CHAPTER 10

Leadership and the Future of Project Management

ONE MESSAGE THAT we have worked to convey throughout this book is the comprehensive nature of project leadership. There is no one face of leadership; rather, leader behavior consists of a huge variety of decisions, attitudes, and actions. This book has shown how leadership behavior can be modeled, and how it allows leaders to formulate and implement visions for the future, build effective and cohesive teams, develop strong ethical decision-making skills, and formulate overall project strategies. Clearly, the idea of a central role of leadership in project management is misleading; the reality is that leadership encompasses numerous roles and activities if those leaders are to have the impact that they should.

The other conclusion that all readers should reach has to do with the central importance of project leadership in successful project management. Project management, as much as any activity in our organizations, is a leader-intensive undertaking. That is, effective leadership by itself can go far toward ensuring that a project will be a success. Conversely, inadequate or ineffectual leader behavior can often torpedo a viable project even when all other project management activities are performing appropriately. The best scheduling techniques, risk management, scope development, project control, and resource provisions will not ensure project success in the face of poor project leadership. This point was recently borne out quite clearly in a book by Pinto and Kharbanda suggesting that too many organizations spend far too much time in promoting their projects, while at the same time inadequately training and maintaining a cadre of project leaders (1995). The results are counterproductive and wasteful.

What, then, are we to conclude about project leadership? Figure 22 and the following section synthesize some of the key points that we have made in this book and serve as an important starting point for any discussion of how companies can work to better shape their project management futures through first shaping their project leadership training.

KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER

Learn the Team Members’ Needs

The first step in effective leadership is to develop an understanding of each individual member of the project team. By understanding, we mean learning as much as possible about what makes each member tick, what each craves, what tasks excite each member, what approaches can be used to motivate each member for the tasks at hand, and so on. The key goal of learning members’ needs also allows project leaders to serve as developer of their team members by giving individuals the opportunities to grow through learning new skills.

Learning team members’ needs consists first of assessing their abilities. Not every team member comes to the project with all of the abilities to perform their tasks. The first task of the team leader lies in accurately determining the status of each member prior to the start of the project. Is additional training necessary? Do team members have a clear understanding of the roles that they are expected to undertake on the project? How much guidance will be needed during the early phases of the project?

The issue of guidance is important to bear in mind. Research has demonstrated that many project leaders perform most effectively when they understand that their approach early in a project should be more directive, that is, telling team members what to do. The directive approach is appropriate here because there is usually a great deal of ambiguity at this point. Team members are uncomfortable with their roles and with each other. Under these circumstances, it is necessary for the project leader to operate as a boss until the team has begun to form, and each member has demonstrated the willingness and ability to perform her role. As the project moves forward, team leaders are able to redefine their role relative to the group, moving into a facilitator mode. Team members are now comfortable with their activities and do not need excessive supervision and direction. Instead, project leaders can best serve the project and the team by redefining themselves as helping rather than simply directing. The focus has shifted from command to one of support.

Learn the Project's Requirements

The primary task of the project manager is to successfully implement his project—period. All activities, like team building, vision creation, personnel training, and so forth are simply steps to better facilitate project success. In order to best ensure that the project can be managed successfully, it is vital to fully understand the project's special needs. What resources will be necessary to adequately support project development? What are the specific goals and priorities of this project? What are the key risks and scope considerations necessary to understand and facilitate its development? All of these questions must be answered as early in the project as possible.

The project leader, functioning in a proactive way, can force early and complete discussion of these issues. Poor project managers typically operate in a far different mode, one that can be compared to a ready, fire, aim attitude. They assume that unless they are doing something, the project is not advancing. In fact, it is usually the case that project managers who opt for immediate activity are simply setting themselves up for downstream problems. When no effort is made to anticipate future events, including potential problems, the project team is doomed to spending more and more time fighting fires that could have been foreseen and avoided if adequate work had been done up-front.

