Are You Guilty of These 4 Leadership Mistakes?

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  

I have mentioned multiple times that a project manager is a leader and that the team will look to the PM for guidance on how to behave, react to situations, and more. The relationship between PM and team is crucial to sustainable success—and is something that cannot be emphasized strongly enough. But we don’t always appreciate just how broadly that can be applied.

Let me give you a personal example to illustrate the point. I am a fairly confident person, and I’m comfortable making decisions without having to go through supporting data in detail first. Those two traits mean that I generally have an opinion whenever options are being discussed, and I’m not going to shy away from offering that opinion. It’s done professionally (and I hope logically), but in the past my teams have known that I’m going to be willing to step forward with my ideas and suggestions.

As a result, whenever such a situation arose, they looked to me to take the lead. They expected that I would have thoughts on the subject and that I would want to share them. Instead of sharing their own thoughts and opinions, making their own recommendations, or identifying any challenges that they saw, they would defer to my thoughts. They knew that they were free to disagree or to try and adjust my thinking, but they wouldn’t say or do anything until I’d shared my …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.