Articles

It was Peter Drucker who famously said “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

As the project management field develops and matures, it is becoming clearer that project management requires project leadership to succeed. Project management is not merely the management of things (budgets, scope, artefacts, risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies, constraints etc). Once people are involved (team members, stakeholders) it’s mental.

This article discusses some of the issues that the project leader faces in the quest to maintain team members’ motivation levels during a project – to ultimately develop a high-performing team.

As more professionals enter the field of project management and leadership, similar to the days of the gold rush, it becomes more critical for you, as a practitioner, to excel and hone your skills.

A key role of a manager, according to Henry Mintzberg, is leadership: motivating subordinates and unifying effort.

Poor planning is like attempting to climb Mount Everest in shorts and flip-flops. The odds are stacked against you.

Leaders who excel know how to listen, they know how to listen before they speak.

According to Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, the company had very specific rules on how to write compelling storylines for their movies.

When I was a kid, my dad often gave me math exercises to solve. He called them ‘math problems’, how true!

Effectiveness and efficiency have several letters in common, to the extent that five out of the six unique letters in the word efficiency are also found in the word effectiveness. In many ways, that is where the similarity ends. Effectiveness is doing the right things, and efficiency is doing things right.