I believe that project managers should tend bar sometime early in their careers.

I doubt this conviction will prompt a change in the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification process, but the concept is worth investigating. So much can be learned from preparing the bar for business, making and serving drinks, ferrying platters of hot food, taking customer orders, communicating orders to the kitchen, cleaning up spills, and other such drudgery. It’s like boot camp for anybody who hopes to get a practical grasp of the physical, verbal, and mental skills needed to operate as a truly effective project manager.

It’s not just for the sake of analogy. There are many skills that nascent project managers can learn from even a brief career in on the other side of the bar:

• Multitask – Bartenders – like waitstaff and chefs – have to excel at handling many things at once. While you pour a batch of drafts for one customer, you’re taking orders from another (orders that you have to remember for more than five seconds). Meanwhile the dirty glasses pile up beside the small under-the-bar dishwasher that is ready to be emptied, and you need to get word to the bus help that you need more vodka. As with project management, many workstreams all merge into one combined flow of input/output that you have to rapidly parse into a sequence of well-executed tasks in order to please all of your customers and avoid getting injured. The tasks involve not only the standard activities you can easily predict; there are also the unplanned problems you have to respond to: the dropped glass, the angry customer, the police raid, etc. Handling these means…

• Think on your feet – Responding quickly to an unexpected situation requires a nominal confidence that, from out of your experience, you can dredge up what you need to handle whatever comes up. It’s an upward spiral: The more challenges you face, the more solutions you try out, and the more successes you have, the more confidence you have to face a greater number of challenges. Bartending gives you a challenge as often as every 30 seconds, especially during happy hour, or during the after-theatre period when customers have an expanded capacity for branching out into bizarre and inconsistent demands. For a normally thoughtful, deliberate person (e.g., many project managers), this kind of improvisatory mentality requires the temporary adoption of an ADD persona. Such improvising is sometimes best prepared for by…

• Follow the drill – Bartending, like many professions, involves a collection of well-known, small-scale repeatable processes that require discipline to learn and habit to execute: arranging the bar, minding the dishwashing flow, prepping the garnishes in advance, and so forth. Once mastered, however, these repetitive tasks become automatic and uncomplicated, freeing your mind and body to handle the things that are not part of the drill. For a project manager, the standard repeatable processes involve project documentation, weekly progress tracking, status reporting, budget updates, issue tracking, risk management, “walking around,” and checking in with sponsors. When these become second nature – part of the drill – a good PM frees up mental bandwidth to focus on those things that require more thought and deliberation. It’s all about habits, one of the best of which is…

• Communicate well with everybody - Bartenders have to interact well across a wide spectrum of humanity, including bikers, country club gentry, loving couples, fighting couples, harried waitstaff, bosses, rowdy sports fans, truck drivers, businessfolk, thespians, and bagpeople. Paul the apostle seemed to have this in mind when he wrote, “I have become all things to all men,” a message about communicating with people on their own terms, of having compassionate empathy or sympathy with their current situation. It means adapting to the person currently facing you. In addition to talking with customers, a bartender also needs to communicate customer requests to the kitchen, communicate kitchen issues to the customer, keep the boss informed, handle requests and issues from waitstaff, and give directions to a lost couple trying to find Duluth. Project managers need to communicate well with multiple constituencies, especially when the news is bad or complicated. They need to adapt their message to the current audience. More importantly, as with bartenders, they need to be able to listen more than they talk. A very useful skill is therefore…

• Keep a neutral expression – In a bar, people usually fulfill their potential to be noisy, irritable, gleeful, unpredictable, loud, unhappy, whiny, elated, lonely, regular human beings, sometimes all at once. A bartender has to put up with a wide spectrum of behavior, and has to be able to respond to it in a way that doesn’t scare anybody or tick them off. Experienced bartenders do this in various ways, but the most efficacious method is usually the “stone face”, a stoic indifference to the local emotional weather combined with a thick skin to withstand verbal slings and arrows. Project managers have to put up with a variety of behavior too. Like bartenders, they need to stay standing – stone-faced and unbothered – in a field of flying arrows in order to reassure their constituencies that mere noise from here and there won’t disturb the progress toward the common goal. This often elusive skill is reinforced by the capacity for…

• Let things go – As any bartender will tell you, no matter how right you are, the customer is more right than you. In an argument, you can’t usually win just on the merits of your position. Sometimes, you just have to absorb a criticism and move on to the next thing without worrying about what somebody thinks. Obviously, situations arise where letting things go is not appropriate. But knowing to accede when the stakes aren’t high protects your energy for handling the really tough stuff. Pick your battles, don’t sweat the small stuff, etc. This especially helps with…

• Get along with your peers – In a crowded and fast-moving bar or restaurant scene, somebody needs you to cover their back, and you need somebody to cover yours. In an efficient restaurant or bar, everybody helps everybody else to keep things running smoothly. Even if you’re not buddy material for everybody else working the floor, you know what needs to be done, which routes to take, and who’s in charge of what, and you know that your peers know that too. In project management, it helps to have a common bond with other project managers in your organization and your industry, a function often served by project management offices (PMOs) or, in lieu of a formalized PM organization, some kind of team or support group. Together you support each other with shared methods, common tools, and shared objectives, the most important of which is…

• Place the customer first – Yes, it sounds obvious, but it needs to be repeated. Some project managers act like a bartender who thinks his job is merely to  arrange the bottles nicely and wipe peanut shells off the bar. But his or her real job is to serve customers well so that the bar makes more money. It’s not enough just to know the standard recipes. A good bartender knows he’s a combination of salesman and “go-fer,” and that his own success links tightly with his ability to fulfill customer needs and bring in the bucks. In the project management world, your certifications, project plans, and years of experience don’t matter a bit if you’re not having an impact on business performance through increased profit or reduced costs. It’s a service role. The best PMs understand that leadership means serving the needs and interests of all stakeholders in a particular initiative, whether it’s for the sponsor providing the oversight, for the team getting the work done, or for the whole business and its strategic goals. It’s not about how good you are; it’s about the good that you do.

Obviously, many jobs other than bartending help develop these abilities. The point is that many project managers can improve themselves through the basic lessons that this kind of work provides. Theory and education are very important, but true effectiveness in a project manager is proven in the day-to-day exercise of certain practical skills that are sometimes best learned in places without desks and conference rooms.