The Strategy of Tying Project Managers to Business Success

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Leadership  

“Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.”
—Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge

Project managers have a lot of responsibilities, chief of which is the responsibility to unite the project team under the guidelines, constraints and specifications to make a deliverable that is agreeable in terms of its use of resources and its cost, and meets the prescribed need. While we put the burden on the project manager to keep things in line and make progress toward these lofty goals, these managers also have the capacity to take charge of strategic outcomes.

In typical situations, managers have been tasked with management duties, but not necessarily had a role in a company’s leadership. A manager is seen as more of a person who seeks to resolve predicaments—utilizing their knowledge and abilities to find the most effective solutions to achieve a defined objective. Alternatively, a leader is seen as a person with a “higher perspective”—a view of how to drive and classify the organization, yet also having the knowhow to come up with new ideas for old problems. Managers may help the organization accomplish goals, but leaders examine what those accomplishments mean to the organization.

The everyday but necessary standards of discipline and action (for …

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