Chapter 16
IN THIS CHAPTER
Defining the difference between leadership and management
Identifying the traits of an effective leader
Improving your ability to influence your project team
Developing and maintaining motivation on your team
Fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team
Because of the rapid changes occurring in every facet of business and personal life today, leadership is one of the most important issues facing organizations. Regardless of how your project team is structured, but particularly when you’re working in a matrix environment, your project’s success depends on your ability to organize, coordinate, and support a diverse team that’s working toward a common goal (see Chapter 11 for more specifics about the matrix structure). Often the people on your team come from different areas of your organization, have different operating styles and different backgrounds, and don’t report to you administratively. Successfully guiding such a group of people requires both vision and structure.
This chapter discusses tips for aligning, focusing, and motivating the people supporting your project to maximize the chances for your project’s success.
Leadership and management are two related but distinct sets of behaviors for guiding and supporting people through a project. Here are the main differences between them:
Throughout the project, continually let people know how it is progressing and deal with any problems you encounter along the way (management tasks). Remind people of the project’s benefits and acknowledge their contributions to the project’s success (leadership tasks). Table 16-1 illustrates leadership and management approaches to support the key activities in each of a project’s life cycle phases (covered in Chapter 1).
TABLE 16-1 Comparison of Leadership and Management Approaches in the Project Life Cycle Phases
Project Phase | Leadership Approach | Management Approach |
---|---|---|
Starting the project | Create and share visions and strategies | Conduct a cost-benefit analysis |
Organizing and preparing | Elicit commitments from members | Specify objectives, schedules, and budgets |
Carrying out the work | Motivate team members | Monitor and report on progress and deal with problems |
Closing the project | Recognize and reward project participants | Conduct a post-project retrospective evaluation |
For you to lead others effectively, they must first agree to follow you. Although every leader develops a unique personal style of leading, people typically look for the following traits in their leaders. Which ones do you need to work on?
Tenacity: Tenacity is persistence. After a tenacious leader commits to a particular goal, they demonstrate tremendous determination in working toward that goal until they achieve it; they refuse to let temporary setbacks derail them. It’s not that the tenacious leader refuses to learn from their mistakes. In fact, they constantly assess the results of their actions and use the experience gained to improve their future attempts to reach their goal.
Simply put, people want a tenacious leader because they want to know their effort won’t go to waste if accomplishing their goal is more difficult or takes longer than expected.
In addition to looking for the previous traits in their leaders, people look for many other traits and behaviors, including:
In other words, in addition to looking for leaders they can believe in and trust, people seek leaders with whom they can personally relate and be comfortable and who appreciate and value their effort and contributions.
Power is the ability to influence the actions of others. Establishing effective bases of power enhances your ability to coordinate your team and other key stakeholders. In this section, we discuss how to develop your personal power bases and how to use the power you can derive from those bases to energize and motivate people throughout the life of your project.
Because personal power is the ability to influence and guide the actions of others, the first step in developing this power is understanding why people choose to do what you ask in the first place. People respond to your requests and directions for many reasons, including the following:
Of course, your technical expertise can be a significant asset if you use it correctly. Your praise for a job well done means a lot more to your team members than praise from someone who’s less qualified to assess the work.
Although many factors can contribute to your ability to influence people, your power over your team members is generally one of the following:
Achieved power is far more effective and enduring than ascribed power. People who act in response to your ascribed power usually do the least amount of work necessary to get the rewards they want or to avoid the negative consequences they fear. On the other hand, people motivated by your achieved power work to accomplish the highest possible quality of results because they’ve decided that doing so is in their best interests (and yours).
You can get a sense of the power you have over someone by taking note of the willingness with which they agree to do and then do what you request. If you already get all the cooperation from others that you need, just keep doing what you’re doing. However, if you feel frustrated by people’s resistance and lack of cooperation when you ask for their help, take steps to improve the power you have over them.
Take the following steps to improve your ability to influence your team members and other people in your project environment:
Efficient processes and smooth relationships create the opportunity for successful projects. Having team members personally commit to your project’s success affords you the greatest chance of achieving it. Therefore, your major task as a project manager is to encourage every team member to be motivated and committed to your project’s success.
When your project meets people’s professional and personal needs in each of these four areas, you strengthen their commitment to the project’s success. In this section, we cover specific ways to meet these needs.
Although some people commit to completing an assignment because someone tells them to do so, you get a much more serious commitment when a person recognizes and appreciates a project’s benefits. When discussing your project’s benefits with your team, consider those benefits that are most important to your organization, its employees, and its clients, such as:
Also consider potential benefits to each team member, such as:
Occasionally, someone reminds us that their team members receive salaries for doing their jobs. In other words, this person is suggesting that they don’t have to worry about whether their team members realize personal benefits from doing their assigned tasks. As far as they are concerned, people will perform their assignments because they want to receive their paychecks. Unfortunately, however, this type of reward power encourages people to do the least work necessary to ensure they receive their next paycheck rather than to work toward the highest quality results.
I’m not suggesting that your main concerns on a project are your team members’ personal benefits. However, people are more committed if they feel they can accomplish their personal goals while helping their organization achieve its goals.
A project is feasible if it’s possible to accomplish. No matter how desirable you may feel a project is, if you’re convinced that nothing you do can lead to its success, you’ll give up more easily when you encounter the slightest of difficulties (and so will your team members). You don’t need a guarantee of success, but you must believe that you have a reasonable chance at it.
