Head of International Project Management Office| Deutsche TelekomPraha, Czechia
The collaboration with C-Suite can be challenging? Do you have any hints or things that worked for you, especially when you wanted to enlarge your portfolio?
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Laura, this often comes down to clarity, trust, and timing. When it comes to enlarging your portfolio, I highly recommend framing the ideas in terms of business outcomes and clearly showing how they support the organization’s strategic priorities. Saving Changes...
From my experience, C-suite collaboration improves when we speak their language: value, risk, and outcomes. Keep updates short, show clear impact, and bring options not problems. Build trust slowly with consistent delivery. When expanding your portfolio, link your proposals directly to strategic priorities Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Great question, Laura. In my experience, collaboration with the C-Suite improves significantly when we stop approaching them as project sponsors and start engaging them as decision partners.
Executives don’t collaborate around project mechanics. They collaborate around strategic choices, trade-offs and risk exposure. When conversations are framed in terms of “what decision is needed now, what options exist, and what each option means for value, risk and timing”, the dialogue changes immediately.
What has worked consistently for me when expanding a portfolio is focusing less on proposing more initiatives and more on helping the C-Suite see the portfolio as a living system: where priorities compete, capacity is finite, and not starting something can be as strategic as starting it.
Trust grows when executives experience that you are there to improve decision quality, not to push projects forward at any cost.
From that point on, collaboration becomes natural, and portfolio growth becomes a shared outcome rather than a negotiation.
Curious to hear how others have experienced this shift. Saving Changes...
I'd start by being in a position to actually collaborate with them before trying to do so. If I were operating as an individual project manager without a lot of exposure to the C-Suite, in a strong hierarchy, I would only bring things to their attention that required their attention, and try to have possible solutions to go with issues before bringing them to their attention. At this level, I would not be in a position to be a direct collaborator with the C-Suite; my role would be to support their decisions.
As the gap between me and the C-Suite closed, whether that be through promotions or by working at a more flat organization, and opportunities to interact with them increased, I would make sure to speak their language and demonstrate that I understand the business and strategic considerations of the project, bearing in mind that I'm still only escalating to them when appropriate.
At the PMO Leader level, I would feel I was in a position to link strategic priorities to funding, capacity, sequencing, and delivery risk. I would attempt to position the PMO as a decision-enablement function, as opposed to a compliance layer, and I would do my best to come across as aligning the PMO to the executive's needs, as opposed to trying to educate the C-Suite on project management.
Whatever your role or proximity to the C-Suite, they are going to be more open to collaborating with people who reduce ambiguity, surface issues and solutions early and when C-Suite attention is needed, and respect the constraints executives operate under (limited bandwidth, many decisions are tradeoffs, influence is finite and fragile, ...). It's important to keep in mind that project management optimizes for execution quality while executives optimize for organizational viability. These objectives can overlap, but they're not identical. Saving Changes...
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
From my experience, collaboration with the C-suite works best when we act as decision enablers, not project promoters. Framing conversations around outcomes, trade-offs, and risk instead of delivery mechanics, builds trust quickly. When executives see that you help improve decision quality and respect their constraints, portfolio growth becomes a shared objective. Saving Changes...
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