A brilliant and gutsy move for leaders is to continually develop his or her managers’ project management skills. When this happens, the leader is ensuring the organization’s future. The leader is creating a deep, talented pool of managers capable of initiating, planning, executing, managing, and closing strategic projects. These managers are then an integral part of the leader’s team in moving the organization forward towards its vision.
However, I’m still amazed at the limited project management skills many senior and seasoned managers have. They aren’t clear on how to solidify a project’s scope. They aren’t clear on how to communicate with project team members. They aren’t clear on how to break-down a project into logical, task-oriented steps. They aren’t comfortable delegating and holding team members accountable. They aren’t comfortable running a project meeting. Yet, when my clients and I look at the managers’ missing skills a bit closer, it’s not surprising they’re missing. They’ve not been given the opportunity nor have they been challenged to develop them before! So here’s the million dollar question: If the project managers haven’t been using or developing their project management skills in the past, who has been managing the projects?
There are usually two answers: 1) No one or 2) the leader. If the answer is no one, we usually see projects that have veered off-track, and have morphed into a new bucket of worms that no one seems to recognize or is willing to take responsibility for. Another result of “no one” managing the projects is the invisible death of projects. The invisible death occurs when a project just simply drifts away and is forgotten. Months later, the team members will ask each other, “Whatever happened to that project we were working on?” Then they’ll shrug and just focus on the next task in front of them. If the leader is typically managing the projects, there are often completely different results. First, the projects’ due dates and timelines are slowly adjusted to fit into the leaders already packed schedule. If the leader is individually overloaded, the strategic projects are pushed out to fit into slots in the leader’s schedule. Needless to say, many projects lose their momentum and the team members see their short term projects becoming never-ending headaches. Second, when leaders lead projects instead of the project managers, the projects’ scope often morphs into something larger and more convoluted than intended. The leader uses his or her insights into the whole organization to turn projects that had been limited in scope, into large-scale projects. As a result, the projects become too complicated for less skilled managers, so the leader “has to” maintain control of the project to ensure it doesn’t fail. The right intent is there, the approach is off.
In order for project managers to manage, they need to develop their project management skills.
To do that, they need to manage projects. Small, rather straight-forward projects first, to more complicated and sophisticated projects next. However, just as projects need to be broken down into manageable tasks with the basic, foundation steps first, project managers need to develop their skills in a logical, systematic way. Start with the basic skills. Develop them. Then, add the next layer of more sophisticated skills to develop by challenging the managers with more challenging project management tasks. Build a solid foundation and go from there. However, if leaders don’t let project managers manage projects. they’ll never develop their foundation skills. They’ll never really be project managers.
Are you allowing your Project Manager to manage projects?
Copyright MMXI – Liz Weber, CMC, CSP – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com +1.717.597.8890
Liz supports clients with strategic and succession planning, as well as leadership training and executive coaching. Learn more about me on LinkedIn!
