Systems drive successful project management and there’s a good reason why education for project managers focuses on methodology too. Mastery of methodology ensures a repeatable process for managing projects that provides understood variables that can be tweaked based on the multitude of changing inputs and outputs of any given project. Waterfall or agile or a hybrid of the two, or even whatever is yet to be created all do an excellent job of providing the blueprint of how the project pipeline can look at your company. Project managers certified in these methodologies and experienced in their execution can reliably set-up and replicate projects according to the specifications outlined in these methodologies or really any methodology and by the specific needs of a project. This is important because methodologies provide a baseline that mitigates risk by controlling the variables. In a vacuum, that’s all that would be required to have great projects time and time again. However, projects are planned and executed by humans. Life is messy, organizational structures are messy, and the human element of projects provides challenges that require good leadership to overcome. Leadership matters because it bridges the gaps between where a project and its people are and where they need to get to by creating a culture of success. This is done through a multitude of things but we’re going to focus on three key aspects: vision/direction, development/opportunity, and the belief that nothing is impossible.
Vision and Direction
A team needs to know where they’re going as much as they need to know how they’re going to get there. They need to understand how their actions correspond to the overall goals and objectives of the organization as well as how they fit in the specific function of the team. In a project, it is the project manager who is coordinating between the various teams to ensure the project executes according to scope, schedule, and cost. The challenge is that often, a project manager has varying levels of control depending on the type of organization. In a heavily matrixed organization for instance, the project manager may have little authority in the traditional sense and may have to be reliant on soft skills and on workplace culture to ensure that project stakeholders are adhering to deadlines and working proactively. However, whether a project manager has direct authority of team members and project stakeholders or not; a successful project manager must still ensure that everyone involved follows a specific vision and direction.
If you’re in a position where you make the decisions on what your project’s, program’s, or organization’s goals are, then fantastic! You can communicate with the relevant stakeholders and take action one way or another as needed. Providing vision and direction whenever you don’t have a lot of direct authority as in a heavily matrixed organization, presents a greater challenge. Peer leadership or ‘colleague’ leadership demands the heavy use of interpersonal tact and nuance to get everyone on the same page because. The project manager still needs to lead the project but must have buy-in from other stakeholders who can be involved in many other projects or operational tasks. Harmony of action and synchronization of efforts are key here. While it is more difficult, it also means that vision and direction are all the more necessary for long-term success as there are many competing priorities.
For your projects or programs, ask yourself if all your stakeholders are aware of the goals for what they’re involved in and if these goals nest into goals of the echelons above, e.g. the program’s goals for a project or the portfolio’s goals for a program. If they don’t align, is there a reason for them to not do so? Sometimes there is, but sometimes there isn’t a good reason and projects can be at various stages in their life cycle and whether they’re legacy projects or the scope has frankensteined out of control, either way there needs to be a unity of vision and direction within a project and all the layers of the organization above it. When a project manager understands and makes clear the vision and direction of a project, they set up the framework for the project to stay on cost, on schedule, and within scope from the very beginning of the project, increasing the likelihood of a successful project.
How to provide vision and direction:
- A good planning process: A vision must be created before it can be shared with a project team. It should not be created in a vacuum either. What is the project trying to achieve? By what metrics are you evaluating success? How ambitious is this project or how routine is it?
2. Communication, communication, communication: it is a great cliche for a reason. A good project manager and leader communicates early, often, and in a manner that is most effective to the individual they’re trying to communicate with. Not everyone will buy-in from a passionate speech at a kick-off meeting. Some people communicate through the statistics, the numbers. Others need to know what support and plan is in place to make a vision reality. It depends on a multitude of factors that a good leader knows and considers. When conflict arises, a good leader communicates their way through the resolution process.
What do they communicate? Well, all project details need a home and a lot of things can be communicated nonverbally through shared spaces. Email can be effective communication, but without acknowledgement of receipt it’s too easy for emails to disappear into the ether. The simple answer is there is no one way to communicate that’s always best. It is a balance of tools and techniques that can be leveraged to create an effective communication strategy for your team. The important thing is that you have a deliberate strategy and aren’t afraid to adjust it as you figure out what works the best for everyone internally and externally.
3. Coordination: the ability to get a team moving together unified in the same direction translates to success. The greatest leaders in history were project managers even if they wouldn’t necessarily call themselves that. The scale of their projects may have been grand, but they all found a way to bring people on board to their vision and orchestrated their people in the right directions.