Act for the Simultaneous Welfare of the Team and the Project

This is the most difficult aspect of leadership—understanding and working to maintain an effective balance between concern for the project team (people) and concern for getting the project completed (task). Balance between these two goals is key. Excessive concern for the task can create tyrants who routinely abuse, hound, and bully their teams into acts of overt and covert resistance, low morale, and lack of commitment to the project. On the other hand, the team leader who displays too much concern for the project team at the expense of the project is also missing the point. True, the project team may love this individual, but the project itself continues to slip further and further behind in schedule and budget.

Research suggests that effective project leaders are typically task driven; that is, they understand that their number-one priority is to complete the project. However, in accomplishing this goal, they also perceive that they cannot do it by simply riding roughshod over their teams. They understand that it is through the commitment and motivation of the team, in fact, that they are able to successfully accomplish project goals. We would emphasize this point: it is through the team, not in spite of it, that projects succeed. One way that leaders can work to achieve these simultaneous concerns lies in developing goals for the project that satisfy both the needs of the organization and the needs of individual members of the team. Creating challenging and motivating tasks serves the dual purpose of achieving corporate goals for project completion and as team-building objectives.

Create an Environment of Functional Accountability

A key leadership role in project management lies in creating a positive sense of team accountability for project success. Rather than members continually pointing fingers at each other or asserting “that's not my job,” functional accountability offers project leaders some concrete steps toward creating a spirit of commitment and team concern for task accomplishment. The key steps in developing this accountability spirit suggest that leaders need to do the following.

• Explicitly define and communicate expectations to the team (early and often).
• Increase the validity of the measures used to evaluate individual and team performance. Make sure that the measures are appropriate to the project, meaningful to team members, and accurate measures of performance.
• Increase the team's control over its performance (provide resources, structure, and training). When expecting greater accountability from the project team, it is vital that steps are taken to give it the tools to succeed.
• Develop meaningful incentives to reward performance. Know your people and what each desires. Give them the ability to succeed and the belief that these goals are attainable through their hard work.
• Adjust the accountability gap, or range of performance, which is unsanctioned and unrewarded, to accommodate uncertainties in the accountability items above. In those situations where expectations are inherently unclear, or performance measurement is only vague, or the team has less than complete control over the progress of the project, the leader must widen the range of acceptable performance to accommodate these constraints.

Have a Vision of the Completed Project

Too often the activities and outlooks of project managers appear little different from those of their team members. They operate in a distinctly reactive manner—responding to crises rather than anticipating them, and dealing with the project in a disjointed piecemeal approach without conceptualizing its overall scope and goals. We see examples of the results of this mindset every day. For example, in the information systems field (where it is often notoriously difficult to envision completed projects), recent research suggests that over 65 percent of all new projects are late, over budget, and/or nonperforming. Even more damning is the attitude of senior managers in these firms—over 50 percent of those interviewed did not view these numbers as either surprising or necessarily bad. That contributes to a dangerous mindset in which project management is being increasingly confused with systematic muddling through.

A far better approach for effective project leaders is to develop a clear vision of the completed project even before the first project-related activities are performed. This vision should be complex and include a visual image of the completed project, as well as links to the commercial or operational side—e.g., how the project will be received by its customers or constituents. When the project vision is thus established, it naturally allows project leaders to begin addressing other key questions, such as how to go about motivating team members, how to ensure that project resources will remain available for its development, and so forth. The vision is key: We can only fully assimilate what we fully understand.

Use the Project Vision to Drive Your Own Behavior

The vision is the metagoal that answers the question: “Why are we doing this?” Coupled with that metagoal are the specific steps we must now take to achieve the vision. The steps taken serve to answer the question: “How will we achieve the vision?” Notice the shift in emphasis: Once the vision is established, it allows the project team and the leader to move from the more general what question to the specific hows necessary to achieve the project vision. This sequence should occur naturally, as the project moves through its planning cycle into execution. Throughout this process, leaders should frequently return to the vision and ask themselves: “Will this activity help me/us achieve the vision?” and “What else should be done to make the vision a reality?” Notice that the overall vision serves now as the decision source for future activities. When the team is faced with a problem or a series of tough choices, the first key question that should be used to evaluate these alternatives is: “Does this alternative support the project vision?” If the answer is “yes,” then the choice is clear.

