Leadership in Project Management

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction.........................................................................................................................................3

2. Project Management and role of leadership...................................................................................4

2.1 Organizational Leadership...........................................................................................................5

2.2 Project Managers.........................................................................................................................5

2.3 Self managed work teams............................................................................................................6

3. Situational Leadership approach.........................................................................................................7

4. Role of leadership in project execution and delivery...........................................................................8

5. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................9

References...................................................................................................................................................9

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1. Introduction

Leadership plays a vital role in success of any project and thus across any project management

strategy, it has the significant part and wide research was conducted in this aspect as well. Vance

Packard defined Leadership as “Art of motivating the others to get the things done as a part of

achieving a common goal” and thus it is clear that, working for a common goal like organization

goal and ensuring it to be done in a right manner with the required guidance and motivation is

the key leadership strategy. Leadership has a wide role to play over several managerial activities

like human resource management, operations management, strategic decision making, change

management, training and development, appraisal management and its role has top priority over

project manager (John, 2009).

It’s the responsibility of any project manager to schedule the tasks, analyze the risk and control

the budgets and thus in these aspects leadership has the significant role and the level of decisions

made and strategies played results the actual success of any project. Meeting the project

milestones, schedule commitments and driving productivity will be main project management

goals and to achieve them, leadership has the open scope and without a good leader, even a small

project tasks might not be completed, even the project holds the right people to implement. Risk

management if fails it turns to be a biggest disaster and most of the project failures are also

related to project manager failure as he/she cant able to solve the people issues (Carmen, 2012).

There are many parameters those can be used to measure poor leadership over project

management and few of them are as listed

Interference from executives

Poor collaboration

Poorly scheduled and managed meetings

Frequent finger pointing and constant bickering

Lousy sponsor

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Can’t do attitude from employees or project team members

All these aspects are enough to make a project mesh and irritate the project manager, which

finally contribute to the project failure. Results will be always catastrophic even the project

manager is well trained with project management tools and techniques and lacks the desired

leadership strategies to control the resource, schedule and budget of a project. Thus from this

discussion it is clear that, success of any project mainly depends on project management

techniques with properly placed leadership strategies and even failures are also directly

dependent on the same. In this context, imposing the strategic and matured leadership orientation

over the project will make the project management activities to run fine over the schedule and

both the identified or unidentified risks can be rightly handled with the level of leadership

strategies explored as a part of project management. Lot of issues with respective to leadership

are to be discussed to understand the actual role over project management and the main

perspective of team members and project managers should be considered as a top priority

(Muriel, 2012). All these aspects those contribute to proper project management and the

corresponding role of leadership are as evaluated below

2. Project Management and role of leadership

Role of Leadership over project management is briefly discussed in the previous section and

from the review it is clear that, entire discussion can be mainly categorized at three levels like

organizational leadership, project manager and self managed teams. Detailed discussion in this

context is as given below

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2.1 Organizational Leadership

In general upper management holds the responsibility of organizational leadership and whenever

new project proposal were reviewed by them, senior management will demonstrate their support

in this context. Organizational leadership will enable any one of the active leader from upper

management to review and initiate the new project proposal and ensure the current proposal will

meet the core objectives and strategies of the organization. Leader among the upper management

will have the interest of success in the proposed projects and also holds the key expertise in this

context. As per the study of Fortune 100 aerospace units, involvement of upper management

plays an important role in the project management success and it is proved that most of the

successful projects have project managers who interacted with leader among the upper

management. As senior managers have unlimited access to the project resources like time,

budget and risks, the level of decisions made and information shared with the project managers

will enhance the chances of project success. Over medium and small organizations, project

management is completely handled by senior management and it will be a mandatory situation

that, senior managers will follow the new initiatives made as a part of project management

strategies and thus where the actual project team will be encouraged and motivated (Nobeli,

2013).

2.2 Project Managers

Over an organization, where multiple projects are running at a single point of time, project

managers should run and lead the projects. Role of project managers will be from the stage of

project planning, cost estimation, resource availability, execution stages and project delivery

over a typical matrix environment. Managing the reporting structure is another tedious job for

the project team members, as they need to report for both the project manager and functional

manager over a typical or efficient project matrix structure. Thus leadership of both the project

manager and functional manager should attribute in the areas of right communication and

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flexibility to achieve the optimal work from the team members and also providing positive work

environment as well (Chan, 2012).

