not only have the technique, but also knowledge management, leadership, and ability, lead successful projects. The most critical factors were the managerial ones, however, the abilities andexperiences in management helped the project to be successful.

Communication Skills is very important for the success of the project. Communication skills of the project managers are not always perfect, they can be always improved. The success of any project depends on the quality of project managing mechanism. The project managers should understand all the relevant factors to understand the whole communication process. Each project should have a good communication plan. A project will have its own method or a process or it might be like another project. Poor communication of the project managers with the stakeholders will have a serious impact on the success of the project. Poor communication could be the following.

1. Missing the deadlines of the project as they are not properly communicated among the team members.
2. The decrease in the productivity of the project which leads to an increase in the budget and the timeline.
3. Lack of commitment of the team members in the project and the stakeholders.
4. Misunderstanding of the stakeholders about the project expectations.
5. Over-communicating to the stakeholders can also lead to poor communication.

Understanding a variety of cultures can also help managers to effectively communicate among the team members. The project manager should make sure that he delivers the right message at the right time. Some of the teams communicate electronically as they have people located in different geographic locations. They are called virtual teams. It is also very important for the project manager to remember the time zones so that he will not miss any important meetings or the project deadlines. The following are the different ways of communications.

• Electronic Emails. Sending any project-related information such as project documents and Budget information in the emails which may or may not include attachments. Also sending the reminders with the project deadlines is very helpful. The information should be sent to all the team members.
• Blog. Project blog is an online journal which is shared among the team members by sending an invite. Project managers can include all the project specific information and the challenges and decisions that were made about the project.
• Fax. These machines have been here for many years. I many countries all the signed contracts were legal via fax, but not the soft copies that were sent online
• Mail. Sending all the documents to the physical address which is least preferred currently.
• Video conference calls. This is becoming increasingly popular as the project members are getting more diversified.
• Team meetings / Virtual Meetings/ one-one meetings

There are many other different ways of communicating. But the best approach is to have a face to face meeting with the project stakeholders prior to the start of the project.

Each complex project should have a good communication plan. The following are the few key components that should be followed in each plan.

1. Purpose of the project: This should include the mission of the project.
2. Set goals and expectations: setup the goals and expected outcome of the project. Project goals and plans must be discussed among all the team members via various modes of communication.

Communication Roles. All the roles and responsibilities of the team members should be clearly defined. Roles could be project lead, manager, and sponsor.

Negotiation

Negotiation is a concept of win or lose. In a project, negotiation plays a vital role in planning the budgets and getting the required resources. To achieve the win in a negotiation, we need to follow few steps. The negotiator must assess the other party’s requirements/plan, try to convince them to get close to your requirement, motivate them by giving the right knowledge about the user requirements and manipulate them by making them believe them about your requirement.

According to Gallagher, K. P., Kaiser, K. M., Simon, J. C., Beath, C. M., & Goles, T. (2010), Negotiation is the key relational skill for the in-house and new hires to a project. It is required for the team player in a project to have negotiating skill, because in the process of negotiation or in the process.

There is a vast change in the type of negotiations in an organization and with the increase of the technology types of communicating to negotiation also changed. As per Sai, Kenneth and Henry “Computer-based negotiations support systems (NSS) and other discussion products came into existence”. In olden days before technology raise, to negotiate people use to travel all the way to the other party which consumes time, by introducing the new way of online communication for the negotiation we can connect anywhere to resolve the issue and it is not less than the in-person communication.

Negotiation is used to resolve the dispute by communicating, exchanging ideas and prioritization of the issue to be resolved (Sai, Kenneth, and Henry). In a project planning there, few tasks which are to be negotiated before they start the execution. Before starting the project, we need to plan the budget and get the resources

According to the project planning strategy in education, these are the challenges to be followed (Garrido-Lopez, M., Hillon, Y. C., Cagle, W., & Wright, E. (2018)) and I am going to describe how negotiation is going to be a part of it. Selecting client, balancing client needs, managing interaction, managing team, make them think and creating value. Out of all these as per my view, negotiation is going to be a part of balancing client needs and managing the team. We must prepare a sheet with all the need of the client and based on the requirement there will be budget assigned to the project and while finalizing the budget from the client side there should be a negotiation done if the client is not satisfied with the documented budget and planned budget. The project manager needs to explain the project sponsor about the documented budget in details by showing our requirement and convince the project sponsor to rethink about their requirement. In the other challenge, while managing the team, the project manager must hire the require team to finish on time without changing the scope.

