People I: Leading and Building Teams

Leading the project team for the July 2026 PMP People domain: leadership versus management and sources of power, a shared vision, leadership styles from directive to servant and situational, team planning, resource histograms and negotiating for people, skills matrices, inclusion and onboarding, team charters, ground rules and delegation levels, Tuckman stages, psychological safety and knowledge transfer, motivation and recognition with expectancy theory, GROW coaching and mentoring, team conflict and the five modes, emotional intelligence, distributed teams and time-zone overlap, feedback and performance in a matrix, with US employment and anti-discrimination context and a capstone on a troubled team.

PMP-120 12 lessons · 5 h 51 min

Offered by HSM University · PMP Exam Prep

This is the American version of this course. See the Canadian version.

What you'll learn

Distinguish leadership from management, use personal and positional sources of power appropriately, and relate the People domain tasks of the July 2026 PMP exam content outline to project leadership
Compare directive, democratic, transactional, transformational, servant and situational leadership styles and choose a style that fits the people, task, urgency and development approach
Plan the project team from the work, interpret resource histograms, distinguish resource leveling from smoothing, negotiate for team members and use weighted selection
Build and interpret a skills matrix, identify gaps and single points of failure, and plan inclusive acquisition and structured onboarding
Facilitate a team charter with specific ground rules, handle ground rule violations, and make decision rights explicit with RACI, decision methods and delegation levels
Diagnose a team's stage of development, build psychological safety, plan just-in-time training and match knowledge transfer techniques to explicit and tacit knowledge
Apply motivation theories, including expectancy theory calculations, to diagnose motivation problems and design fair, valued recognition and reward plans while protecting a sustainable pace
Distinguish coaching, mentoring, training and managing, conduct a GROW coaching conversation and set up effective mentoring relationships
Identify sources and levels of team conflict, choose among the five conflict-handling modes and resolve conflict by moving from positions to interests
Apply the four domains of emotional intelligence to project situations, including self-management under pressure and empathy for resistant stakeholders
Lead hybrid and distributed teams by calculating time-zone overlap, matching synchronous and asynchronous channels, building trust and bridging cultural differences
Give specific feedback, diagnose and address performance problems in a matrix, distinguish employee and contractor management, and use team metrics appropriately, applying all of these to a troubled team and to PMP People questions

Course content

12 lessons · 5 h 51 min total · final exam

1 The project manager as leader 30 min · quiz
2 Leadership styles and servant leadership 28 min · quiz
3 Building the team: acquisition, onboarding and skills 30 min · quiz
4 Team charters, ground rules and empowerment 30 min · quiz
5 Developing the team: stages, safety and knowledge transfer 31 min · quiz
6 Motivation and recognition on projects 27 min · quiz
7 Coaching and mentoring 28 min · quiz
8 Managing team conflict 27 min · quiz
9 Emotional intelligence 28 min · quiz
10 Virtual, hybrid and distributed teams 28 min · quiz
11 Performance management and difficult conversations 31 min · quiz
12 Capstone: leading a troubled project team 33 min · quiz
E Final exam 20 questions

Requirements

PMP-110 Project Management Foundations for the PMP

Recommended background. You can start any course at any time.