Starting with project leaders you respect, who have experience and have led projects in ways you admire is a good place to start. Getting advice from a mentor is recommended because they can add a level of depth to the process that no number of books can match.
Another thing to remember is these five leadership concepts, which are similar to a leadership workout. You'll strengthen your leadership muscles if you practise them.
1. Mind the Gap
Take some time to consider the difference between navigating and utilising trade tools and leading others. It's traditional leadership, with the goal of bringing a group of people together to form a team and achieve high performance. Simple words, difficult tasks, but well worth the time and effort.
2. Reframe Your Challenge: It’s Not the Project, It’s the Team
The problem you're having isn't with project execution; it's with team development. If you look after your team and create the right environment, the initiative will be taken care of by the team.
3. Let the Team Define Your Role
Conduct a pre-post mortem on your leadership role. “What will you say I did at the end of this project when we are successful?” ask your team. Many of the raw ingredients of high-performance teams can be heard if you listen carefully. This question will elicit a slew of important responses, ranging from project alignment to treating team members with respect to ensuring fair and even accountability to setting high expectations to not micromanaging. Make a mental note of everything. These are the essential elements of your project manager job description.
4. Teach Your Team How to Talk
One of the common performance killers I've observed in teams struggling to perform is an inability to navigate the swirl of emotions, biases, opinions, and agendas that pervade all of our group discussions. Spend some time working on improving your facilitation skills.
5. Teach Your Teams How to Decide
Teams succeed or fail based on how they handle key, often irreversible decisions during moments of truth. While it's important to improve your team's ability to communicate as outlined above, it's even more important to support the development of effective decision-making processes.
Given the complexities of group decision-making, such as our proclivity to draw on our own unique prior experiences and unconsciously impose our biases on a decision, assisting a group in developing effective decision-making processes is no easy task. You'll require a procedure. Find the one that works best for your company and team.
Want to know more ideas to become a great project leader? Go through the PMP prep course today!
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