Are You Meeting the True Needs of Your Team?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Talent Management   Teams  

I have always viewed project management as not just a people-focused profession, but that one that is consciously concerned with helping people to succeed.

I’m not unrealistic; I know that we have to ensure that we deliver a project that can achieve the business outcomes for our employer. But I have always felt that most PMs are also concerned with trying to provide team members with a positive experience and potentially help them grow their own careers.

That’s not exclusive to project managers of course; every good leader should be looking to build up the people around them. But as project management has evolved away from task management and toward people leadership, so the development of others has seemed to become more “built-in” to the function.

That is now increasingly becoming an expected part of the job.

For-purpose orientation
There’s even a term for it—for-purpose orientation. In the 2023 Pulse of the Profession® report, PMI defined that as the ability to “Recognize the needs of others and actively seek ways to help them.” It’s related to the larger concept of purpose orientation at the enterprise level, where organizations prioritize ethical approaches, societal impact and so on.

For project managers, this seems like a natural extension of how they operate anyway. It takes the idea that project …

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