The project team will have both the contracting and full-time employees accommodated based on the requirement and usage of the team. According to W.A. Meinhart and Leon M. Delionback (1968), project contracting effort is divided into three phases: program definition, research and development, and the execution. We need to accommodate the team based on these like where we need the contract employees and where to accommodate the permanent employees. There must be a negotiation with the respective teams to get those resources for the project.

As per Amrita Narlikar (2013), to win the negotiation we need to “albeit to varying degrees depending on the area of the issue and negotiating partner”. While getting the issue resolution we need to state the requirements very clear and make the other party understand the need for the requirement in the negotiation. According to Adam D. Galinsky, William W. Maddux, Debra Gilin, & Judith B. White. (2008), after conducting three study cases they concluded that perspective-taking is more important for a negotiator than empathy. Both perspective and empathy are very important aspects of project negotiation. These will help in creating a clear idea of winning the negotiation most of the times.

According to THV Mothilal DeSilva (2007), the negotiations are done based on the sponsor’s strength and capability. Before we prepare a budget or plan to request a resource, a negotiator needs to do some background work of the project sponsor or an investor. The negotiator needs to have information on the other party’s strengths and weaknesses. By documenting the information, we can have an estimate of what to negotiate and how to make their weakness as your strength in a debate of negotiation of getting a resource or planning a budget meeting with the client and the project sponsor/ investor. The main asset of knowing their weakness is to make them understand your requirement and motivate them in modifying their argument on the weakness. The assessment of the strength of the other party will try to make to be prepared for the questions they are going to debate about them.

There are few steps to follow for a successful negotiation. As per Hake. S and Shah. T (2011), their research in the clinical industry, the above steps of negotiation can lead you to success. They are sub tasked into the negotiation into four phases which are very important to be considered.

• Collecting facts.
• Knowing priorities.
• Knowing principles.
• Identifying common grounds.

Negotiations are raised when there is a conflict in the project. According to Shankar Ganesan (1993), negotiations are referred to five types of conflicts: competing or aggressive, collaborating or problem-solving, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. These styles are used one in different situations when compared to the project in an organization. For example, there should do a competing or aggressive negotiation while you have the requirement clearly mentioned and the client is trying to negotiate with the requirements you can’t start the project with the requirement you have. Collaborating or problem-solving is used when both the requirements are closely defined and one needs to push other for the gap in requirement this case, both the negotiators will have strong questions and they must solve the mutual problems. Compromising is the strategy where either one of the negotiators should give up their requirement and agree with the other party because the opposite party is having strong evidence for the need of requirement. Avoiding is a strategy which is made by avoiding the other party’s requirement and making the negotiator to modify the requirement what the client provided. Accommodating the requirements after the strong evidence is shown.

Negotiation is not an easy skill to perused by the professionally, it should need all the expertise in these methods, concepts and theories will have success in most of the times. After studying briefly into all these research papers, negotiation with other parties should have a strategy, plan to question the other party and be prepared with answers to the questions we are expecting from the other party.

Leadership

According to a Journal written by Mansour Javidan in the Cross-Cultural Lessons in Leadership from Project Globe, leadership in project management plays a very important role in the success of the project by guiding the project through complex and stressful situations. There are a lot of traits which a leader exhibits throughout the process of project management:-

• Good communication: in order to lead a project, one must be able to clearly communicate their respective vision, goals, guidelines etc. The ability to deliver and receive constructive responses is another important part of being a leader.
• Positive attitude: Spreading positivity in the team by having motivation talk, commitment and confidence in team.
• Team building: for the project to reach a successful conclusion the whole team needs to work well together therefore managing team conflicts at an early stage is important.
• Excellent decision-making: making the right decisions at the right time has a direct impact on the success of a project.
• Problem-solving: a great leader shall always have excellent problem solving skills so that when the time comes the issue is taken care of.
• Resiliency: maintaining positive attitude even after a temporary setback is the most important trait of a leader.
• Emotional intelligence: being able to understand emotions of not only oneself but also others is a trait which every leader should comprised.

