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Effective leadership is important for projects – no one disputes that and a quick online search will throw up plenty of survey results that position leadership as one of the key factors for project success.

However, leadership is hard work. It’s also very stressful. I hear a lot about ‘being a leader’ but I don’t think the discussion is wide enough. We also need to talk about how to cope with being a project leader because it’s difficult, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience at the top.

I wish project teams worked well together from Day 1 but experience shows this isn’t the case. At all, some of the time. Here are 6 behaviours to watch out for in your project team and some things that you can  do to manage these behaviours and attitudes before they start to cause problems on your team. 

A common problem on projects is that you and the team get so used to working on the project, deep in the detail, that you can’t see the big picture. The issue with this is that you really do need to be able to take a big picture view sometimes as it helps you see how the project fits into the organisation and how what you are doing adds value. Knowing that context will in turn help you keep the fo ...

Project managers are at the forefront of project success. They are responsible for defining, organizing, and keeping projects moving toward completion, thus if the project is a success, the bulk of the credit goes to the manager. 

We run into worthless project managers - those ‘figure-head’ project managers put in place on the customer side to ‘do something’ to keep the project moving forward.

Project kick off meetings are when your new project team comes together, potentially for the first time. Sometimes you’ll want to incorporate icebreaker exercises as part of the meeting. An icebreaker is a short exercise or game to help the team members get to know each other. Here are five icebreakers that you can use with your project team. 1. Introduce a colleague This is a simple exercise that ...

Interesting concept and you’re probably wondering what the heck I mean by this.  Usually, there are two extremes of project managers and the obvious middle ground. 

Project managers come in all shapes and sizes.  The flat-out ‘manage the project’ project managers who sort out the tasks and track, track, track. 

Power is often defined as the ability to influence key players in the decision-making process to achieve a goal. In other words, power means getting what one wants.