Managing Talent: Finding the Right Balance

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  

As project managers, we learn early on that one of the most vital aspects of our job is to develop a high-performing team. We are then given any number of tools that are designed to help us achieve that lofty goal.

What tends to be missing--and what can really only come with experience--is the wisdom to know when to relax the management style and when to tighten things up, who to give more freedom to and who to restrict, etc. There’s no magic solution, but there are some guidelines that the project manager can follow, and that’s what I want to look at in this article.

Freedom is earned, continuously
I want to start with an area that I get asked about fairly regularly: the level of day-to-day monitoring and control that a PM should be doing. Many PMs fear that they will be perceived as micro-managers if they monitor work too closely, as well as being thought of as task-based managers who manage to the detailed schedule rather than the big picture. That tends to drive a more arm’s-length management style, which can lead to problems being missed until it is too late. So what’s the right balance?

As far as I’m concerned, the default should be a fairly close management style--but the PM should be looking to change that default as quickly as possible.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you have a team member who has never worked on a…

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