All these attributes are essential in the making of a great leader. However, in the article the main emphasis has been put on the traits of resilience and emotional intelligence. By reading the article thoroughly one can argue that the traits of resiliency and emotional intelligence are the most important aspects of a leader. Both of these traits play an important role in making a leader resolute at any circumstances as well as allowing a project leader to perceive things from a different standpoint. In culmination of all these important characteristics a project leader raises his/her status and facilitates the smooth progress of the project. From these projects, if we want to get our desired result then the presence of a good leadership is paramount. An article written by Michael (2001) based on Project Management Skills is published in the International Journal of business performance which emphasis the role of project leaders, their skills and their effect on the project success. Research held previously showed that an effective project leader comprised of four skills which were conceptual, human politics, and technical skills, along with their 16 skill components. The article discusses the skill components which influence the time, cost and quality performance in construction projects. Hence in order to understand that, first the data was collected from 107 project managers using a questionnaire survey method. The analysis results were collected which further implied that interpersonal influence has positive relationship with project time performance. Project cost performance is influenced by four skill components, namely, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skill, apparent sincerity, and budgeting. Lastly, project quality performance is affected by eight skill components, which include visioning, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skill, transformational leadership, interpersonal influence, apparent sincerity, quality management, and document & contract administration. Thus by looking at this analysis we can say that different skills have their different respective effect on the project progress and success. It is important for a leader to fully understand the nature of the project and apply the right type of skills at the right point of time so that a smooth progress throughout the project is maintained. There are a lot of conflicts and complex situations that arise in the project but a good project leader that has the skills to tackle the whole situation will always ensure that the desired result is obtained.

We have discussed about the importance of a good leader to ensure success but also there are a lot of things that a leader should always be alert of. Being a leader comes with a host of responsibilities and always the individuals around the leader have high expectations. Due to this pressure, sometimes the leaders make common mistakes such as:-

• Lacking humility
• Absence of faith
• Lacking vision
• Making less time for team
• Failing to define goals
• Misunderstanding the role

All these are the most common mistakes that many leaders struggle with. Hence it is important that a good leader should not only harness the skills but also be attentive to the common mistakes that a lot of leaders make.

Until now we have discussed about the different traits of leadership, different leadership skills & their effects on project and some common struggles of a leader. However one cannot ignore the approach in which leaders take up their roles. An article written by S.Pretorious(2018) was presented at the South African Institute for Industrial Engineering (SAIIE) which emphasized on different leadership styles and approaches. This article includes some of the leadership styles, approaches and theories which have been featured in the past couple of decades which namely are:-

Types of approaches discussed

• Trait approach
• Skills approach
• Behavioral approach
• Situational approach
• Psychodynamic approach

The leader decides its approach by looking at the project structure after which the main preference is given accordingly i.e. traits, skills, behavior, and situation.

Types of leadership styles discussed:

• Strategic leadership: this type of leadership focuses on how organizational performance is influenced by executive leaders.
• Transactional leadership: it is a type of leadership which centers on the interactions between leaders and subordinates. It occurs when managers offer promotions to employees who exceed their goal. This leadership style is largely task-focused.
• Servant leadership: in this type of leadership leaders serve by ensuring that there follower’s highest priority needs are fulfilled.
• Authentic leadership: the main emphasis of this type of leadership is the authenticity of the leader.
• Charismatic leadership: it is a type of leadership that comes into play whenever there is a situation of distress, uncertainty or extreme enthusiasm among social relationships.

Amin(2016) in his written journal of impact of natural born leader qualities on the performance of the project describes that some individuals encapsulates the qualities of being motivational leader naturally by birth. They can be in any situation and emerged as a leader by displaying their certain qualities which surprises everyone around them. There are certain qualities which are developed at their young page itself like awareness, lucidity in communication, direction, initiative and influencing skills by displaying which they always emerge as Showstopper.

