The role of Project Manager is difficult. This is an informal leadership position—one of those with most of the responsibility and little of the authority. If a person is worried about being liked, this is a lousy choice of profession.
From the same organization that brought you this enlightened sales manager and his timeless advice on how to prosper: "The only way that you will succeed on my team is if you are married to the job," and "The reason that I am not in any family vacation pictures is because I'm on the phone. If I'm in the picture, you can be sure I have a blackberry stuck to my ear," is back with: "The problem with you is that you care too much about people." I love this organization. There are very few other places where a simple phone call offers me a priceless quote on really bad ideas from lousy leaders.
It's critical for leaders to recognize that organizations that broadly understand their strategy and employees that specifically understand how their activities and decisions impact strategy execution are going to defeat less-enlightened competitors. Strategy is not an abstract concept reserved for the deep-thought thinking sessions of senior leaders. Strategy is a powerful leadership tool to engage the hearts and minds of associates and to fuel performance.
The most challenging leadership positions are the informal roles where an individual leads based on his or her credibility and capability without the backing of a formal reporting structure. These positions are often characterized by a high-level or responsibility for results with little direct authority over the people doing the work. The role of Project Manager matches this description perfectly, with organizations increasingly looking to the individuals charged with project or program management to play key roles in executing on strategic priorities. Unfortunately, in many organizations, the role of Project Manager is inappropriately disconnected from the strategy process and is often viewed and treated by executives as a mid-level or administrative role. This is wrong. Senior executives would be wise to tap into the unique skills, insights and capabilities of the best Project Managers as they look to build out their leadership teams and to propel their organizations faster.
As a leader, you should be critically concerned about where ideas come from and how they go from insights to actions. This process of value creation is fundamental to a firm's growth and at its core it is a very organic process.
Every once in awhile, a number of articles or blog posts converge nicely to build on each other. Today over at Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog in his post entitled Sunday Afternoons, Wally offers his perspective on an article describing that many people report feeling a high degree of anxiety about work as Monday looms in the foreground. Wally's guidance for the leader's role in helping eradicate the causes of this unproductive stress is priceless and timeless (go ahead and click over and read it) and it puts the exclamation point on the leadership themes found in several other recent articles and posts.
Tomorrow's effective leaders are better served focusing on bringing the right resources to bear at a point in time than they are being constrained by a consultant derived goal to reduce managers and costs by increasing span of control. It's time to reengineer the old school thinking that leads to dangerous advice about leadership.
Organizations that learn to work in “Strategy Bursts” are able to learn, adapt and refine their strategic activities faster than more plodding competitors, but this new style requires learning and internalizing a new approach to strategy management and execution. For many leaders and executives, succeeding with this new model requires letting go of old strategy habits and biases.
While the technique or reaching agreement with your stakeholders one by one ahead of formal approval might seem a bit like playing politics, I prefer to view it as covering the bases. Leaders invest in people they trust and have a sense for, and the ceremony of a group meeting is the wrong place to try and build your trust and credibility.
As professional project management practices (and project managers) grow in importance to a firm's success (see my post: Struggling With Strategy? Think Project Management), it is critical that top leaders learn how to support the process rather than beat it into submission. And because as the saying goes, "it takes two to tango," Project Managers need to learn how to "manage" their executives to minimize unproductive involvement or outright interference.
