What other skill set besides project management is focused on those three things? When I talk to successful people in any field, what I generally find is that underneath their professional niche beats the heart of a great project manager. If you’re a professional project manager, take your own pulse and see if you’re using your skills not just to manage projects, but also to propel your career.

Here are 10 questions to ask yourself and ensure that you’re using project management as your career’s secret weapon:

1. Do you show results? Project management is the art and science of getting things done. When you improve your project management skills, you know how to get things done quickly, and even more important, you learn how to document the results. In our careers, we are often as good as our last hit. You can’t be a one-hit wonder. Instead, you want to keep charting, year after year, with success after success.

2. Are you efficient? When you apply project management principles to your work or your home life, you stop reinventing the wheel. Project management teaches you how to make the most efficient use of resources to generate the best results in the least amount of time.

At the end of every project, you capture best-practices and lessons learned, creating an invaluable documentation of hits and misses. Sound too good to be true? Good project managers do this on every project, and you can, too.

3. Is your communication ongoing? One mistake I see a lot in project management and on teams is the assumption that there’s one meeting and everyone goes away, and then the communication ends, and somehow everything is still going to magically get done.

Your communication skills are not about your vocabulary. They are about how you manage your communication. Are you communicating frequently enough and with clarity? Are you communicating what is relevant? Are you communicating your successes?

4. Do you play well with others? People hear the word teamwork, and they groan or they say that they are, of course, a team player. That’s why I like to bring it back to the kindergarten place in our mind: Back to the sandbox. Do you play well with others? Do other people want to be on your project team? Are you respected? Do you listen actively to what others have to say?

Good project managers know when to lead and when to get out of the way. When someone is interviewing you, you know what that person is thinking: Can I work with him? Will my team work well with her?