There are lot of researches done on how gender difference can impact project performance. Since as a male and female, they encapsulates different inborn qualities as a Natural Leader. Even lots of authors have considered Age as influential factor in managing Project teams. As a young leader will be more energetic who strives to achieve new things and will be able to grasp new technicalities very fast, On the other way around Old Age leaders will use their past experiences working with management times and calmly manages team with their traits and practices. Amin (2016) have mentioned interesting model in his Journal explaining how Age and Gender can really impact the Project team performance.

Jack Futcher says in S.Pretorious(2018): “Process does not deliver projects. Leadership does, and has to trump process.”

To Summarize, The ultimate goal of a certain project leader is always been envisioned to have successful outcome. Davis, B. L. (2007). Journal describes that “My analysis revealed to me that the enhanced support of the cadre of LEAD fellows and mentorship was instrumental in mentees experiencing less stress and satisfaction with their jobs.” .The paper investigates and traits which are being followed by leader, approaches adapted to be a good team leader, leadership styles, theories discovered by different authors, leadership and management difference to get more clarity and also contradicted some mistakes which could happen in project failure. As per my research there are only 34 percent of Project which are successfully able to achieve their goal of completion. The reason for project failures are hiring project managers primarily on their technical expertise rather than leadership capabilities, resulting poor direction to team and unsuccessful projects.

Conclusion

In today's fast-paced and competitive world, work ethics hold a crucial place in the professional world, and conflict management is an essential skill that all individuals within an organization should possess. Communication skills are also an essential aspect of project management, as they enable project managers to convey ideas effectively, foster collaboration among team members, and facilitate the success of the project, while negotiation is an essential skill in project management.

An individual's behavior and decisions are influenced by their personal ethics, which also play a major role in their work ethics. While the company or organization may lay down certain principles, it is ultimately up to the individual to adhere to them. Maintaining a balance between personal and work ethics can be challenging, but it is essential to create a positive work environment. A leader's example and behavior set the tone for ethical conduct in the workplace. A leader should maintain a balance between pessimism and optimism and represent factual data while being transparent. It is also essential to understand and acknowledge emotions and the impact they can have on decision-making. The Aristotelian conversation method can be an effective tool in confronting one's emotional state of mind.

Conflict can occur among team members or among different project teams within an organization. Conflict can be perceived differently by each individual based on their personality traits such as agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, and openness. Avoiding conflict is not the solution to resolving conflicts; rather, individuals should be encouraged to approach conflicts with an open mind and seek mutual agreements. Conflict management styles can vary from integrating, compromising, obliging, avoiding, and forcing/dominating, and the way in which a conflict is managed determines the success or failure of a team.

Communication in project management involves a good communication plan, which specifies the type and timing of information delivery, and the method of communication. Effective communication fosters cooperation between team members, which is vital to project success. Communication is also essential for mergers and acquisitions performance, as it enables better documentation and evaluation of individual and team performance. Poor communication by project managers can lead to missed deadlines, decreased productivity, lack of commitment, stakeholder misunderstanding, and over-communication. To improve communication, project managers should develop their communication skills, have a good communication plan, and understand different cultures.

Negotiation is a process of exchanging ideas, prioritizing issues, and resolving disputes to achieve a win-win situation. The negotiator must assess the other party's requirements and plan, try to convince them to get close to their requirement, motivate them by giving the right knowledge about the user requirements, and manipulate them by making them believe about their requirement. Negotiation is used to plan the budget and get the required resources for the project execution. It is essential to balance client needs, manage the project team, and stay within budget constraints.

In conclusion, work ethics, conflict management, communication skills, and negotiation are essential skills that individuals need to possess to create a positive work environment, achieve project success, and manage projects effectively. Leaders and organizations must foster a culture of ethical behavior and transparency, and individuals must take responsibility for their actions. Conflict management enables individuals to approach conflicts with an open mind and seek mutual agreements. Effective communication fosters cooperation between team members, which is vital to project success, and negotiation is a process of exchanging ideas, prioritizing issues, and resolving disputes to achieve a win-win situation. By possessing these essential skills, individuals and organizations can achieve their goals, increase productivity, and build a positive work culture where individuals work together in a cooperative and supportive environment.