Why is it that the abilities of project managers range so widely from brilliant to absolutely awful?

Bad Project Managers
The bad ones seem to have a lot in common. They monitor progress quite a bit. No, they monitor progress constantly. In fact, they walk around with a paper schedule surgically implanted in their left hands. They love lists: they have lots and lots of lists with boxes to check off every day. And they attend meetings. Now and again those meetings are with the project team, but usually those meetings are with other people: important people in management, and very important people from other departments, whom I did not realize were that important at all. And they copy the team on lots of important e-mail they send and receive. E-mails that the team stop reading after a while because they’re not really sure of the purpose. And they say “work harder and faster”, and that the schedule is slipping. They always say the schedule is slipping. Their schedules seem to be slipping the moment they are assigned to the project.

Good Project Managers
The good ones seem to have a lot in common as well. They set priorities up front. Everyone on the team knows where they are all going, what they are all fighting for. They feel like a team. They want to succeed, they want the project manager to succeed, and they want the company to succeed. They feel inspired. The good project managers have similar lists, and charts and schedules, but they don’t manage with the lists and charts and schedules. They reference them, sure. But they are much more interested in the individual, in the individual’s value, in how the individual is doing and feeling, in the individual’s opinions and thoughts and ideas. They are interested in everyone else on the team as well, in motivating everyone en masse. In making it fun, and exciting for the team. In articulating an end point, a direction, and keeping the team focused as a team on that end point, in the right direction. And they know what the end customer wants, and they know that the end customer will be happy when it is delivered. And they know what management wants and how happy they will be at the end of the project. And the whole team just knows they are going to succeed, and that feels great!

Big difference! But why can the difference be so stark? In both cases, the individual project managers may each have a similar aptitude and knowledge of the task at hand. But the results are incredibly different! In order to explain this, we must first take a quick look at the history of project management.

How we got where we are
Project management, as it is regarded and practiced by most companies today, is a result of the practices established by large government contractors in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, and by governments’ participation in the space and arms races. Contracts of that era could involve many different companies, and thousands of people working on large, complex space or weapon systems. In order to effectively coordinate the efforts of all of these entities, this discipline of project management was refined and standardized into what some call project management today.

So you can see that if a company views project management the same way it has been viewed in years gone by, you will likely end up with a project management function that is driven by checklists and monitoring. What is very intriguing is that most training and development offered to project managers propagates this notion of project management being a check and monitor discipline! The same is held true for executives at many companies – the executives always want a schedule summary, and checklist knowledge. So the poor project manager obliges by focusing on nothing else!

The most advanced companies, and the best project managers have figured out that project management is all about one thing: leadership! Leadership in defining requirements, leadership in planning project execution, in forming the team, in inspiring the team, leadership in communications, in expectation management, in being proactive, in being creative, in dealing with change. Leadership! The great project managers all demonstrate and practice leadership!

Think about every time you have been involved in a post mortem review on a failed project. Can you recollect one instance when the reason for the project failure was due to the Gantt chart program, or the resource forecasting tool? I can’t. I do remember failed project being due to poor resource selection, over commitment at the offset, lack of team inspiration, poor expectation management, horrible communications, letting problems fester. All of these are of course leadership issues.

Project Management versus Project Leadership
There are a multitude of management tasks that anyone heading up a project must accomplish. These tasks involve planning, tracking, and reporting the status of the work underway. These tasks are well documented and there is a large body of knowledge associated with performing these tasks effectively and efficiently. Almost all of the books and training generated for people leading a project deal with the “management” side of the job. The leadership tasks associated with heading up a project have not been given anywhere near as much attention.

This is an interesting situation in that it is the leadership qualities of the person heading up a project that more directly affect the successful outcome of a project rather than their management qualities. The leadership skills that a person must possess to effectively head up a project are what are sometimes referred to as “soft-skills”, as opposed to the “hard skills” of management. These soft skills include setting proper goals on a project that people buy into and get motivated about achieving. Soft skills involve working with the end customer to ensure that they appreciate the value that they are receiving and ensuring that their needs are going to be met at completion. They involve interfacing with management and giving them a proper appreciation of the state of the project and ensuring that that they can make appropriate resource allocation decisions that involve time, people, and money. They involve leveraging and working with key stakeholders of the project.

