3 ways PARENTING improved my MANAGERIAL SKILLS in a multicultural environment

Parenthood can easily be considered a weakness rather than a strength in a professional’s resume. I would like to share how becoming a mother helped me focus on skills that are crucial for project management especially if you work, as I normally do, with multicultural teams.

My role as project manager has mainly to do with people and time. To deliver a successful project I must leverage given resources which are money and time. To leverage resources, I must put together an efficient team to carry out every assignment smoothly and precisely. There is no excuse for wasting time/money or for creating unnecessary workload. So then, it is understood that the secret of successful project delivery lies in communication flow among team members. The role of project manager is crucial in designing the most efficient communication flows for team members as well as to encourage intercultural understanding in case of multinational and multicultural teams.

And here comes my toddler daughter. Being a parent made me better at managing multicultural teams in three ways.

The first is language – share instructions without assuming background knowledge

Marketing jargons and even technical terms from niche industries like advertising can vary across countries, despite tons of books sharing the same industry vocabulary out there. Your team members may have different educational backgrounds, so they might not know what you consider technical terminology. Besides, they might have ended up in marketing, having come from different industries and their past expertise may reflect in their language and in their understanding of jargons. Consequently, a good project manager must ask team members about their background, check their level of comfort with terminology and vocabulary during meetings and double check their understanding of the to-do list before executing them.

Waste of time due to misunderstanding is the nightmare scenario you’d rather avoid at any cost.

The same happens when you are playing with your toddler. Disappointments and tantrums are definitely the opposite of quality time. So, if you are playing cricket and your kid tells you to grab the “racket” and be ready to hit, you would take the bat and run towards the stumps. It is only later that you would teach them the difference between a tennis racket and a cricket bat!

In my next post, I will share about how parenthood improved my next two skills- managing communication flow among team members (assignment) and increasing the productivity of my team (timeline). Stay tuned!