7 HABITS OF TRUE PROJECT LEADERS

When organizations seek talent for project leadership positions, they are often hung up on the experience and hard skills that
make them qualified for the position. While these qualities are fundamental, they're the minimum price of admission to the
Project Manager club. What separates qualified project managers from truly great project leaders are the leadership skills that
do not show up on a resume.

Rather than highlighting some general characteristics and skills of project managers, this post demonstrates the seven habits
that need to be deeply engrained in a project manager to be a true leader.

But there is always the question of nature versus nurture. Are successful project managers naturally gifted, or are they put in
favorable situations? We will also cover how your organization can nurture project leaders to put them in the best position to
succeed.

info@projectassistants.com 800.642.9259
 1) MASTER OF THE PROJECT CHARTER

The entire basis of the project stems from the charter. The charter starts with the “why” and “how” of the project
(objectives/problem statement and the solution to that problem). When you get specific with the problems, you can be
specific with the solutions, then from there, you get the tasks. And once you have the tasks, you can map the skills needed,
which will serve as the basis for the people and effort necessary to perform the project.

So every aspect of the project manager's job has its roots in the project charter. Just having the technical skills and experience
to draft a charter isn't the measure. It's the solid, detailed approach to the problem that gives roots strong enough to support
everything that stems and branches from that, or else the project will topple.

Many times a propensity for weak project charters is engrained in the culture itself. Many organizations have low standards
for project charters, or view them as optional altogether, and a true project leader won't stand for this.

Nurture: The organization needs a standard in place and it needs to comply with that standard. Just as importantly, is
using it as intended rather than just going through the motions to tick the boxes. The parts that often get glossed
over are measurable objective, Cost Benefit Analysis, and monitoring that it is kept up-to-date with the changing
business environment all the way through execution.

2
 2) DEMANDS A STRONG ARCHITECT

A strong leader relies on the support of their team members,

especially in areas where the project manager is either weak or not
expected to have a certain skill in the first place. Every project has two
methodologies: there's the project management methodology, but
there’s also the methodology around the design and build of the
solution itself. The design and build provides the foundation for the
“how” of the approach to solve the basic business problem in the
project charter. Without a firm grasp on that methodology, the project
management methodology doesn't have solid ground to define the
approach to solve the business problem. Without a clear solution
approach, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is set to be misguided
and incomplete.

Seeking out a project manager who is an expert in both methodologies is likely a fool's errand. What an organization should
look for is a project manager who is not only an expert in their own domain, but also has the keen eye and command to
demand a strong architect.

Nurture: The organization needs to support the architects with at least high-level samples, including a rich set
of processes and artifacts to give an organizational standard. This makes everyone's job easier by not making
them reinvent the wheel every time, but also it ensures everyone is speaking the same language. Regardless
of how qualified and talented the project managers and architects are, if there's no standard in place, each
architect and PM may use different structures and terminology that muddy the process. One project manager
might even get multiple WBSs for multiple projects that all speak a different language from each other, forcing
that PM to translate them all to a “good enough” facsimile. It's better to have a general framework that each
architect can feel free to modify to their needs than to start from scratch and have no standards whatsoever.

3
3) DOESN'T GAMBLE WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

Leadership is often associated with bravery and fortitude, but you don't want to
trust the helm to someone who exposes your organization to unnecessary risks.
When bringing in a project manager, you want to make sure they recognize that
risk management is necessary. Just as with the project charter, a true project
leader will have the fortitude to call out an organization that doesn't recognize
the necessity of rigor of risk management.

Nobody likes an insurance salesman; there are enough actual problems to go

around that no one wants to dwell on worst-case-scenarios, getting bogged
down by what *might* go wrong. But the organization and the manager need
to put their predilections aside because risk assessment and monitoring are
*not* optional.

Luck and hope are not strategies. You might get lucky and have projects work
out well for a stretch, but the odds will catch up to you eventually.

Nurture: Plain and simple, the organization needs to give project managers the license to hunt these risks and
be open to hearing what they find. No matter what kind of temperament and talent-level the project manager
has, it won't do the organization any good if they shoot any messenger who brings a negative outlook. Is your
organization structured to listen to risk assessments, embrace their reality, and invest in the insurance policy of
mitigating the potential disaster?

4
 4) STRONG ATTENTION TO DETAIL

When people think of a leader, they don't generally think of someone who dots the Is and crosses the Ts. When managing
projects, especially the control activities during execution, the ability to flawlessly execute on the minutia is crucial. Many
project managers consider this administrivia below their pay grade, but without a strong attention to detail, you cannot
establish the cadence and rhythm that is fundamental to project control.

