You’ve all seen top 10 lists of the best traits of a project manager or the top 10 skills of a project manager. However, project management is not for everyone. Many people have some of the traits to be a good project manager, but they also have many traits that make them a bad fit for the position.Here’s my list of indications that you may not be well suited to be a project manager. Note: These are not in any ranked order.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: You are a poor communicator

It is said that more than 50% of a project manager’s time is spent in some aspect of communication. This includes meetings, status reporting, e-mails, phone calls, coordinating, talking to people, and completing documentation. Some studies have shown that verbal and written communication takes up 80% of the job. If you are not an effective communicator (and you don’t care to be), don’t go down this path.

#2: You don’t work well with people

If you prefer to stay in your office and focus on your own work, you probably don’t have the collaborative ability to be a good project manager. Good project managers need to spend a lot of time with clients, stakeholders, and team members.

#3: You prefer the details

Many people like to work on the project details. We need people like that. But when you are a project manager, you must rise above the details and become more of a delegator and coordinator. You must rely on others for much of the detailed work when you are a project manager.

#4: You don’t like to manage people

You don’t have much of a project if you’re the only resource. If you want to be a good project manager, you need to be able to manage people. You will not have 100% responsibility for people, but you will need to show leadership, hold them accountable, manage conflict, etc. Some project managers say they could do a much better job if they did not have to deal with people. If that’s how you feel, project management is probably not for you.

#5: You don’t like to follow processes

Yes, I know no one wants to be a slave of processes. But you need good processes to be effective as your projects get larger. If you don’t want to follow good project management processes, you are not going to get too far as a manager.

#6: You don’t like to document things

Of course, all things in moderation. I am not proposing that you have to love documenting to be a good project manager. But you can’t hate it, either. Many aspects of project management require some documentation, including status reporting, communication plans, scope changes, and Project Charters.

#7: You like to execute and not plan

When a client gives you a project, what is your first inclination? If your first thought is to get a team together to start executing the work, you probably don’t have a project management mindset. If you do not want to spend the appropriate amount of time to make sure you understand what you are doing, you are probably not cut out to be a project manager.

#8: You prefer to be an order taker

If you think your job is to take orders from the customer and execute them, you may not be a good project manager. Project managers need to provide value on a project, including pushing back when the client is asking for things that are not right. If the client raises a request that is out of scope, you also need to invoke the scope change management process. If your reaction to scope change is saying, "Yes sir, we’ll do it” instead of going through the scope change management process, project manage is going to be a struggle for you.

#9: You are not organized

People who have poor personal organization skills and techniques usually do not make good project managers. If you’re going to manage multiple people over a period of time, you need to be well organized to make sure that everyone is doing what he or she needs to do as efficiently as possible.

#10: You think project management is "overhead”

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In the duplicate world, definition means everything. That’s because a duplicate is subjective to the context of its related data. Duplicates can occur within a single column, across multiple columns, or complete records. There’s no one feature or technique that will find duplicates in every case.

To find duplicate records, use Excel’s easy-to-use Filter feature as follows:

1. Select any cell inside the recordset.
2. From the Data menu, choose Filter and then select Advanced Filter to open the Advanced Filter dialog box.
3. Select Copy To Another Location in the Action section.
4. Enter a copy range in the Copy To control.
5. Check Unique Records Only and click OK.

Excel will copy a filtered list of unique records to the range you specified in Copy To. At this point, you can replace the original recordset with the filtered list (the copied list) if you want to delete the duplicates.

Finding duplicates in a single column or across multiple columns is a bit more difficult. Use conditional formatting to highlight duplicates in a single column as follows:

1. Using the example worksheet, select cell A2. When applying this to your own worksheet, select the first data cell in the list (column).
2. Choose Conditional Formatting from the Format menu.
3. Choose Formula Is from the first control’s drop-down list.
4. In the formula control, enter =COUNTIF(A:A,A2)>1.
5. Click the Format button and specify the appropriate format. For instance, click the Font tab and choose Red from the Color control and click OK. At this point, the Conditional Formatting dialog box should resemble the following figure:

1. Click OK to return to the worksheet.
2. With cell A2 still selected, click Format Painter.
3. Select the remaining cells in the list (cells A3:A5 in the example worksheet).

The conditional format will highlight any value in column A that’s repeated. If you want Excel to highlight only the copies, leaving the first occurrence of the value unaltered, enter the formula=COUNTIF($A$2:$A2, A2)>1 in step 4.

The conditional format works great for a single column. To find duplicates across multiple columns, use two expressions: One to concatenate the columns you’re comparing; a second to count the duplicates. For example, if you wanted to find duplicates of both first and last names in the example worksheet, you’d enter the following formula in cell D2 to concatenate the first and last name values:

=A2&B2

You could insert a space character between the two names if you liked, but it isn’t necessary. Copy the formula to accommodate the remaining list items.

Next, in cell E2 enter the following formula and copy it to accommodate the remaining list:

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