Please don’t misunderstand me: management, “hard skills” are key skills for someone who is heading up a project. The thing that needs to be kept in mind is that a person who has great management skills, or hard skills, will in no way ensure that their projects will be a success. On the other hand, a person with great leadership skills, or soft skills, will almost always end up with a successful project. The reason for this is that the leadership aspects of the project leader job are much more critical to success than the management aspects.

And what’s interesting about great soft skills, or leadership skills, is that there is a common denominator. The soft skills are all about expertly managing relationships. When I talk about project leadership being:

- working with the end customer to ensure that they appreciate the value that they are receiving and ensuring that their needs are going to be met at completion – I’m taking about the expert management of the customer relationship

- interfacing with management and giving them a proper appreciation of the state of the project and ensuring that that they can make appropriate resource allocation decisions that involve time, people, and money - I’m taking about the expert management of the management relationship

- inspiring the team, making the team feel accountable, and excited, and motivated, getting the team to work hard, in unison, towards an end goal – I’m taking about the expert management of the project team relationship

- keeping the key stakeholders involved, and using them to propagate the end goal - I’m taking about the expert management of the sales/marketing relationship

Project Leadership is all about expertly managing relationships – four key relationships – the client, the project team, management and sales/marketing.

The Leadership Effect
Let me postulate the following: a project manager acts just like a business leader or CEO for the duration of the project!

Business leaders understand the needs of the end customer and deliver to those needs. They carefully nurture employees, and maintain a skilled and motivated workforce. Business leaders work effective with their Board of Directors, providing information and leveraging their strengths for the benefit of the business. They show responsibility to their shareholders (well, in most cases) in reporting accurate information and offering outlook guidance.

Great project leaders focus on end customers, and the work team, and internal stakeholders like the sales and marketing team, and shareholders in their projects like their executives. Indeed, being a project leader is the closest position I can think of to being a CEO or business leader! A great project leader, just like a CEO, focuses effort on the four key relationships: the customer relationship, the project team relationship, the sales and marketing relationship, and the management relationship.

The customer relationship
A successful project manager spends a lot of time interfacing with the end customer and working hard at building a relationship based on trust and respect with them. Building this relationship may be the most critical aspect of running a successful project.It amazes me to witness the amount of investment made by most companies training their sales and marketing forces on how to effectively interact with customers, while investing nothing in their project managers on how to do the same thing. Is it any wonder then that many project managers do a very poor job of managing the end client relationship? In fact, many project managers feel so inadequate with respect to interfacing with a customer that they go out of their way to avoid spending time with them much less build up a productive relationship. If the customer is external, it’s even worse.

The project team relationship
The great project managers have this relationship well in hand. They communicate with the team superbly, getting team buy-in to project goals and approach, establishing the most optimal forms of communication for the team members, matching communication styles with individuals on the team. Great project managers form a real team: they establish accountability amongst the team, they inspire the team, they know what they have in their team and how to adjust for maximum success, they excite a team. Great project managers lead a team, developing authority over the members of the team, establish credibility with the team, and use power properly.

The sales and marketing relationship
On any project there are a number of senior stakeholders that the great project managers make effective use of in order to help deliver successful projects. The relationship between the stakeholders and the project manager is essentially the same type of relationship that exists between a business leader and the board of directors. In both cases the people in question are not involved in the day-to-day operations but can provide key guidance and advice when difficult situations are faced.

Just as a board meets periodically to review the state of the business and make changes to strategic direction, the project stakeholders should come together periodically for the same reason. The great project managers bring the key people together and make sure that these folks help ensure that the project is seen as a success by both the end customer and internal management.

Most project managers are uncomfortable dealing with executive management, even the great ones, and tend to shy away from interacting with them. However, by taking advantage of the key stakeholders, such as sales and marketing people, the problem is easily overcome.

The management relationship
A project manager is constantly being asked to inform internal management of operational results and predict future performance. It is this relationship that is given the most attention by project managers today. While this is an important task, from the standpoint of ensuring project success it probably has the least impact of any of the four relationships in determining whether a project is successful or not. The great project managers know how to manage this process without being completely engulfed by it.