Practices for Project Leadership - Ninth Practice

By Alexander Laufer

Lead, So You Can Manage

In a world perceived as being in "geometric order", projects require only plan-driven management. The cases in this book, however, clearly demonstrate that in the real world of "living order", there is a need for both leadership and management.

Plan-driven management assumes a relatively predictable world and thus relies primarily on planning, control, and risk-management tools. A dynamic environment, where unexpected events are inevitable and the project is plagued with numerous problems, demands both leadership and management. Most of these problems are technical, that is, they can be solved with knowledge and procedures already at hand. Although solving these problems might require great flexibility and high responsiveness, they can still be resolved while maintaining the status quo. They just require good managerial skills. Other problems, however, are adaptive, that is, they are not so well-defined, do not have clear solutions, and often require new learning and changes in patterns of behavior. To address these adaptive problems, the project manager must be willing and able to make significant changes and to challenge the status quo. These problems, therefore, require leadership.

Another aspect that distinguishes between these two roles is that managers engage in routine activities, whereas leaders focus on and generate nonroutine interventions. Using this distinction, it is clear that the epilogue includes three practices requiring primarily routine activities and three that demand nonroutine interventions, as follows:

Practices requiring routine activities:

• Plan, monitor, and aticipate
• Use face-to-face communication as the primary communication mode
• Be action-oriented and focus on results

Practices requiring nonroutine interventions:

• Challenge the status quo
• Do your utmost to recruit the right people
• Shape the right culture

As stated eloquently by an anonymous source, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Although most of the time project managers perform managerial activities, the few incidences in which they act as leaders are what define them in the eyes of their team members as leaders who they willingly follow.

Thus, distinguishing between management and leadership is helpful when you first begin shaping your attitude and developing your skills, but these roles are intertwined and indistinguishable once you become a successful project manager. What you actually become is a project leader.

This text is part of the book "Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management - Practices that Deliver Remarkable Results". Author: Alexander Laufer. Editor: FT Press.

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