Getting your team members to appreciate your project’s value and feasibility helps you motivate them initially. However, if the project lasts longer than a couple of weeks, the team’s initial motivation can die out without continual reinforcement from you. In general, people working on a particular task need to know how they’re doing over time for three reasons:
See Chapter 15 for ways to inform people of your project’s progress.
Rewarding people at a project’s conclusion for their effort and accomplishments confirms to them that they accomplished the desired results and met the stakeholders’ needs. It also reassures them that team members and managers recognize and appreciate their contributions. This recognition, in turn, makes it more likely that they’ll welcome the opportunity to participate in future projects.
Post-project rewards can take several forms, including one or more of the following:
Rather than guessing which form of reward your team members will appreciate most, ask each of them directly.
In this section, we delve into one of present day’s seemingly most hot-button workplace topics, diversity, equity, and inclusion (also “DEI” or “DE&I”), and discuss some of the ways it may impact your project. But first, allow us to state outright that we are not experts in DE&I or Human Resources nor do we intend to lecture you or try to influence your opinions on the topic. The focus of this section remains on how to conduct yourself as you lead and reap the benefits of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team to achieve your project’s goals. Incidentally, if you are seeking an informative, well-rounded book on this topic by a widely-respected expert in the arena, you’d be hard-pressed to find any better than Dr. Shirley Davis’s newly released Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies.
The DE&I movement is not new; it’s officially been around in one form or another since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, when leaders began calling attention to the inequalities and injustices plaguing the United States and other countries at the time. Eventually, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address employment discrimination and promote equal opportunities for all American workers.
Common sense, supported by volumes and volumes of research conducted over many decades, tells us quite clearly that a diverse team is more likely to be a high-performing team; an equitable team is more likely to be a high-performing team; an inclusive team is more likely to be a high-performing team.
Let’s briefly define these terms, as the rest of this section builds on each of them:
Team members with different backgrounds, different experiences, and different outlooks typically mature into a more enriched team, with a significantly larger knowledge base of diverse experiences and ideas from which to draw, than a homogeneous, uniform team. This maturation does not spontaneously occur on its own in most instances though. Be deliberate and emphatic in your acceptance of diversity and the inclusion of these diverse qualities and your project team will follow suit. It can be intimidating to join a diverse team, as many people tend to focus more on the differences they see than the more subtle similarities that exist beneath the surface. Establish a welcoming and respectful framework for your project team. Newcomers will feel like productive, equal members of the team much faster than if they are made to feel like an outsider.
As a project manager, you’re accountable for the successful execution of project activities to yield an acceptable output for your stakeholders. Your team will be more likely to solve a problem (and may solve it faster and more efficiently) if people on your team have encountered similar problems in the past and feel comfortable sharing those past experiences with the team.
It is not enough to simply have a diverse team; diversity without inclusion will lead to an environment where team members are reluctant, or unwilling, to express their ideas and beliefs for fear they will be treated disrespectfully if other team members do not share the same backgrounds and perspectives that resulted in those ideas and beliefs. The success of your project relies on project team members working together in a respectful and collaborative way to accomplish your shared goal.
As discussed previously, equity is not the same as equality. Let’s say you are managing a four-month long project to refresh your company’s intranet site. You have three project team members who all require a laptop (don’t worry, you planned ahead and budgeted for this equipment) to perform the majority of the tasks they are each assigned. One of your team members, Diego, happens to be legally blind and has been for most of his life. If equality is your primary goal, you would procure three of the same mid-level laptops, all with the same features and specifications and distribute them to your team. You’ve treated each member equally by procuring the same laptop for all of them; however, this is approach is not equitable.
Diego requires a specialized computer that narrates aloud all of his actions, button clicks, mouse moves, and so on, and a keyboard with Braille on each key. Without this specialized computer and keyboard, Diego will require significantly more time to complete the same tasks as the other team members and will most likely miss the project milestone dates. You could have avoided this predicament had you pursued an equitable solution rather than an equal one. The equitable solution is to provide Diego with the specialized computer and keyboard he needs so he can begin the project on the same footing as the other two team members, both of whom can be successful with the mid-level laptops. Even though Diego’s laptop costs $3,000 more than the other team members’ laptops, this is the equitable solution because it renders Diego just as capable of performing the tasks assigned to him as the other team members.
Table 16-2 notes topics in this chapter that may be addressed on the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam and that are also included in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition (PMBOK 7).
TABLE 16-2 Chapter 16 Topics in Relation to the PMP Exam and PMBOK 7
Topic | Location in This Chapter | Location in PMBOK 7 | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
Distinctions between leading and managing | “Exploring the Differences between Leadership and Management” | 2.2.4. Leadership Skills 2.2.4.4. Interpersonal Skills | The discussion of leadership and management in PMBOK 7 notes the names of different leadership and management skills and techniques, instances where you may use them, and selected highlights of what they entail. |
Power, influence, and motivation | “Developing Personal Power and Influence” and “You Can Do It! Creating and Sustaining Team Member Motivation” | 2.1.1.4. Engage 2.2.4. Leadership Skills 2.2.5. Tailoring Leadership Styles | The discussion of interpersonal skills in PMBOK 7 notes the names of different leadership and management skills and techniques, instances where you may use them, and selected highlights of what they entail. |
Diversity, equity, and inclusion | 2.2.2. Project Team Culture 2.2.5. Tailoring Leadership Styles | PMI’s standard for project management and PMBOK 7 describe two project management principles, stewardship and team, that address this topic. This book discusses similar concepts in more detail and relates them to real-life scenarios. |