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Chad Prinkey is CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting, a Baltimore-based firm that provides strategic consulting, facilitation services and peer-to-peer roundtable discussions for construction executives. Opinions are those of the author.

I was baffled by the inadequacy of my own vocabulary, and perhaps the English language, to articulate different types of “management.”

Managing a project requires strong planning, organizing, communication and problem-solving skills. You can entrust your projects to someone with these attributes if they also have the technical aptitude needed for the projects, because one cannot solve a problem that they do not know how to recognize nor have solutions prepared to solve it.

This is where experience and education come in. If we want strong people to manage our projects – which, for the sake of this article, includes roles like project manager, supervisor and foreman – then planning, organizing, problem solving and communication are the attributes we need to hire. and train to succeed.

Definition of people management

On the other hand, people managers need a more in-depth and specialized set of communication attributes compared to their project manager counterparts.

Every strong manager must be able to express ideas clearly, listen to understand, and select the right mode of communication (phone or email, for example) depending on the situation. This is communication 101, and without these abilities, a project manager will be ineffective, regardless of their on-paper qualifications for the role.

401 communication is necessary for great people managers. This is rooted in emotional intelligence, which is essentially the ability to understand and manage feelings effectively. It starts with being aware of your own feelings and your ability to control these emotions, so that they do not negatively impact the results.

For example, a strong human resources manager will not allow his own bad day to cause him to treat his team poorly. They understand the mission and can control their emotions.

Once a manager becomes a master of his or her own emotions, he or she must learn to recognize the emotional state of others and be strategic about intentionally eliciting the ideal emotions in others.

For example, we all want our employees to be happy and motivated, right? A good human resources manager knows how to create an emotional environment for their team that is most likely to bring out those feelings.

They will adjust their body language and tone while choosing their words and actions wisely. They understand that although they cannot control how others feel, they can create conditions that make those feelings likely.

Born or created?

Good people managers are somewhat rare. I’ve had many discussions with people smarter than me about whether these people are born or made. This is an important thing to consider, because if they are born, we only need to learn how to find and keep them.

However, if good people managers can be trained and developed, we can turn our project managers into people managers and unlock significantly faster growth.

Here’s my take: The attributes of people management come more naturally to some than others. Those for whom it comes easy may have been born (or raised) with heightened emotional intelligence, while others were not.

With a deep desire to become a human resources manager, I have seen people who were not born with these gifts develop them to extremely high levels.

In short, people managers can be trained, but they have to be willing and ready to change their habits, learn new skills, and adopt entirely new ways of thinking. It’s not easy, but it is possible with focused effort.