Voices on Project Management

by Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

Today’s hybrid work environments, ethical demands, stakeholder complexity, and organizational pace require new success criteria. According to PMI’s 2024 Pulse of the Profession report, only 34% of projects are considered successful by traditional measures of scope, time and cost. For leaders to thrive in this new reality, project guardrails must be modernized to inspire autonomy while aligning purpose, ethics, and sustainable outcomes.

Rethinking Guardrails: From Control to Catalysis
Traditional project governance structures emphasize compliance, change control, and rigid escalation paths. But in environments characterized by complexity, ambiguity, and constant change, rigid control can undermine innovation and engagement.

McKinsey & Co.’s research shows that projects with adaptive governance outperform peers by 25% in delivery of value and 30% in stakeholder satisfaction. Leaders must introduce guardrails that promote empowered decision-making within clearly communicated boundaries, and encourage distributed leadership and agility without sacrificing accountability.

5 New Guardrails for Today’s Project Leaders

1. Value Over Output: PMI’s 2023 Global Megatrends shows organizations that prioritize value over delivery metrics achieve a 42% higher rate of strategic goals. Teams that connect features to customer outcomes develop deeper alignment with mission and increase stakeholder confidence. These leaders define value-centric KPIs rather than milestone attainment.
2. Ethics Over Expediency: Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer indicates 71% of employees expect their companies to take a public stand on ethical issues, expect their leaders to anticipate unintended consequences, and apply ethical analysis into key decisions. Ethically governed projects report 30% fewer incidents of rework and stakeholder backlash (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2023). Empowered teams build a culture of integrity and long-term resilience. These leaders add ethical risk as part of project risk registers, ethical checklists and stakeholder impact maps.
3. Psychological Safety Over Hierarchical Control: Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson shares teams with high psychological safety are 27% more effective in cross-functional collaboration while enabling openness, faster error detection, and greater innovation. Projects with psychologically safe environments complete 18% faster and report 35% greater team engagement (Google’s Project Aristotle). Team members are more likely to raise early red flags and offer solutions without fear of reprisal. These leaders model curiosity, not criticism. Shifting to questions such as “What can we learn?” versus “Who’s accountable?”
4. Agility Over Certainty: Only 16% of organizations report that traditional planning methods are effective in today’s fast-paced environment (PMI, 2024). Agile projects are 2.5 times more likely to succeed than waterfall counterparts in dynamic sectors like tech, finance and healthcare (Standish Group CHAOS Report, 2023). Teams working in short feedback loops are more responsive to customer needs and regulatory changes, resulting in better user adoption. These leaders use rolling-wave planning and commit to decision-making during sprint steering reviews.
5. Stakeholder Integration Over Stakeholder Management: The modern stakeholder is no longer a passive recipient but an active participant. Projects that actively engage stakeholders experience 29% fewer change requests and 41% greater satisfaction scores (IBM Business Value Institute, 2023). When stakeholders are engaged early, then resistance turns into advocacy. These leaders manage stakeholders by listening and integrating their inputs. Use stakeholder empathy interviews and involve them in prototype testing or solution design.

Making Guardrails Operational
Putting these principles into action requires a shift in mindset and structure. Here are five ways to support your practice:

1. Formalize guardrails. Document in project charters and playbooks the team norms, governance models, and onboarding practices.
2. Measure guardrails. Use KPIs like Net Promoter Score, stakeholder sentiment, innovation speed, and compliance metrics.
3. Empower coaches and champions. Appoint internal coaches or culture champions to reinforce these behaviors during stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives.
4. Build guardrails into decision trees. Create frameworks where teams can operate with autonomy while escalating only when critical guardrails are approached.
5. Conduct quarterly guardrail health checks. Conduct quarterly “guardrail health checks” to audit, reflect and adapt. Use team surveys and external facilitators to refine policies and culture.

Conclusion
Now more than ever, project success requires leaders who can lead with precision and principle. This requires one to balance execution with empathy, speed with substance, and strategy with stewardship. The new project guardrails of value, ethics, safety, agility and integration do not constrain; rather they are cultural enablers that empower high-performance delivery within purpose-driven boundaries. These guardrails provide structure for leaders where trust replaces control, adaptability replaces rigidity, and purpose becomes the new metric of success.

What actions will you take to ensure guardrails turn from control to catalysis?

References

1. Pulse of the Profession: The Future of Project Work, PMI (2024)
2. Unlocking the Power of Agile Governance, McKinsey & Company (2023)
3. Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety, Harvard Business Review (2023)
4. CHAOS Report: Project Success Rates, Standish Group (2023)
5. The Stakeholder Experience Advantage; IBM Business Value Institute (2023)
6. Trust Barometer: Expectations of Ethical Leadership, Edelman (2024)
7. Ethical Decision-Making in Fast-Paced Projects, MIT Sloan (2023)

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI-PBA, PMI-ACP

A few weeks ago, I lost my voice entirely for two days. It finally came back, but I had to wait a few weeks for it to regain its strength.

It was an unpleasant experience on a personal level. I had to use an old slate, a pen, and an eraser to communicate with my family and other contacts. I became aware that my daily environment was not suitable for people who did not speak.

