Preface

Project management is about more than just delivering projects on time and within budget. It’s about the people who make the project happen.

Over the years, countless methodologies have been introduced with the hopes of increasing project success. Agile, PMBOK®, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, and many other methodologies were meant to solve specific problems; however, when practitioners apply these methodologies, they do so under the premise that they are “one size fits all” solutions. The best way to reach project success is to match the best methodology to the project at hand. For example, if your project goal is to reduce cost, then you are best served by using Six Sigma methodologies as opposed to Total Quality Management.

It’s up to the project manager to learn these methodologies and use them as tools in his or her toolbox. But these methodologies work from the premise that you already know how to lead people and that all you need to learn is the technical application of particular management concept; unfortunately, the methodologies do not teach you project management leadership.

A project manager should have a leadership foundation and then add on the various tools available “out there” with which to execute projects, rather than the reverse, because project managers have to drive results through the management of people:—human resources. Many times these resources are people who were “volunteered” to work with you and don’t necessarily want to be on your project; therefore, it’s even more critical to know how to “influence without authority” and lead your team effectively. Whether you are starting out as a project manager or are a seasoned project manager, leading teams is a part of the job. Yet, over the course of my career, I’ve noticed that project managers often don’t possess the leadership basics.

I decided to do some research to discover whether books or resources were available that help people develop their leadership skills within the project management framework. To my surprise, there really weren’t any that provided hands-on exercises or that related leadership concepts to practical project management application.

As a professor at the Metropolitan College of New York, I found that students respond favorably to experiential learning, which means applying a concept in real time. With that lesson in mind, I decided to create this book. It blends theory and application so that anyone who’s interested in becoming a better project leader can use it like a workbook. It’s designed so that each chapter has some sort of toolkit that you can use in your current organizational environment.

I’ve structured this book to mirror a model I’ve used in teaching for many years called the Project Management Human Performance (PmHP) model. This model focuses on techniques to develop three areas (domains) of awareness: self-awareness (Individual), awareness of team dynamics (Team), and political awareness (Organization); and on application of these to the project (Project). The book is thus organized into four corresponding parts, with the first three parts providing the tools for understanding and influencing behavior in each domain; the last part brings these all together in a single case study. An overview of this model follows.

Individual. Part 1 ensures that you focus on yourself before addressing the behavior of others. Once you understand the behaviors you consciously or unconsciously exhibit in interactions with other people, you will have the ability to successfully lead a project team. Exercises given in Part 1 focus on increasing self-awareness, developing a consistent brand, and building advocates in your organization. Monitoring and feedback develop self-awareness and guide you toward the habits that help you lead. Self-awareness, as the cornerstone of leadership, leads to branding, which is the practice of presenting yourself to others with consistency and credibility. Lastly, your reputation will determine your ability to recruit advocates, who are key to your success in the organization.

Team. Part 2 focuses on your team and team members. Where Individual equips you with a sense of yourself, Team equips you with a similar understanding of your team. This part addresses the conscious and unconscious behaviors of team members and their impact on your ability to lead a project. Just as self-awareness is the basis for success as an individual, managing a team begins with your ability to read your team members from the first time you meet them, both as individuals and as a group. The dynamics of their interactions will change over time as they develop from a group of strangers into a true team; you must adapt your leadership style to those dynamics and the situation as well as to the structure of your organization. The size and type of team you lead will also greatly affect your leadership style and can be optimized for high performance.

Organization. Part 3 focuses on your organization as a whole, analyzing teams in relation to the organization. Organization-level behaviors can also jeopardize a project. All organizations experience politics, which manifest themselves in both formal and informal networks of power and influence. Politics present a threat to your success if they lead to loss of support for your project or to decisions being made without your or your sponsor’s input. Consequently, these networks require monitoring and engagement. You and your advocates can also use political influence to mitigate negative politics and to promote your project. Finally, successful change at the organization level depends on an assessment of the gap between an organization’s current status and its desired status.

