Master of All: How remote work has illuminated the many hats worn by project managers and what makes a “good” PM.

Over the course of the nearly two dozen startups that I've founded directly, I have to admit that I've taken project management for granted. Not that I did not regard it as valuable, even priceless, it’s just that I learned it through experience. I learned it through my interactions with others, some of whom were awful and taught me how not to do things and some of whom were incredibly skilled, allowing me to absorb and pass on their wisdom.

Perhaps this was because of my self-limiting belief about not being a detail-oriented person while still having respect for those who are, and the desire to bring that caliber of talent to my teams. However, based on the critical insights I gained from Project Management Institutes free Kickoff course , I should have enrolled in PMI courses over a decade ago and at least learned the core protocols in further detail.?

The WFH Landscape

When I was developing my remote work community / media startup in the early days of the emerging pandemic, I had a clear vision of how "The Future of Work" was morphing into "The Now of Work." How everything we discussed in terms of Social Business, Enterprise 2.0, and the Post-Digital Enterprise was now being imposed on a world left with few other options.

Early lessons learned by my co-founders and me were profound:

• Cohesion within a team requires greater intentionality, planning, and focus/effort.
• Not only were businesses becoming more 'remote-first,' they were also transitioning from activity monitoring to outcome/results-oriented management.
• Running a remote meeting requires more facilitation than many people naturally possess, particularly in developing an agenda, concentrating effort, and starting/ending at agreed-upon times.
• Teams required additional opportunities to bond with one another and develop the type of trust necessary to maximize their collaborative productivity.
• Businesses needed to do more to foster a genuine sense of co-ownership amongst stakeholders.
• The most effective contributors to the top and bottom lines, regardless of role, are those who are content personally and professionally and who bring their best selves to the work.
• Unless we understand diversity in all of its manifestations, including thought diversity and the inclusion of all participants in a discussion, we will never reach our full potential.
• Those adopting a 'hybrid' work culture will need to invest even more to avoid the emergence of a hierarchy of remote and on-premise workers who are prone to emotional and professional conflict as a result of their disparate responsibilities and expectations.
• Businesses must develop a cultural strategy in addition to their strategic and operational plans. Not only to recruit the right people but also to align them and keep them bonded through a shared sense of teamwork.

In my opinion, working remotely now requires increased effort from leaders and others, while the majority of employees are seeking more ways to work fewer hours per week. The early reports and assessments of the 4 day work week experiment in Iceland seem to show that working fewer hours per week boosts productivity. This is perhaps, in part at least, supported by eustress, a type of stress that is beneficial to humans. Here, working less improves our concentration/engagement, mental acuity, and capacity to contribute. Often when we feel/know that something needs to be done, and we have less time to do it, we perform at a higher level. The question then becomes how much 'less' we are doing and how much more efficiently we are doing it. Specifically, is it the elimination of unnecessary meetings and side conversations, or is it the focusing effect of more finely tuned performance management??????

Rising to the Occasion

Regardless, one of the most important lessons I learned was that team leaders and project managers have increased responsibilities to their teams and direct reports. They now need to communicate with them more frequently/clearly and improve their protocols for one-on-one meetings. They must devote additional time to their team’s overall well-being and professional development. They must do more to strengthen the bonds between team members in order to foster greater trust and dispel any animosities resulting from perceived slights and differences of opinion on plans/decisions. They must conduct meetings with even greater rigor to accommodate the new 'life-work balance' that is a critical component of the shift to remote work and a primary contributor to what many refer to as "The Great Resignation." In short, team leaders and project managers are being asked to take on additional responsibilities in order to keep the proverbial trains running on time.?While project managers have always been team leaders and more, the Project Management Institute , with their Talent Triangle, make it clear that project managers should invest in development of leadership skills. One that involves more soft skills and a deeper understanding of the business environment in which their projects exist. In fact, the PMI Talent Triangle combines technical project management, leadership, strategic, and business management expertise — and, increasingly, digital capabilities in leading co-located, remote, and hybrid work teams.