Serve as the Central Figure in Successful Project Team Development

No project team naturally develops into an effective group. In fact, the reverse is most often true; left to themselves, team members will quickly dissolve into factions, bickering, private agendas, and, ultimately, project failure. This is not a pessimistic view of human nature, merely a natural result of putting members from different functional backgrounds together in a team. These individuals have different goals, timeframes, attitudes, and mistaken beliefs about themselves and personnel from other departments. When they are allowed to bring this psychological baggage to the project team, it is a recipe for conflict. In the face of this conflict, the project leader will either flunk the test, allowing disagreements to disrupt and eventually destroy the team and the project, or the leader will take direct and proactive steps to anticipate conflicts and resolve them effectively.

The key lies in the project leader's understanding of team-formation dynamics. In spite of what we may sometimes be led to believe in the popular business press, it is not natural for people from different functional backgrounds to work together efficiently in a group setting. There are too many points of difference and potential disagreement to ever suppose that effective project teams will naturally evolve. Instead, leaders should make team development their number one priority after the project team has been structured. Once key personnel are in place, it is imperative to begin working with them, one at a time and as a group, to start creating an atmosphere of trust and collaboration. Cohesion does not come about by accident but as the result of serious effort.

Recognize Team Conflict as a Positive Step

It is important to qualify this point. There is a great difference between destructive conflict that arises due to distrust, political scheming, or interpersonal dislike and the healthy conflict that comes about through natural team development. All evolving teams are subject to natural frictions and disagreements. The key often lies in the project leader controlling the team development rather than allowing the team's destructive evolution to control the project manager. The most effective method for controlling this process is to operate in a proactive manner, anticipating the causes of conflict and addressing them immediately.

One of the warning signs of ineffective team leadership lies in how the project manager chooses to address conflicts that develop. Poor managers often panic at the first sign of disagreement among their team members. Their response typically is to suppress the conflict, usually through banal observations, such as: “We are all on the same side.” Inattention is not a meaningful or useful response. Left unchecked, unaddressed or suppressed conflict will simply fester and grow until it again raises itself to threaten the project. Some of the poorer project managers can actually engage in several iterations of this suppress and ignore cycle in the mistaken belief that they are taking appropriate action. They are mistaken. Successful project leadership consists of recognizing that conflict must be addressed, but in a positive way, so that the sources of the conflict are uncovered and resolved. Only in that way can a project team mature and begin to attain the cohesiveness so necessary for effective project development.

Manage with an Eye toward Ethics

Ethical problems are almost always the result of dysfunctional project management characteristics. When problems are occurring with technical specifications, budget overruns, or customer dissatisfaction, there is a natural temptation to look for ways to cut corners. The worst examples of these practices even involve falsifying data or providing fraudulent information to avoid the penalties of project failure.

What is the answer? Clearly, project managers must examine their project management processes with a critical eye. What are they doing that could potentially lead to downstream problems with the project? What behaviors are they implicitly or overtly encouraging in their project teams? For example, in one project that the authors are familiar with, it became common practice to routinely falsify project performance data in order to cover up ongoing technical problems. When the project prototype was tested by a government agency, these technical inadequacies quickly came to light. Following some digging by government auditors, the whole range of deception came out—padded expenses, false performance results, and so forth. When the case was finally resolved, the offending company was forced to pay millions of dollars in fines, the project manager and several key members of the team were terminated, and the company lost a tremendous amount of goodwill.

In our chapter on ethics, we suggested that while unethical behavior may sometimes appear on the surface as an easy out, it invariably leads to even greater long-term problems. Unethical behavior always carries with it costs, some hidden and others immediate. These costs, in extreme cases, have resulted in catastrophic project failures and even death, as inadequate or unsafe projects are introduced or built only to fail, as they inevitably must.

