Project Management: Leadership Styles

Leadership Styles

• A project manager's leadership style is often based on their personality, team, and environment

• Laissez-faire leaders empower teams to set their own goals and make decisions, taking a hands-off approach

• Transactional leaders focus on results, goals, feedback, and rewards

• Servant leaders prioritize team growth, well-being, and collaboration

• Transformational leaders inspire teams through innovation, vision, and personal attention

• Charismatic leaders inspire loyalty with energy, confidence, and conviction

• Interactional leaders balance transactional, transformational, and charismatic elements

Leadership vs. Management

• Management directs people through established processes to achieve goals
• Leadership guides and inspires collaboration to reach a shared goal
• Project managers must balance leadership and management, knowing when to lead and when to manage

Politics, Power and Project Management

• Success relies on mastering influence, negotiation, and power, navigating workplace politics

• Project managers must gather data about the project, team, organization, and environment

• Skilled project managers use power to motivate, negotiate, and inspire while respecting team autonomy

• Effective leadership balances results with collaboration to achieve project goals

Sources of Power

• Power is influenced by individual, organizational, and perceptual factors, including relationships to unlock power

• Positional power comes from one's title or role

• Informational power comes from control over key information

• Referent power is earned through respect and credibility

• Situational power is unique to specific circumstances like crises

• Personal/charismatic power is built on charm and personal appeal

• Relational power comes from networking and connections

• Expert power is based on skills, knowledge, or certifications

• Reward-oriented power involves offering praise, incentives, or rewards

• Punitive power involves enforcing discipline or consequences

• Ingratiating power involves using flattery or common ground for cooperation

• Pressure-based power restricts choices to encourage compliance

• Project managers must understand and wield power thoughtfully to inspire teams

Power Dynamics

• Guilt-based power leverages obligation or a sense of duty
• Persuasive power presents compelling arguments to influence decisions
• Avoiding power steers clear of participation when necessary
• Effective project managers secure authority through organizational policies, prioritizing proactivity and intention

Personality Traits

• Personality shapes how project managers think, feel, and act
• Key traits include authenticity, courtesy, creativity, cultural awareness, emotional intelligence, intellect, managerial skill, political savvy, service-orientation, sociability, and systemic thinking
• Successful project managers balance traits to fit each unique project, team, and situation

Performance Integration

• Integration is critical for keeping projects on track and involves aligning objectives with organizational goals and focusing the team by connecting processes seamlessly

• Integration happens across process, cognitive, and contextual levels

Integration at the Process Level

• Projects depend on processes, such as creating a project charter or managing scope changes
• Processes like Control Scope and Integrated Change Control manage changes

Integration at the Cognitive Level

• Universal integration requires managers to ensure processes work together effectively
• Factors like project size, complexity, and organizational culture affect how project managers operate
• Successful integration needs experience, skills, and business insight, knowing when to act and what levers to use

Integration at the Context Level

• Knowledge and people connection is important, particularly for large, cross-functional initiatives.
• Project managers need communication and knowledge-sharing strategies to fit the project context to drive success.

Project Complexity

• Project Complexity needs integration to succeed. It has three dimensions:
  • System behavior: Interaction of interconnected parts
  • Human behavior: Dynamics between diverse teams
  • Ambiguity: Uncertainty and lack of clarity

Characteristics of Project Complexity

• Complexity stems from having multiple moving parts, connections between those parts, dynamic interactions, and unpredictable outcomes
• Project managers can plan and control projects by analyzing these factors effectively
• Integration involves uniting elements, navigating complexity, and delivering meaningful outcomes with a focus on process