Week 2 Project

Attributes of a Good Project Manager

Research and development, engineering, and other disciplines are naturally project oriented, as are other industries, such as aerospace and construction. Despite all of its

orientation toward technology and technologists, the human challenges of leadership are still of paramount importance in project management. As you lead projects, you

will be expected to know how to get the job done with other employees that do not report to you. This requires use of leadership skills that needs to be developed. Here

are some examples to inspire leadership.

Richard Branson employs 25,000 people in 200 companies. According to him, "Having a personality of caring about people is important. You can't be a good leader unless

you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them."

Further, he is a believer in positive reinforcement and says, "For the people who work for you or with you, you must lavish praise on them at all times." He adds, "If a �ower

is watered, it �ourishes. If not it shrivels up and dies." He further adds, "It's much more fun looking for the best in people" (Uhl-Bien, Schermerhorn, & Osborn, 2014, p.

310).

Lorraine Monroe serves as a leadership consultant and runs the Lorraine Monroe Leadership Institute, which trains educational leaders in visionary leadership to build high-performing schools that can transform children's lives.

Monroe's many leadership ideas are summarized in what is called the "Monroe Doctrine." It begins with this advice: "The job of the leader is to uplift her people—not just

as members of and contributors to the organization, but as individuals of in�nite worth in their own right" (Uhl-Bien et al. 2014, p. 106).

To succeed as a project manager, you need the right interaction patterns and communication abilities to accomplish your project management goals. These goals require

you to work with others that do not have the same goals as you do.

While some of the tasks of a manager are conceptually easy to understand, they are often dif�cult to practice well. Every manager has an implicit theory of leadership,

organization, and risk, but it is often a terrible and ironic mistake to assume that if they are easy to understand, they are also easy to execute. They are not. Research indicates that the most common problems associated with failed projects are human beings.

There is an axiom in strategic management, "Structure follows strategy." This means that a plan should be devised �rst and then the organizational structure should be

established. It also means a great strategy can become completely useless if determining the right kind of organizational structure is not considered as important as the

plan.

The project manager must be a good leader. Not all those leadership styles adopted from the popular press are right for a project manager. The imperatives, however, are

still ones of leadership. The great project manager will understand team building is one of the most important activities, and team management has different challenges throughout all phases of the project life cycle.

Reference:

Uhl-Bien, M., Schemerhorn Jr., J. R., & Osborn, R. N. (2014). Organizational behavior (13th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Additional Materials

View a Pdf Transcript of Characteristics of a project manager (media/week2/SU_MGT3035_W2_L4_G1.pdf?

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