Project. Part 4 focuses on combining the complexity of your project with human dynamics occurring at the Individual, Team, or Organization level. Projects live at the intersection of the three levels of a company; thus, they are subject to the three types of behavioral dynamics typically observed in an organization. The success or failure of a project depends on how well the project manager handles the interaction of these behavioral dynamics. The project level also introduces an element of practice into the model, where the first three components are largely theoretical.

Chapter 1 offers an introduction to business psychology. To help the reader appreciate the research behind this field, also known as industrial psychology, this chapter covers pivotal moments in time that have shaped this discipline. It’s the foundation of my own model and its application to project management. Think of this chapter as a quick crash course on what industrial psychologists learn over several years of under- and postgraduate work.

Part 1 begins by examining what are you already doing as an individual to help or hurt your chances of success, whether you realize it or not. We don’t always consider that we ourselves could be the root cause of our difficulties. The three chapters provide exercises and insight on what to look out for and work on to ensure you are not doing anything to compromise project success.

Chapter 2 focuses on how you make decisions, on using a psychometric evaluation, and on reconciling how you perceive yourself to how others perceive you. The objective is to create a personal baseline or starting point for self-analysis and reflection. Chapter 3 encourages the reader to establish a brand. As humans we absorb information through our five senses, with sight being one of the primary ones. This chapter dives into a knotty question, “Are you presenting yourself accurately?” For example, you may feel confident, yet feel no one listens to you. Perhaps the way you talk, dress, and act is sending contrary messages. The goal is to ensure consistency between internal and external self to ensure a high level of credibility.

Chapter 4 explains how to build a network of advocates in your organization. When leading projects, we tend to dive straight into the project without fully taking the pulse of the people we will have to work with. But it’s important to spend the time to foster relationships that will help your project, especially those with stakeholders and subject matter experts. An active plan helps foster long-lasting relationships that will help you stand out from the crowd—or when times are tough.

Once the reader has mastered strategies for interacting with other individuals, he or she will move on to building skills related to the Team component in Part 2. This part covers unconscious and conscious behavior among groups of individuals on the team level. The chapters in this section explain how to understand your team’s dynamics and how to minimize group conflict. Critical to this understanding are the fundamentals of reading people, understanding power, leading groups, building a high-performance team, and using advanced techniques to reorganize your existing team.

Chapter 5 explores the principles behind reading people and detecting deception or underlying emotions. Chapter 6 covers understanding how your team functions as a group. This information helps uncover unspoken dynamics within a group. Team dynamics are complex, and motivating a team to work on a project can be difficult. The concepts of the power seat and group dynamics will help your team develop group cohesion.

Chapter 7 focuses on leadership concepts that all leaders need to know: leadership styles, determining your default leadership style, and the top ten leadership characteristics needed to be a successful project manager. Chapter 8 adds to these concepts the types of teams and how they differ from groups, how to divide a team into subteams of the right size, and the characteristics of highperformance teams.

Chapter 9 brings in using Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis as a way to take the pulse of a team by exploring what motivates each team member. Frequently, project managers are assigned resources who may not want to be part of the project; a SWOT analysis will help close the gaps between “what’s in it for them” and your project objectives. These techniques can be used by project managers with existing teams or newly formed teams.

The days when personnel were evaluated only by what they delivered are gone; now the how and the who cares are just as important. Part 3 moves on to the Organization component: external factors that can hurt or help your project—in particular, sponsors. Understanding your organization is critical to positioning a project for survival. These chapters discuss strategies for navigating through organizational politics as well as determining the readiness of your organization.

Chapter 10 explains how to evaluate the importance of a project to the organization, both to the formal power structure and to the informal one. It is critical to have a network to gather information. Chapter 11 provides means for assessing organizational readiness for change. This assessment is particularly important to the management of large-scale transformation projects.

Part 4, Project, puts the theory into application by looking at an example of how all this information can be applied. Chapter 12 brings together the concepts of previous chapters in a project case study. The case study illustrates how the project manager must leverage or neutralize behavioral dynamics at all three levels of the organization to bring about change successfully.

As you go through the book, keep in mind that each exercise will provide you with data to use in later exercises. The goal is to arm you with enough information to build the strategy that works best for you. It is important to be as honest as possible when completing the exercises.

—Bernardo Tirado