However, it was also an enlightening experience at the professional level. I had to take sick leave for two days because I was not able to work without a voice.

I wrote emails, messages and texts to move projects forward, but I missed being able to use the power of my voice. Electronic communication methods are not enough.

As a project leader, you need to connect, explain, help, negotiate, organize, collaborate and brainstorm. But you also need to listen. I also realized that I spoke too much during conference calls and sometimes had to repeat myself.

The voice translates our inner state, even if we are not conscious about it. We have all experienced team members saying, “I’m fine” with a big smile, but we felt it was not true.

I work most of the time with no videos, and thanks to the international background I work in, I have learned to listen to the hesitations, the “yes” that means “no,” the pauses that indicate a need for help. Smiles can also be “heard” through the phones even if there is no video.

Having a voice is also about learning how to use it. We are so familiar with the sound of our own voices that, for most people, it’s hard to listen to their own voice. But I encourage you to do it. When I began producing podcasts, I had to listen to each entire episode several times to edit it. I heard my voice, and I was surprised—I had spoken too fast, with too much energy, and sounded like I was giving orders. This also explained why, at the beginning of my career, a colleague (politely) told me, “Don't give me any orders.”

My next step is to take vocal training with a coach to learn more about it.

The voice is a fragile muscle: you need to respect it and protect it.

When you have a voice, activate it! Don't shut up, but listen.

How do you use your voice as a project leader?

by Conrado Morlan

Not everyone is born a leader. Some must be groomed. This is where the vertical development comes in. In my previous post, I wrote about how it can lead to a better understanding of challenges, more innovative thinking, improved emotional intelligence, and increased ability to resolve conflicts constructively in the VUCA world.

As humans, we experience stages of development: infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Just as we progress through those stages as humans, we make similar progress moving through varying stages as project leaders.

David Rooke and William R. Torbert developed a  model that outlines seven styles of leadership. Although it was introduced in 2005, I find it still relevant in today’s VUCA times:

• The Opportunist wins any way possible, is self-oriented and manipulative
• The Diplomat avoids conflict, wants to belong, and follows group norms
• The Expert rules by logic
• The Achiever meets strategic goals and juggles managerial duties
• The Individualist creates unique structures to resolve gaps between strategy and performance
• The Strategist generates organizational and personal transformations
• The Alchemist generates social transformations

When you started out as a project manager, you most likely were in the Diplomat or Expert groups.

Becoming a project manager jumpstarted your vertical development with an unprecedented experience. That should had been complemented with meeting new peers with different perspectives and consolidating your experiences and knowledge to start acquiring a new POV.

The natural path to follow next is to become an Achiever, turning yourself into an action- and goal-oriented individual. Evolving to Strategist or Alchemist requires you to explore disciplines that will create projects, teams, networks, and alliances on the basis of collaborative inquiry.

So go ahead and step out of your comfort zone: Look for a stretch assignment, start exchanging your perspectives with other people within your organization, and consolidate that knowledge. This will help your development—and prepare you to face the VUCA challenges that many individuals and organizations are already facing.

How are you using vertical development? Share in the comments.

by Conrado Morlan

The term VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world has been around for a while. But 2020 will be remembered as the year that forced every organization to deal with the VUCA world. And the most successful ones will be those that find ways to improve the capability of their leaders by acquiring new ways of thinking.

Yet even before COVID, PwC’s annual CEO survey found a majority of executives reporting they didn’t have the talent needed to grow their organizations and respond to increasing complexities.

         Today’s VUCA world demands vertical development. What exactly does that mean? The acquisition of skills, certifications, and experience is essentially learning or horizontal development. Vertical development helps the individual change to become more sophisticated, mature, and capable.

Put simply: Horizontal development transforms what you know; vertical development transforms how you think.

Typically, vertical development involves the following:

• An unprecedented experience that derails a person’s habitual way of thinking
• Meeting with people who have different perspectives to find a different way to achieve outcomes
• A process of integration to help the leader gain a different perspective and develop a new way of thinking

Vertical development isn’t exclusive to leaders at the top of the organizational hierarchy. It’s for anybody in the organization, including project professionals.

If project managers and/or organizational leaders respond to the VUCA world simply through learning a few more skills, it’s not going to produce any significant benefit. They must develop their capabilities, adapt, and expand their ability to respond to the challenges. Vertical development involves a transformation of their consciousness.

To understand the difference between horizontal and vertical development, think of a cup of water. Individuals developing horizontally are pouring water into their cups. Individuals developing vertically need a bigger cup.

As project managers grow into their leadership roles, it becomes less about their mastery of frameworks, methodologies, tools, and techniques, and more about their container. The level of consciousness to navigate the complexity of the VUCA world requires a bigger cup.

One of the greatest benefits of vertical development is how it fosters increased mental complexity, innovation, emotional intelligence, and the ability to resolve conflicts constructively. This translates to an improved ability to interpret situations and make effective decisions—two essential skills needed to tackle problems in the VUCA world.

         How are you and your team using vertical development to deal with today’s VUCA world?