Project Leadership v. Project Management

I’ve heard and read a lot about leadership and management. When it comes to projects, I can’t help but feel leadership is an overrated concept; something that is really only required by employees at low-level positions; people who need something to believe in because their jobs don’t provide fulfillment. I also think that a project team (or an organization, for that matter) that has good management, without leadership, will do better than one that has good leadership, without management.


Why? Look at how leadership is defined. Leadership is responsible for establishing direction, aligning people and motivating and inspiring. You can duplicate all of those through management – setting objectives and creating strategy and vision, coordinating resources and defining relationships and communicating expectations. Leadership however, will virtually never be able to plan and budget, organize and staff, or control and problem solve. Even if a project team or organization built on leadership is successful, it will never be as efficient (and therefore competitive or profitable) as one that is well managed.

I would like to bring up the idea that a team of professional workers, who are experts in their functional areas, don’t require leadership or motivation. These individuals need management to coordinate their efforts and provide support and resources to their activities. As a matter of fact, if this was a team of people that required "motivation, direction and guidance" (a common definition of leadership), I’m not sure that want them on my team (who wants to have to constantly “lead” people?).

From one of my textbooks: “Leaders use inspiration, charisma and inherent excitement…to motivate others.” That sounds like nothing more than a sales pitch to me. Can’t we have a team of rational people who are able to deliver results and adapt because they recognize it’s necessary, and because they have the will to succeed; not because they have a cheerleader touting the “inherent excitement” of the change or the project?

This is not to say leadership is never necessary; it has its place. In the military, or on sports teams, when bullets are flying by and mortars are falling, true leadership can bond people together and help them focus on meeting that one single objective. But when it comes to executing in a professional environment, I know who I want on my team: intelligent, consummate professionals who are driven by achievement and need management support to accomplish their tasks, not a leader.

The First Post - Why Project Management?

The significance of project management, the associated methodologies, and related disciplines in operations management, has become increasingly apparent to me throughout my professional experience. As a technology consultant, and while pursuing my Bachelor’s degree, I began to notice certain similarities among projects that we performed for clients. Meetings at different organizations covered the same topics; the steps and deliverables were virtually unchanged; and the same problems and questions were always presented. It wasn’t, however, until I completed a course in Project Management that I could formally identify the similarities, articulate why these trends were so prevalent and determine how to control them so we didn’t continue to reinvent the wheel.

Later, I accepted leadership of a task force created by a volunteer organization to market and manage an online community activity register. As the team met, certain steps of a sequence emerged (much as the standard project lifecycle model that I was still becoming acquainted with suggested) – before we could accomplish anything, a plan had to be developed; and before developing a plan, we had to identify our objectives. The progression repeated itself when I worked on a committee who was arranging an event to highlight economic development in our community. This event also taught me a lesson in gathering inputs from volunteer and donated resources, and then structuring them to meet critical requirements while prioritizing secondary considerations - another practical application of my undergraduate coursework.

Eventually, the idea of a standard progression and workflow models became obvious outside of specific projects. If a project could be managed more effectively using these methods, why couldn’t the same be true for operations? My time at a regional chemical manufacturer provided a holistic view of the processes required to operate a business, and the interdependencies that made them a system. Ideas such as continuous improvement and process design took the concepts of project management and shifted them to ongoing operations. It was also at this company that I learned the perils of neglecting to manage both projects and operations: lowered morale, decreased productivity, financial loss, inefficient systems and high employee turnover were just a few of the resulting symptoms.

The culmination of my experience, education and realizations was that techniques to plan, create, execute and improve products and processes are vitally important to business – both for their inherent ability to increase efficiency and optimize productivity, and for the sustainable competitive advantage that operational excellence provides. So that's the "why." Look to this blog for information and thoughts about project management.