I talked to or traded emails with more than 50 PMs for this story. From those conversations, here are the five most important signs that you shouldn’t be a project manager:

1. You’re not a good team leader - Project managers manage teams, and effective teamwork is the foundation of the job. Those are givens. But what separates a high-performing team from an unsuccessful one?

“Unfortunately, there are so many poor managers out there that someone who is even marginally skilled looks fantastic,” said Stephen Balzac, president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development company based in Stow, MA. “That said ... it’s the ability to give people as much autonomy as possible while still maintaining a sense of team cohesion that makes the best project managers.”

According to Charles Pellerin, even natural leaders can be undermined by a team’s “social context.” As NASA’s director of Astrophysics, Pellerin launched one of the agency’s most infamous mistakes: the Hubble Space Telescope. Today, we think of Hubble as a rousing success, but when it was first put into orbit, Hubble’s flawed optics made it a $1.7 billion dollar fiasco. A review board blamed “leadership failure” as the root cause for Hubble’s problems.

“The mirror was manufactured in 1978, and I didn’t become director until 1983, so I wasn’t the target of blame,” Pellerin said. “But I wondered if there was something I could have done differently that would have caught the flaw.”

What Pellerin ended up doing is a classic story of redemption. Not for him so much as for NASA. Pellerin decided to initiate a mission to repair Hubble. However, no one wanted to be associated with the project, the press ridiculed Hubble, and Congress wouldn’t fund anything even remotely attached to the failed telescope.

“I had enough power at the time that I was able to launch a servicing mission,” Pellerin said. “I had to fund it with my own money, and I spent plenty of time recruiting people, but we were eventually able to repair Hubble.”

Through corrective optics, Hubble was back in business and astrophysicists have been reaping the benefits ever since. After this experience, Pellerin asked himself, “How did flawed leadership trump the work of the best technical people in the world?”

He looked back at other failed NASA missions, such as the Challenger explosion, and he found a common ingredient to each failure: the “normalization of deviance.” For some reason, errors were not only accepted, but they were standard operating procedure. Pellerin dug deeper and determined that a “flawed social context” was the root of this problem.

With Hubble, the social context that existed between NASA and its contractors discouraged contractors from reporting problems. Pellerin went on to write a book about this experience, How NASA Builds Teams, which was released in July.

Pellerin believes there are four key “dimensions” that project managers need to understand about effective teams: 1) people need to feel valued; 2) team members need a sense of inclusion and belonging; 3) people need to have hope for the future, especially a hope based in reality; 4) team members need to know what’s expected of them and how to get resources to succeed.

Pellerin’s new company, 4-D Systems, offers free team assessment tools on its website.

2. You don’t have people skills - Team skills are all well and good, but what if you don’t even have people skills? Of the PMs I talked to “a lack of good people skills” was the most common trait mentioned. Pellerin believes that people trained in technical fields are actually taught to devalue certain people skills. “In graduate school, students are taught that the definition of collaboration is cheating,” he said.

According to Wayne Botha, director of Marketing for SNEC-PMI (Southern New England Chapter of Project Management Institute), an “inability to build rapport with team members, project sponsors and stakeholders” often undermines PMs. Botha notes that this should be apparent in the hiring process.

“If a project manager cannot build rapport with the hiring manager, then (that person is) unlikely to build rapport or credibility with the project team,” he said. However, many PMs backed into their jobs. Some were promoted from within. Others moved laterally during a reorganization. Still others took over a in a pinch when a previous PM left.

Moreover, people skills can be overblown, and even detrimental if carried too far. Daniel Ruggles, senior director, TransUnion, warned against “trying to be everyone’s friend on a project. You were hired or put in charge to execute a plan or achieve an objective, not to make friends and win over enemies."

3. Deadlines freak you out - We’ve all had trouble with deadlines at some point in our lives. Remember those all-night study sessions in college? According to Ari-Pekka Salovaara, CEO of Severa, a European-based professional services automation company, setting unrealistic deadlines is what causes many PMs to miss them in the first place.