I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal purporting to offer leadership advice to young women at the beginning of their career (http://bit.ly/qVTaae) .  The only kind thing I can say about the article is that it serves as a very good example of what not to do.

Let’s go through the points one by one:

1) The article says that If  young women “assert themselves forcefully, people may perceive them as not acting feminine enough, triggering a backlash”.  There is so very much wrong with this statement that I barely know where to start.  Project managers are NOT suppose to be feminine or masculine.  They are suppose to themselves and be able to lead and make decisions.  The classic sexual descriptions should never pertain.  The goal here is to be accepted.  A long time ago in a world far away, I worked with Carol Bartz (the CEO of Yahoo) http://bit.ly/qOmxHl.  I loved watching her work because she was great at being a woman who was one of the boys.  In Jungian parlance, Carol was the quintessential amazon.  She was respected, fun and clearly smart and talented.  I have to admit that I was a bit envious of her but I knew her style would never work for me.  I aimed for being the sister everyone trusted.  And now people have told me that I’ve become the Aunt you trust completely (oh the tyrony of time).  Feminine and masculine are terms that have to do with finding someone to date—not to someone you’ll trust the success of your project with. 

2)The article says “One major problem is a shortage of female role models. People often learn leadership styles by observing others; but there are often few female executives to observe.”  Not sure what planet the author is living on but if you think this is true you are living under a rock.  There are women C.I.O. and women who run PMOs and manage major programs.  I know I’ve been in those positions (though it was C.F.O in my case).  Even when I started there were plenty of women there to help.  Another woman I worked with back in the day was Carlene Ellis (http://bit.ly/o3IFgl) who later became Intel’s first woman C.I.O.  So if there were women role models when I was starting my career there are even more today.  DO NOT believe that a role model has to be in a C level position to inspire or to be someone to learn from.  The best role models are successful at their jobs and are willing to talk to you.  The higher up the management food-chain someone rises the less time they have to help young women starting out.  Aim just a couple levels above your current position – that’s where you’ll get the best advice.

3)The article says “In theory, these mentors could be either men or women, but young women should realize that male mentors may not be as aware of the unique challenges young women face in asserting leadership.”  I have one answer to this B* S*.  If you believe this for even one second they you will FAIL.  You do not have a unique challenge.  The kind of sex discrimination women faced when I started my career simply doesn’t exist today.  Yes, there are still pockets of it but there WILL ALWAYS BE CHALLENGES.  No one regardless of sex gets a free pass into upper management.  You always have to work for it and earn it. 

4) The article says “It’s also important for young female managers to ask superiors to back them up when others second-guess them.”  Like the rest of the advice this is terrible.  If you have to ask for the support you have already failed.  First off, always be willing to fight your own battles.  If a senior level stakeholder disagrees with you then you need to go to them directly and explain why you made the decision you made and ask why they disagree.  You might have missed a nuance that you could actually accommodate and change a potential adversary into a supporter.  Every once in a while there is a major confrontation.  At this point what should kick in is the normal relationship between a project manager and a sponsor. 

The wonderful thing about being a PM is that it’s absolutely equal opportunity work.  The only thing a young woman or a young man needs to focus on is what its going to take to get the team going in the same direction and to deliver the results the sponsor and the stakeholders want.  Believe it or not if you focus on your job and then stay open to feedback and constantly learn from your successes and your failures – you’ll not only do fine—you’ll do great.

Found this quote in a ComputerWorld article a friend sent me (http://tinyurl.com/lm9yb7).  While the entire article is well worth reading this one sentence seemed to pertain to the essence of what Project and Program management of software projects is all about, especially since it so perfectly encapsulates the concept of servant leadership.

It occured to me that I write about servant leadership and yet it seems I haven’t really defined it.  From my perspective the concept of servant leadership begins with accepting that it is the team or the group or the society that creates the outcome.  The role of the leader then is to effectively empower or give “permission” to the “team”  to make the change and to remove as many roadblocks as possible so that they (the team) can be successful. And the secret to empowering the team is to respect them as the creative, valuable, talented people that they are.

If this sounds too touchy-feely for some of you let me assure you it’s not.  The flip slide to the coin of respect is demanding people live up to their potential.  Slackers get booted off the team.  Likewise destructive worms (no matter how brilliant and talented) get shown the door as well.  Committments are honored by everyone or “contracts” are renegoiated.  Everyone owns their own failure (no blame game allowed — EVER).

Now on to another one of my aha moments.  All of what it takes to manage this way seemed pretty instinctive to me when I started my career, but that was just youthful arrogance.  It was instinctive because I was surrounded by lots of great people who subtly reinforced me for doing the things described above and who boxed my ears every time I did something stupid (bad donna — 20 lashes with a wet noodle).  I recently had the opportunity to test some of this out myself with a very large team of Gen Ys and I can now safely say I appreciate how much work everyone put into me, especially when the trick to this form of mentoring is to make it look like benign neglect.

I’ve said to a lot of clients that I think they’ve hired poor project managers but the more I think on it the more I believe that poor choice of people is only half the problem.  The Gen Ys who worked for me had great raw potential.  Some of them would have made it to become great managers and leaders simply because they had good training from their parents.  Some of them will become good because of managers who helped them in their career, and some of them no matter what anyone does will fall by the wayside on their journey to become leaders.  My guess is that the born leaders number no more than 10% and all we need to do with them is leave them alone.  The ones who can be developed into leaders are probably the next 40%  and this is where we should be investing our time in order to keep our profession vibrant and valuable.

One of the things I like about writing this column is that it gives me the opportunity to poke at topics until I can come up with something concrete (which then generally turns into a Gartner research piece).  Obviously leadership is one of my hot buttons this year since I spend a lot of time talking to heads of PMOs about the leadership crisis they face. Their PMs at best approach the three elements of leadership in reverse order — and yes order makes a difference — and at worst fail on all three elements in their entirety. 

I’d been thinking that the problem was the PMs that they’d hired were simply unsuited to the work but what I now realize is that nobody has actually taught them how to lead and more importantly no one has given them “permission” to see themselves as leaders.  Some of us simply lead through inclination.  We see something that needs to be done, it takes more than a single person to do it, we go enlist other people and viola instant team and instant leadership.  The Darwinian method worked for me but I now realize that I spent my early career in an environment that naturally produced leaders (Silicon Valley in its heyday).  If a company culture isn’t designed to encourage this natural formation then we actually have to learn to grow them ourselves.

Now the light bulb has turned on over my head, I realize that I’ll have to figure out how we can begin to design a sustainable method for growing a crop of leaders. And YES it really is OUR responsibility since it turns out we have the most fertile fields.  Projects and programs are fantastic places to develop the skills and abilities we need in our future leaders.

By the way for those of you already in a PPM leadership position, I might suggest that I’m offering you a golden opportunity to improve your own cache.  One of the fastest ways to move up the ranks is to not only do your own job exceptionally well but to do something completely above and beyond your current job assignment.  Most people do that by picking something their boss is passionate about.  I have found that it works even better is you pick something the company as a whole values to work on.  For a whole lot of reasons I won’t go into here — you’ll ruffle less political feathers if you do it smartly.