Did you know that you can be a leader without title power? Even in our environment! Often project managers only have limited decision making power and function more like a project coordinator. Yet they are responsible like a project manager. Even here you can be a true leader.
Leadership is about
- How you treat your team members
- How much empathy you have
- Having emotional intelligence
- Having relationship intelligence & purposefully building meaningful relationships
- Building people up to see them shine – not shine yourself
- Enabling people
- Removing barricades, red tape & stumbling blocks for your team
Being a true leader requires you to have a big heart for growing people. Leadership also demands humbleness. Actually, Leadership is not about you and your shining results, but about bringing the best out in your team, nurturing them to grow beyond what they thought is possible.
Leave old believes behind
That old picture of the “powerful leader” who makes decisions and tells people what to do, actually describes a Manager and not a leader. This idea of leadership is also outdated. If you have the willingness to dedicate your work to helping others grow and nurturing them, then you are on the leadership journey.
Let’s all work on becoming better leaders this year. We do not need the title power, we just need the willingness to make a change!
Project Management is People Management
I totally agree with Cornelius Fichtner, that Project Management is primarily People Management. The fact that many of the “technical skills” like preparing WBS, Network Diagrams, Gantt Charts etc by hand are now being taken over by software or even AI, is a big opportunity. Now we have the time & possibility to become true people managers. If you dedicate the time to your team, you will see amazing results. You will find, that your team will execute projects with outcomes you never expected.