Leading Plus Managing: Strategies Drive Projects

Keeping the project on course requires going beyond the usual project management skills and strategies to exercise leadership strategies. For example, in the Human Genome Project, many external and internal forces, support, and specialized resources are crucial at different times in this project. Strategy research helps explain the differences between times when managing and leading are needed. One way to think of this difference in strategies for a project is presented in Figure 18, adapted for project management from Mitroff (1988, 30). It shows that the project manager’s role includes both managing and leading strategies for things that are relatively easy, as well as for things that are fairly difficult to change. We can think of project managers needing to maintain or make changes in key systems, thus splitting the figure into four quadrants. Our focus in this chapter is on the leading strategies, those below the line in Quadrants 3 and 4 (see Figure 18), as other chapters provide good management strategy guidelines. Each challenge and its leadership strategy will fit in the lower section of this diagram.

Figure 18. Managing and Leading Strategies for Project Management

Adapted from Mitroff, 1988.