Remember That Ethics Is Not an Afterthought but an Integral Part of Our Thinking

Ethical problems do not arise independently. We need to recognize that, along with the other myriad decisions associated with project management and the operational and economic concerns, there are going to be ethical issues that surface. Treating them as a separate concern makes ethical behavior appear as an afterthought. It is important to understand that the results of each of our decisions as project leaders carry with them potentially serious ethical implications. When ethics are viewed in this light, they push project leaders to frame their decision processes as concerned with making the best possible decision, where best is defined to its fullest extent—economically, technically, behaviorally, and ethically.

Take Time to Reflect on the Project

Both the project leader and the team can benefit from taking time now and then to consider the progress of the project. It is more typical of most project managers that they consciously adopt an action-oriented mode during the project's development without devoting sufficient time to considering its overall status. Control information tends to be highly compressed, often consisting of “How's it going?” inquiries, rather than detailed feedback. We suggest that it is both appropriate and necessary for the project leader and team to routinely devote time to objective analysis of the state of the project. These brainstorming sessions can identify looming problems or opportunities, help team members coordinate their activities, and improve team solidarity.

One highly successful project that one of the authors was involved with routinely (once a month) held Friday morning prayer meetings in which all relevant project status information was shared with the group. At these fully catered breakfast meetings, the project team leader solicited input from the team regarding upcoming milestones, assessed the state of team member relations, asked for suggestions, and passed along relevant information from top management and other stakeholders. The meetings served the dual purpose of unifying team efforts while forcing members to reflect strategically on the current status of the project.

Develop the Trick of Thinking Backwards

One of the best ways to keep the project moving forward is to learn to think backwards. In other words, we need to continually assess the project's status in the context of the organization's intended purpose. We must evaluate progress through reunderstanding the project's original goals, i.e., looking backwards to the issues and contexts that drove the project in the first place. When done effectively, this process allows us to continually test our current project assumptions against the original assumptions driving its development. Is the project still fulfilling its original intent? Is the project in its current form still contributing to corporate profitability and strategic direction?

An extremely common side effect of project development in many organizations is to cocoon the project team once it has been given initial go-ahead to act. The effect of this approach is always dangerous; it leads to the potential for well-developed projects that no longer serve a strategic purpose. In other words, we are no longer solving the right problems. The alternative, requiring the project team and leader to continue to think backwards, puts them continually in touch with the larger organization and its goals. The result is projects that have a greater and more immediate impact in the marketplace, or throughout the corporation, because they have been continually reconnected to the company's central mission.

CONCLUSION

Discussions on the importance of effective leadership for project success are likely to continue to grow in the coming years. More and more organizations find themselves adopting project management techniques for their core operations. At the same time, they are discovering that without a cadre of project leaders trained in appropriate project management techniques, they will never achieve anything close to their potential. Both research and practice must continue examining the role of leadership, offering guidelines to project managers attempting to improve their abilities in this key area.

The heartening message that should come across from this work and other texts is that leadership can be taught. It is not simply some innate commodity that one either does or does not possess. The more we study leadership, the more we practice techniques for effective team development and vision creation, the more we operate with an eye toward ethical management, and the greater our abilities grow. This book is an effort to steer project managers toward a greater understanding of the true, multidimensional nature of project leadership. One theme that has run throughout the chapters of this book is that leadership is not a single attribute or characteristic; rather, it is a set of attitudes and determined behaviors, and its very comprehensiveness matches the myriad demands that project management makes on us. Put another way, project management is a large undertaking requiring an understanding of multiple performance expectations. Leadership, likewise, requires us to develop an equal degree of breadth. There is no one leadership style; there is a leadership attitude that affects all subsequent styles that we employ.

It is our hope that readers of this book will see it not as an end unto itself but as a springboard toward investigating further aspects of leadership. In other words, we hope that we have whetted our readers’ appetites to explore project leadership in greater detail. What this will require is gaining a better understanding of ourselves, our subordinates, our organizations, and our projects. Effective leadership makes us better, more active learners. It encourages us to critically evaluate our current actions in light of what we seek to accomplish. We hope that this book has begun this process of self-analysis and renewed commitment for a new generation of project leaders.