Project Managers and Bullies: Are They One and the Same?

I hope my tease yesterday kept you on pins and needles. I have had the good fortune to be on a wide number of project teams, some of which had good project managers, some of which had bad project managers and some of which had me. Throughout all of these projects there is a common theme of trying to lead the team. Different PMs had different ideas about how to lead the team with some methods being more effective than others.

One popular method of leading the team is through the use of “It’s my way or the highway”. This is rarely effective as it stifles creativity, leads to aggressive behavious between the team members and the PM and usually causes people to devalue the importance of the PM. (Sometimes it leads to team members calling the PM an “arrogant SOB from Chicago”, but that is another story.)

Another popular method is consensus. Everyone needs to agree on something before it is done. While this may work for some areas, developing IT solutions requires a vision that needs to be followed. If that is the vision of one person or the organization as a whole, there needs to be someone driving the project forward and that is the PM.

An effective PM leads through something I like to call “motivation”. You need to be able to get the team engaged and believing that their part, no matter how small or obscure, is part of the overall picture and is important to the success of the project. And you know what, it is!!! Everything that someone is doing on the team is helping to craft the final product and is important, because if it’s not, why are you doing it? The PM needs to be cheerleader, traffic cop and salesman all rolled into one. Being a bully doesn’t cut it as that devastates the motivation piece and does nothing to engage the project team members.

Are Project Managers bullies? No, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be strong willed and opinionated, just that they know when to apply these features to the tasks at hand.

(Any similarities to people living or dead is purely coincidental, unless you are referring to that arrogant SOB from Chicago in which case …)