Development and Opportunity
“Project management needs strong leadership to accomplish great things. Strong leaders earn the respect of the team and empower individuals to do and be their best self. Every success I’m proud of required the support of others.” – <Ron Langhelm, Program Manager, DHS S&T>
“At a certain point, the individual’s scope of focus is limited and their efforts can become misaligned with the goal of a project or the mission at hand. Good leaders can gather a team of individuals and coordinate their efforts so that they apply their skills in the most effective way.” – <Emily Olson, Captain, US Army Infantry>
Achieving success single-handedly is an illusion especially for a project manager. The work of the entire project team, not the project manager alone, will ultimately decide the success or failure of a project. One of a project manager’s jobs is to try and get the best out of that team by leading the team with an understanding over everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and how to maximize those strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.
Developing your team and providing opportunities:
- Skill and/or knowledge opportunities/gaps (technical or soft): Do you know your team’s strengths and weaknesses and is your work breakdown divided with those strengths in mind? Try focusing on maximizing the strengths of your team members and actively encourage them to fine-tune those strengths even more. Yes, weaknesses need to be addressed, but some psychologists suggest that it is much more effective to spend time focused on improving your strengths.
- Personal ambitions and goals: Ambition, goal setting, and personal growth can be viewed as positive or negative depending on how they’re framed and managed. Ambition, for instance, often has a negative connotation. Handled positively, setting challenging and measurable goals can push your team to new heights and are absolutely a necessary part of a leader’s tool kit to both achieve project success but also the personal success of team members. Accepting the status quo leads only to stagnation across the board, but on the flip side, setting unrealistic goals and piling unhealthy workloads on your team for too long will be detrimental to team development.
- Empowerment and trust: A good leader builds an effective team that empowers team members to make decisions and they trust that their team members are equipped to handle the situations that they are put in. A successful team does not have one person making all the important decisions as this often leads to delays where team members are waiting for the person in charge to make the decisions instead of being actively engaged with the problem themselves. The important caveat to this is that the team needs clear escalation criteria for when a team member is put in a situation that they haven’t been prepared for. However, part of good development is getting your people in the habit of coming to you with what they think that the solution to the problem should be even if they’re escalating it to you. Problem solving is a practiced skill and everyone in a project team should be in the habit of trying to solve problems, not piling them on someone else.
Belief That Nothing is Impossible
The belief that you and your team can accomplish anything is the peak of effective leadership. Morale, workplace culture, camaraderie all contribute to creating this belief, but they’re just part of it, not the whole picture. These factors can be a bit amorphous and you can gather information through surveys to see if employees are happy; however, a single snapshot from one day isn’t an agile enough metric to keep up with fluid concepts. I would argue that if the only means of evaluating workplace culture is through a survey, there is likely a disconnect between senior management and the rest of the workforce. Creating a team that believes they can do the impossible means that things are clicking on every level and quality leadership is in place from top to bottom across the team and there is confidence inspired by a history of success. Building positive momentum is important here, but so is building in resilience to the workplace culture. Of course, you want to celebrate accomplishing milestones and that you want everyone to feel that sense of progress that starts making things feel achievable, but you also want to have your team prepared for adversity – even relish it. If you believe that that’s not possible with your team because of X reason, then you’ve already lost the battle because if you believe something isn’t possible, then it’s not for you. However, when you believe the opposite and you commit to try to make it happen, you start finding ways to do things that you’ve never done before.
Conclusion
Leadership isn’t easy and doesn’t always come naturally to people just like any skill. It takes deliberate action to be a good leader and build a team that can achieve success. While I think that peer or colleague leadership is the most difficult, something else may be the biggest obstacle for you. An organization without good leadership suffers just as a project without good leadership suffers. Reliance on personality can be mitigated through solid, replicable systems and methodologies, but true success requires the vision, team building, and the belief that a good leader brings.
How to implement:
Here are some thoughts on how to implement:
- Pick one aspect that you think is most important for you and your organization and start there.
- Have a propensity for action. When in doubt, act, then keep improving as needed.
- Communicate and draw strength from your team. They will certainly have something fresh to add and together your team will be better than if everyone just acted as individuals.
- Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do.
- Find ways to lead amongst your peers especially in a heavily matrixed environment. Peer leadership can be immensely challenging, but once again remember communication and action.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Marcus Aureleus