6 Reasons Project Managers Should Exercise Their Writing Skills

By Kristin Savage

Project managers need to embody a variety of skills to lead their team to successful project completion. The skills that are mostly associated with project managers are organizational skills, leadership, financial skills, risk-assessment skills, and social skills. However, there is another valuable skill that often gets forgotten. That skill is writing.

Great writing skills can be a huge advantage for project managers. Practicing and improving your writing skill can affect your role as a project manager in numerous ways. Here are some specific reasons that will explain why exercising writing skills is important for project managers.

1. Be an Example for Your Team

Project managers are leaders. As such, they should present an example of how others should perform. Poor writing skills can diminish your authority among your team and present a bad example.

Leadership and management author, Kenneth Blanchard, once said, “The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” Inspire your team to always strive towards improvement by doing the same with your writing skills.

You can’t demand excellence from others if you don’t put the same effort in honing your own skills. Practice writing until your skills are at such a level that employees can look up to you.

2. Improve Understanding among Your Team

If your project plan is incomprehensible, your team might go in the wrong direction. Having great writing skills will ensure that your team understands their roles as well as the project’s goals.

A project plan needs to be understandable, and how you write it can determine the process of your project.

Also, you need to be able to make changes in your project plan along the way, and good writing skills are essential for that as well. Otherwise, confusion and misinterpreted assignments are bound to happen.

3. Assure Better Communication

As a project manager, you must be used to sending tons of emails. But are they as efficient as you want them to be?

Refine your communication skills by writing better emails. Well-written emails will help you establish a better relationship with your team.

“Working on your email writing skills will result in concise, direct, and clear instructions for your team. What you should pay attention to is clarity, precise subject line, and diplomacy,” advises Charlene Vaughn, a project manager at TrustMyPaper and technical writer at GrabMyEssay.

Lastly, don’t forget that you should always proofread emails before you hit that send button. If you want to atomize proofreading, just integrate an editing tool like Grammarly into your Gmail, and you’ll be all set.

4. Write Impeccable Project Proposals

Even though project proposals fall under the sales team’s assignments, some project managers have to handle that as well.

It’s no surprise that project managers have to juggle numerous obligations that sometimes shouldn’t be among their tasks. If this happens to you, knowing how to write a project proposal will be a lifesaver.

Writing great project proposals can be an additional skill of immeasurable value. Not only will it bring you clients, but it will also save you some valuable time.

If your writing skills are at a high level, you’ll need notably less time to write a perfect project proposal. You’ll also get to save some money as you won’t need a freelance writer to jump in and rewrite your draft.

5. Properly Prepare Training Material

Whenever someone new comes aboard, you’ll have to get them in the loop. That’s when training documents come in. Training materials are necessary for both training a new teammate and improving the skills of existing team members.

Utilizing your writing skills to create useful training documents will help you to speed up the training process. Delivering understandable written material to your trainee will limit additional questions and explanations.

“I often get requests from project managers to help them with writing material for their trainees. The drafts they provide me with are mostly full of errors and usually incomprehensive. On the other hand, when I work with project managers who are great at writing, my task is to simply perfect their writing, and this saves us both a lot of time,” says Anthony Wright, a freelance writer who currently works at BestEssaysEducation and TopEssayWriting.

You know best what the training materials should consist of. That’s why it is very helpful if you can write it on your own and thus improve the learning environment for your team.

6. Motivate Your Team

The research has proved that when managers recognize employees’ contributions, their engagement increases by 60%. Knowing how to lift your team’s spirits and motivate them is a trait of exceptional project managers.

Write motivational emails to your team members and praise them for their performance, and you’ll boost their dedication. However, how you write those emails is a big factor in their efficiency.

You need to combine just the right dose of authority and friendliness. Why is this important? Because aside from praise, the motivational email needs to remind them that this isn’t the time to decrease their amount of effort but to keep up the good work.

Final Thoughts

By now, it is pretty clear why working on your writing skills can help you to perform your duties as a project manager. You can grow as a professional and help your team with performing their responsibilities as well. How you express yourself in the written word can further determine the course of your project’s process. Don’t waste any more time and get to practice your writing skills as soon as possible. Remember, practice makes it perfect!