Leadership Development: The Cornerstone to Project Success

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Career Development   Leadership   Strategy   Talent Management  

Recruiting project management talent and retaining them is one of the biggest challenges for any organization. Usually, most organizations seek to recruit, retain and grow talent in their core areas of business. Some organizations, unfortunately, consider project management as a utilitarian or commodity expertise that can be brought in house when the need arises.

A recent PMI study show that 40% of strategic initiatives that are aligned to business goals are adversely affected by deficiencies in talent management. More revealing is the fact that these studies had focused on project, program and portfolio management areas. While this brings out glaring gaps in project management talent acquisition and retention, it also emphasizes the need within organizations to develop and nurture leadership traits of their project managers.

Recruit project leaders
As part of talent hunting, what should organizations look for in a prospective project leader? It is a known fact that most project managers spend 80% of their core work time communicating with stakeholders, effectively. Even if you are looking out for a technical project manager, countless experiences have proven that individuals with good emotional intelligence, social awareness and strong accountability traits tend to succeed well as project leaders.

This task of finding the right project leader--not yet another project…

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