Introduction to Leadership Skills for Project Managers

Jeffrey K. Pinto, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Trailer, Ph.D.

FEW ACTIVITIES ARE readily acknowledged to be as “leader intensive” as project management. A great deal of research and practical observation points to the fact that effective project managers can, by themselves, go far toward ensuring whether a project will be a success or a failure. Project managers take on a number of both traditional and non-traditional roles in pushing their projects along the chosen path. They serve as key communicators, motivators, team builders, planners, expediters, and so forth. At the same time, they must also be the chief cheerleaders, project champions, politicians, big brothers or sisters, and a thousand other roles for which they usually have never been adequately prepared. In the project management context, “leadership” is truly a multifaceted concept.

The problem is typically exacerbated by the fact that so few project managers receive formal training in carrying out their roles. Too many of us can distinctly remember our first foray into project management. It typically began when we were assigned a project, given a rudimentary team, and told what our goals were to be. In essence, we were thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to sink or swim. Those of us who survived this first indoctrination learned a number of lessons—often the hard way—which became further solidified with future project management assignments. The greater majority of those who failed this initiation went away frustrated and convinced that project management was, at best, a bad way to further one’s career. Indeed, a recent book by J. Pinto and O. Kharbanda, Successful Project Managers (1995, Van Nostrand: New York), notes that all too often, our “learn as you go” approach to training project managers results in doing more harm than good, both to our companies and to prospective project managers.

The current volume of reprints from past research on project management leadership includes articles taken from the Project Management Journal over the past decade. In selecting these articles, we sought to focus most directly on the key role played by project managers in successful new project implementation. As a result, the articles selected revolve around the nature of the project management challenge, the skills required of effective project managers, and some of the important leadership and management principles. Taken together, we believe that they offer a comprehensive and thorough look at the immense challenges and skills necessary to successfully navigate the minefields of project management.

The articles are grouped and presented in an order that may be illustrated in our general model of project leadership. This model is presented in Figure 1. To clarify the relationship between the leadership articles we selected, and the manner in which readers may integrate the contribution of these studies, we will refer to specific sections of Figure 1 (in parentheses) as we introduce each paper in the following paragraphs.

Figure 1.

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The first four articles discuss how the attributes of the leader and the characteristics of the situation affect leadership and the performance of the project team.

The first article, Albert Einsiedel’s “Profile of Effective Project Managers,” discusses two important issues that characterize the particularly demanding nature of the project leadership situation and then examines the characteristics that all successful project team leaders must possess to meet these demands and operate effectively (see 1 and 2 on Figure 1).

Following a similar theme, “What It Takes to Be a Good Project Manager,” by Barry Posner, explores the nature of the project management challenge by identifying the most frequently encountered problems in managing projects, identifying the critical project manager skills necessary to execute the project successfully, and arguing how these skills and problems are interconnected. It also illustrates that the effective leader possesses the skills that best match the problems inherent in the project management arena (see 1 and 3 in Figure 1).

Normand Pettersen follows the first two papers with an important contribution on “Selecting Project Managers: An Integrated List of Predictors.” In an age when many project managers are selected in a strictly ad hoc manner, Pettersen’s article offers an important look at the types of personal predictors so necessary to project leadership success (see 3).

Dennis Slevin and Jeffrey Pinto follow up with an article that directly addresses the project leadership process. In “Project Leadership: Understanding and Consciously Choosing Your Style,” they make the point that leadership styles are, at their core, consciously chosen and changeable and subject to the unique nature of the problem and characteristics of leaders and followers. Successful project managers are those capable of managing their own transition from one leadership style to another as circumstances dictate (see 1, 2, 3 and 4).

The next three articles focus on improving project leadership through skill assessment and training.

The fifth article, “Developing Project Management Skills,” by Hans Thamhain, looks at the specific skills project managers need to possess, breaking them down into leadership, technical, and administrative. He then presents twelve alternative skill development methods and assesses the effectiveness of each method. In conclusion, he synthesizes this information to offer some important managerial implications for developing project management skills to their highest potential (see 5).

“Learning to Lead, to Create Quality, to Influence Change in Projects,” by Lee Peters and John Homer, offers key insights into the central problem of developing project managers: how to produce a “mission-capable project manager in a relatively short time.” These authors make the argument that the use of simulation is effective in developing critical project management skills quickly because it allows a high feedback cycle and creates a relatively low-risk learning environment. Their article draws on research from the quality movement and offers important practical lessons and implications from their own experiences (see 6).

The seventh article, “Situational Leadership in a Project/Matrix Environment,” by Nicholas DiMarco, Jane Goodson, and Henry Houser, describes a situational approach to assessing the need for leadership training. They identify fifteen specific leadership aspects that can be assessed and subsequently used to design and focus their management development efforts. Their study is based on a sample of project managers, functional area managers, and their employees in a project-based engineering firm. They outline key dimensions of effective project managers and offer some suggestions on how to improve the skill set of project leaders for future success (see 7).

The next article shifts the focus to the project team and addresses how to enhance the project leader’s ability to develop and build the team. “The Project Manager as Team Builder: Creating an Effective Team,” by Lawrence Todryk, explores one of the critical responsibilities that all project managers must face: the ability to effectively mold a disparate group of individuals from various functional backgrounds into an effective team. This article explores the characteristics of effective teams and the steps necessary to turn people whose primary loyalties lie with their functional affiliations into a potent, unified project team (see 1 and 4).

The final set of articles discusses leading the project team in the context of the larger organization.

Project leaders must continually work to bridge the gap between their own activities and top management’s concerns. In their article, “Design of Project Management Systems from Top Management’s Perspective,” Christian Navarre and Jean-Louis Schaan provide the results of some important research into the process of effectively blending the problems of single project management with the concerns of top management, trying to successfully balance a portfolio of projects (see 8).

The final article, “Organizational Culture and Project Leader Effectiveness,” by Michael Elmes and David Wilemon, puts the leadership challenge into its larger context—effectively managing with an understanding of the unique relationship an organization’s culture has with the culture of the project team. The authors present a typology of cultures to help the project manager classify the cultures in their situations, and they provide four generic “influence strategies” to assist project managers in interacting effectively with the identified cultures. The authors argue that unless we fully understand the unique culture of the firm, it is impossible to lead effectively, influence correctly, or manage the project for future success (see 3 and 4 on Figure 1).