Role of project manager and functional managers are varied over a strong project matrix, where

project managers will have full control over the key project management and the functional

managers will have bought-in responsibilities and holds the control over their subordinates in

make them work over key project activities. If these responsibilities from the managers lack at

the right proportion of leadership, entire process will confuse the subordinates in delivering their

project activities. Thus this is the actual place, where the senior or upper manager management

champion will come into picture as the key project ambassador and will communicate or resolve

the issues with the respective functional or project managers (Rubaiya, 2011).

2.3 Self managed work teams

Entire responsibility of project management will be with the work teams and thus this strategy is

known as unique leadership over project management. People are made responsible for

organizing the project activities like controlling and regulating and will ensure everything works

in the right manner and matches the required job conditions. Even there is a designated leader for

the respective project activities, entire team will hold the responsibility and control to take over

the project activities and create the desired environment of high effective and performance across

a typical project management. Based on the crucial situation over any project stage, there will

required assistance from a rotating leader, who can handle both the management and technical

issues. Thus with this type of project management leadership, project outcome will depend on

the strong interest of the corresponding team, where every member will proactively take the

charge in completing their tasks and communicates with rest of the team when required like in

case of any issues. Limitation with this style of project management leadership is that, it may

take 3 to 5 years to set the things in right manner and also to impose a self managed leadership

environment. Managing a new project will become complex in such situations as the size and

scope can’t be decided due to the long and full time engagement of experienced team over a

single project (Maya, 2011).

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3. Situational Leadership approach

Behavior of leaders can be estimated under various project situations and circumstances and thus

situational leadership have significant importance. In general complex and tedious situations will

always flew over project management and this is where the actual leadership strategies of a

persona can be focused. Two different leadership approaches or dimensions can be evaluated

across the situational leadership like supportive and directive, where the later approach needs the

leader’s directions, evaluation methods, define roles and timelines and set the strategic project

goals against each and every activity. Supportive or relational leadership mainly focus on feel

good environment for employees and also in providing the comfortable work conditions over the

project completion. Four different leadership style or approaches are embedded over these two

dimensions of situational leadership like directing style, coaching style, supportive style and

delegating style and are applied against the actual situation flown over the current project

management strategy adopted (Tiell, 2014).

Top down management approaches are followed over directing leadership style and the leader

can direct the team over accomplishing the project tasks those will drive in the desired level of

confidence in the project team by controlling and setting the current situations of the project.

Encouragement to the subordinates, which acts as the crucial inputs over the complex situations,

is provided with the coaching leadership approach, from where the subordinates can learn the

things in controlling the current project situation. Proper team engagement which is suffering

with low directive behavior can be served with the supportive leadership style and both the

supportive and directive behaviors can be evaluated against the complex project situations over

the delegating style leadership and thus provides autonomous situations against the actual work

groups (Matthiopoulou, 2013).

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4. Role of leadership in project execution and delivery

Execution and delivery are the key stages of any project, where the senior managers have the

important role in controlling the project management activities in terms of team encouragement,

empowerment and leadership. Situational leadership again plays the required role in this context,

where the project execution and delivery process are streamlined. Competence and commitment

of each and every resource should be engaged over these project activities to achieve the project

success and the role of leadership is crucial in this context. Success or failure of any project

depends on the level of emotional intelligence of individual employees and it’s the responsibility

of the project managers to control the same with the advent of their leadership qualities (Maleka,

2010).

Flexibility of a leader who acts as project manager is always required across the workplace, and

switch leadership is mostly applied by the leaders thus exposing their ability to switch among the

leadership strategies against the current project situations and thus contributes to the entire

project success. Switching leadership from delegating to directive style is followed by project

managers as part of their leadership strategy in case of complex project conditions like if the

project is not packing up quickly as expected and in case of many breakthroughs. Based on the

team composition and ability, some of the project manager will adopt the Laissez-faire

leadership strategy, where the team members are given ample freedom in completing the project

activities. Thus the project stages like execution and delivery can be well managed with switch

leadership and Laissez-faire leadership strategies (Jo, 2013).

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5. Conclusion

Project management strategies adopted decides the success or failure of any project and in

general a project manager with ample leadership qualities always fetches the successful driving

factors of a project. Thus leadership strategies and qualities of project manager decide the fate of

a project against any type of project management theory implemented by the organization.

Project manager should be able to communicate, coordinate, schedule the timeline, control the

resources and budget as a part of project management and all these activities can be well

achieved with the type of leadership style implemented. In general there are many leadership

strategies proposed and reviewed over literature and only few of them are suited across project

management and the important among them are discussed in this report. Situational leadership,

Switch leadership and Laissez-faire leadership strategies are important among the nature of

leadership style those can be adapted to a proper project management.

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