While this is not a quality that most see as a “soft skill,” it is not easily found on a resume and it is a habit that a project
manager either has or does not have.

The organization must understand the reality of what it takes to do execution right and value nailing the administrative detail.
A feasibility assessment can point an organization in the direction to have a realistic environment to do control successfully.

Nurture: Multitasking breeds mistakes and oversights. Even the most detail-oriented managers have a point
where they cannot do everything asked of them, so they go into survival mode to do “good enough.” As the
slate of projects gets larger in relation to the pool of project managers, the organization needs to ask itself “Are
we better off asking our PMs to manage seven projects tenuously or to have full control of four?”

5
 5) ENABLES AIRTIGHT COMMUNICATION

Every hiring manager knows to emphasize “communication skills,” but this generally refers to someone's individual ability to
speak well. Equally important is the insistence to put the plan and infrastructure in place that enables communicating in the
first place.

The right project manager will command strong communication up, down, and laterally. Project management requires an
airtight process to make sure that changes are identified, acknowledged, and revised in a way that’s complementary to the
original expectations.

A formal communication serves as the foundation to this. Any gap in the following process, and things will get lost.

Nurture: If an organization wants an accurate status of the reality of the project, no one can do it alone,
regardless of talent. In order to nail Issue Management, for example, the project manager first needs to
perform a Risk Assessment that highlights the potential issues; the practitioners then need to report when
that risk is realized (i.e.: has become an issue) to the project manager; from there, the issue often needs to
be sent further up the ladder to determine what recourse there is to resolve the issue, then sent back down
to execute on the resolution. No project manager is prescient; they rely on a well-executed communication
plan from all team members to have control of their projects.

And when it comes to communication, the old saying applies: You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.
The shareholder supports the PM primarily by listening, rather than telling, yelling and selling, though all of
those become necessary at different points.

6
 6) STUBBORNLY STICKS TO REALITY

The ideal project manager would make for a lousy politician. The project manager's job isn't to inspire optimism, but to tell
you why a project might fail and to inform you when it's failing.

Stakeholders generally want a project manager who will change reality to fit the plan. Once a project gets underway, the
original baseline is in the past. It is the project manager's job to compare actual outcomes and updated projections to that
baseline, not to pretend that it is still the current reality. A true project leader has the resilience and composure to do just the
opposite: convince the stakeholders to accept the new realities and allow them to sync the plan with it.

Even more impressive is a project manager who has such consummate GIPS and GAWE (Great Interpersonal Skills, Gets Along
With Everyone) that they can look you in the eye and tell you that your you-know-what stinks, and you'll still like them.

Nurture: Accepting reality would be easy advice to follow if we were talking about a stark reality. In the real
world, though, realities are murky. Outcomes are probabilistic, not certain. A struggling project has a chance
to succeed if you don't rock the boat, but at the same time, hope is not a strategy. Successful organizations
operate in the gray area, not always playing Chicken Little, shying away from any option that incurs any
amount of risk, but also heeding warnings and cautions from the experts.

The same can be said of project managers: it's easy for PMs to say “because of x, we can't do y” because that
way they're never on the hook for a risky endeavor. But they should say, “doing x risks y.” From there, the
organization should heed the advice, then decide when to hold them and know when to fold them.

7
 7) SCOPE CHANGES ARE SECOND NATURE

If you ran a post-mortem for all of the projects that have failed
in your organization, the most common cause of death would
likely be scope creep. As the old saying goes: How does a
project fall a year behind schedule? One day at a time!

It is human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but the ideal project manager is a little twisted in this regard. They seek
pain as early as they can find it (as in the risk management example, they seek out pain that isn't even actualized) so that they
can change the plan immediately and always be aiming for the right moving target.

The natural outcome of this is that project managers do not let schedule and budget changes be optional.

Nurture: From a macro standpoint, we can have standards and procedures, we can have the discipline to
follow the procedures, but at a certain point, you need to have the courage to put your foot down and stand
up to play all the different pieces up, down, and sideways. If I’m the captain and I’m going down with the ship
and the ship is the project, do you know what your recourses are? If you ask dad and he says “no,” can you ask
mom? Is there a court of appeals? Are you prepared to fight city hall? In other words, you need to know the
procedures well enough to follow them and you need to know them well enough to exploit them when failure
is not an option.

8
 CONCLUSION

These are the habits that are innate to true project leaders, and what separates them from merely qualified managers. The
qualities above are not easy to find in a resume or even in a basic interview process.

Learn about how Project Assistants is uniquely qualified to provide project managers with these skills.

See how Project Assistants creates the environment necessary for these project managers to flourish.

info@projectassistants.com 800.642.9259