Donna Fitzgerald

Leadership is not based on formal authority.  Especially since, at the early levels of maturity, project management might still be approached on a somewhat informal basis. What this will generally mean to a PM is that the ability to form a team. focus the teams actions toward the agreed upon goal and deliver the project on time will all be based on the degree to which the project manager possesses sufficient charisma or sufficient personal stature to attract and enlist support for their project.

Natural leaders don’t necessarily go around telling everyone how wonderful they are. What they do is support others in solving their problems and they willingly accept responsibility for getting something done.  Another important criteria that we have observed over the years is that team members who report to a natural leader alway comment on the fact that they knew that they could count on their PM for support.  An often heard comment is “I knew that the PM always had my back.” To be more concrete in what this entails from a managerial perspective blame never flows down the chain.  If a mistake happens the PM answers for it to upper management and then handles the situation as appropriate within the project. This committment to stand as the responsible party when there’s trouble, while at the same time making sure that management can attribute praise directly to the individuals who have done the work, is the underpinning of building a project environment that operates on trust.

We realize that this is a performance standard that many PMs today would have a hard time living up to but these are the qualities that allow natural leaders to attract followers and that allow these individuals to operate indepently with little or no support in a chaotic level one environment.

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Category: Program Management     Tags: Leadership, Program Management, Project Management

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