How to make project leadership succeed

Project leadership is often noted as an important factor in successful project delivery.? As with any organisation, projects require leadership at all levels to engender the right culture, teamwork, and results.?

But what is project leadership and who really leads? Is it the project sponsor (the leader accountable to deliver the project’s benefits) or the project manager (the person with the day-to-day responsibility to deliver the project’s tasks on schedule and budget to the agreed quality)?? ??

In this article, we explore how to make project leadership successful.

Definition of Project Leadership

Project leadership sets the project’s direction, inspires a high-performing project team, and makes the critical decisions necessary to deliver a project.? It is finite and only required for the duration of the project.

While the component elements of project leadership are also present in wider change and organisational leadership, project leadership by its very nature is bound within the frame of the project itself.? It is a unique and interesting challenge for leaders who typically are focused on strategy and used to thinking, and operating, through a long-term lens.? For example, instead of a whole quarter to do set-up, there may only be a week.? It means building a sense of team quickly to get high-performance, rather than allowing that to build in a more organic way.? Urgent decisions often mean a decision that hour, that day, not sometime that week or month.?

Sometimes great organisational leaders will struggle to effectively lead within a project context. ????

#1. Setting project direction

A project is a finite entity which will only exist for a specific purpose to change some aspect of the current status quo.? It is the role of the project sponsor to articulate the purpose of a project, including having a clear reasoning for why the project is being formed to make this change.?

This is not to be confused with change leadership.?

A change leader will have set out their vision for change, provided the ‘why,’ and created an urgency and commitment in key stakeholders to move forward.? It is usually in that wider collective stakeholder agreement that the requirement for a project is identified and approved.

In very large organisations, a senior leader may be the change leader, and they may delegate the project to deliver the change to a member of their team, who then acts as the project sponsor.? In most small and medium organisations, the change leader and the project sponsor will likely be the same individual (or group of individuals).

The project sponsor sets the project direction by ensuring three things for which they are always accountable:

• A well-articulated specific outcome for the project to achieve
• Clear boundaries within which the project will work
• A way to achieve the outcome which is mapped out enough for people to understand it

They may delegate the activities to form these to a project manager, or other members of the project team, who are then responsible for the work getting done.? For example, a project manager may pull together a project definition workshop to establish the outcome articulation, scope boundaries, project approach and milestone plan.

The project sponsor will typically be part of the workshop or will certainly review and agree the finalised versions.? They also monitor the project manager.? If the project manager is failing to articulate the outcome of the project, the project sponsor must step in to understand why and to resolve any issue.

In a small business, the project sponsor may also be acting as the project manager.? If this is the case, they need to keep themselves honest about their progress and any issues they encounter.? Having an external mentor to the project or a business coach can be useful in these scenarios.

Project direction is typically documented as part of the overall project definition document or business case.? Project briefing communications are drawn from this and used to engage stakeholders, and to onboard the wider project team.?

#2. Building the project team

Nothing much happens on a project without the project team members committing to their roles and delivering quality work on schedule.

Project leadership not only identifies and forms the team but seeks to build the relationships within the team to be effective and successful.

Team building is critical to ensure that the benefits of collaboration are realised fully; that team members feel safe and comfortable with each other to discuss work openly and honestly to get the best results.?

The project sponsor and project manager, if they are two different people, will often divide and conquer the component parts of this aspect of project leadership.

Team Identification

Finding the right people to include in the project team is critical.? The project sponsor should take lead on this activity.? They may have to negotiate and influence their peers or senior stakeholders to release the best subject matter experts (SMEs) to their project.

Team Onboarding

The project manager typically takes responsibility for ensuring that the team is properly onboarded.? This means that team members are briefed about the project, understand their role, the project management system, and ways of working.? However, the project sponsor may also contribute by having a welcome coffee with new team members, or an informal Q&A, or by fronting the ‘project purpose’ part of the briefing.

Teaming

The project manager or project sponsor may organise a ‘teaming’ event. Team bonding activities can sometimes be derided as cringe-y and old school, but there are many different activities out there for bonding.?

The key is to find something which is inclusive, and which allows people to get to know each other as people.? This may be something as simple as taking the team out for lunch or going for a walk in a park.? Getting ideas from the team themselves is good practice.?

Team Motivation

Motivating the team day-to-day is usually the project manager’s role.? They are the hands-on leader who is facilitating the daily stand-ups, or regular team meetings. They are the ones floor-walking and checking in on individuals.? They can see when the team looks grumpy or fatigued and intervene.

However, the project sponsor also plays a role, not least in ensuring the project manager also remains motivated!? Sometimes the intervention of the project sponsor coming along to a stand-up or a team meeting and providing encouragement can help motivation enormously.

Team Conflict

Conflict usually manifests in one of two ways.? The first is in personal conflicts.? Here the project manager may have to step in and address poor team-working, individual attitudes, or in some cases bullying and harassment.? The second way conflict arises is in the simple disagreement of how to proceed, what the best solution might be to a problem, what method might be best, etc.?

Similarly to motivation, it is usually the project manager who is on the ground with the team when personal conflict between team members might arise.? In addition, many of the management systems will defer to the project manager to make day-to-day decisions where the conflict is around opposite opinions.?

However, as with motivation, it may be that the project sponsor is the ultimate escalation point and determinator on conflicting opinions or to correct poor behaviour in team members.

What is definite is that if the project sponsor and project manager are different individuals, they must build a very good working relationship between themselves to ensure they are working as a team in team building.? If not, they leave themselves open to the team playing one off against the other, which may lead to the project’s failure.

#3. Making the decisions

Projects live and die by the decisions made during their existence.? Quite often, quick decisions are required to ensure the project is not delayed or unduly impacted.? It is therefore critically important for projects to have clear governance with an identifiable decision maker, and an ability to have fast decision making when needed.

Depending on the change governance surrounding the project, the majority of the time, the project sponsor will be the ultimate authority for the project and be the decision-maker.?

In large organisations, there may be a delegation of authority provided with limiting parameters around budget, schedule and scope which may require additional approvals from a Change Board or from the Executive team, for example.

If the project sponsor is not also the project manager, they may in turn delegate day-to-day decision making to the project manager.? On any project, the project manager may also delegate parts of their authority to workstream leads or SMEs.? This is very typical in agile projects where the solution team is often delegated to make decisions in order to increase speed of execution.??

However, there should be clear boundaries provided whenever authority is delegated to enable people to know when they must go back to the project manager or to the project sponsor for a decision – essentially, it must be clear what they do not have the authority to decide.

A documented project governance and management system helps to provide a clear guide to who decides what, when they decide it, how they decide it, and what to do, if they need to decide it quickly.?

In conclusion

Many of the reasons project fail, such as reactive or slow decision making, poor teamwork or lack of clear project vision, are rooted in poor project leadership. ?

Putting these three leadership pillars in place increases the likelihood of great project leadership. More than anything in a project, leaders have to be proactive across all three to create the agility required for a project to act with speed and maintain pace of progress.

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