For those who see the opportunity, with the desire to grow, and learn more to earn more, this opens up new opportunities for you to demonstrate your value as a strategic partner in business success, and not just as a member of the team. For individuals who are now required to wear additional hats, this requires them to think more? holistically about their work and their role in the organization.. This is particularly true with smaller teams at small to mid-size businesses, where there remains the combination of complexity AND insufficient resources to perform at the level of larger organizations.

While this observation is influenced by my unique inter-disciplinary background and holistic entrepreneurial approach, I am not alone in seeing this challenge. It is not just about the work that I need to get done, but also the work to have done, the capability of my team, the timely completion of deliverables, the management of cross-functional teams, and the importance of improved time management for collaborative and deep work. On top of all of that, there is also the need to pay greater attention to the humanity of my team, lest we regard them as interchangeable cogs in a machine, resulting in a high turnover rate.

While working for a Big Four consulting firm in 2013, I made an attempt to establish a new practice area focused on providing "project coaches" as a newly-created role to be filled. While many project managers consider themselves to be coaches by nature, and indeed the best are, a large percentage are not. I believe we can learn a lot from sports, where there are position coaches, group coaches, and team coaches... as well as general managers, facility managers, and operations managers, each of whom manages their own types of projects.

The elevator pitch for project coaches, then as now, was straightforward: we need someone to oversee not only the individual verticals of work on a project/team, but also the team as a whole. Someone who could cut through the BS, the disagreements, the unresolved scores, the perceived slights, and everything else that is impeding the team from being aligned, cohesive and performing at their best.

This is one reason why I wanted to take the opportunity of collaborating now with the Project Management Institute to discuss the concept of the roles and responsibilities taken on by an excellent project manager, a master of all - an all-in-one specialist akin to what we know in tech as “full stack.”?

Though the increasing responsibility brought on by remote work has shone a light on the multifaceted capabilities of project managers, there is more work to be done to have them demonstrate to the rest of us personally what proper execution looks like. And with everyone now responsible for some aspects of project management, the best protocols and approaches are not universally deployed. This means these soft and hard skills cannot spread organically due to a lack of exposure in professional situations. This is another macro benefit of the Kickoff course, the work PMI is doing more broadly with the Talent Triangle, and the community of PMs built around its thought leadership, bringing more awareness and professionalism to these other skills that are now essential for the best project managers.

Now that both the full scope of work and the true impact of our project managers have been realized, let us begin to understand what makes them great. How many hats, roles, and titles do great project managers prepare for and rise to??

• Manager
• Team Coach?
• Facilitator?
• Communicator?
• Inspiring Leader
• Coach for Career Development/Professional Development
• Technologist
• Intrapreneur
• ????

What am I overlooking? How does this strike a chord with you? In my experience working with different roles and different levels of talent, there aren’t that many people who are naturally great at soft skills, persuasive communications, creative design, facilitation and mentorship who are also detail oriented. This seems to be what separates great project managers from the rest, allowing them to lead the charge from all different angles and specialties. It also provides the unique opportunity to understand what makes an upskilled, well-rounded project manager so invaluable.

The Value of Upskilling

Redefining job requirements in this era of remote work and distributed teams is the most likely way the profession, as a whole, will upskill. Of course, this also requires enhancements to training programs and an expanded investment in professional development by organizations—the sort of initiatives that I am happy to report are being offered by PMI.?

PMI’s initiatives are valuable not only because they help shape great project managers, but also because they can do so in unprecedented times where internal methods of bolstering project management skill building programs/infrastructure are challenged by rapid change and a continued period of adjustment to remote work. As early leaders in the project management space, PMI is uniquely equipped to not only upskill current project managers and hone the project management skills of team members that do not necessarily hold the title of ‘project manager’, but also to do so in a way that is congruous with the growing importance of project management skills in a remote environment.?

What are your thoughts? Is it time we actively note just how many hats our great project managers wear? Can we utilize tools like those on PMI to upskill our own teams, even for those who don’t hold a “project management” title? Though people who normally see their impact only peripherally, like you or me, were unaware, PMI has always known the scope of, and skills required of a great project manager. Moreover, they’ve created an entire organization dedicated to the education, challenging, training, and excellence of project managers.??

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