To be the best...

What are the top 3 traits or skills every project manager must have to excel?

Can you suggest any tips or insights to develop your project manager expertise?

the three traits needed to be a good project manager would be the ability to organize, communicate, and execute the project plan flawlessly.

The top three traits are all one: the ability to manage people. People with large egos, some of whom outrank you, all of whom purport to want the same thing you do although their actions don't demonstrate that, all of whom have to be guided toward your goal: successful completion of your project.

It helps to be organized obviously and to know the tools - but anybody can learn the tools so that is no big deal.

Another huge tip (if you are in IT): involve the QA team from the very begining - a simple thing but few seem to do it.

There are three areas a PM needs to cover. Leadership, PM technical skills, and expertise in the industry you are looking in. Leadership would cover team dynamics, development, change management, presentation skills, and general/business background. By PM skills, I mean scheduling, estimating, HR, and the other PMBOK areas - not just book knowledge, practical experience in the 9+ areas. Finally industry expertise - the phamacy industry is an good example to make my point, it is rare you would see a job posting for a Phara PM. They are grown within the company, well paid and usually retained. They likely will have a Phd in science and years of hard hard knocks as a researcher. They may have wanted out of the direct research or were not succesful at finding the compounds needed. Construction, hardware, SW, aerospace, and most other industries have realized that PM are not interchangable. You must have deep imdustry experience before a company will gamble on you to manage projects that use very precious resources in particular capital & scarce people.

Great question and I enjoyed also reading the responses:

My observations over the years have been:
Leadership
Intuition
Reputation for being able to delivery consistently