Becoming a Project Leader by Alexander Laufer Terry Little Jeffrey Russell & Bruce Maas

Author:Alexander Laufer, Terry Little, Jeffrey Russell & Bruce Maas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Courage: Choosing Your Battles

Studying dozens of successful project managers during the last two decades, we have come to realize that challenging the status quo creatively and courageously frequently changes the fate of a project and is widely regarded as a key component of project leadership [19–21]. In their book Fusion Leadership, Daft and Lengel have this to say: “Leadership in a destabilized world means nonconformity. One obvious trait that distinguishes a leader from a manager is a willingness to take risks. … It takes courage to jump into a new way of doing things” [22].

In the three examples described earlier in this chapter, the project managers exhibited courage by their willingness, and ability, to convince their teams to do things in a new way. Don Margolies exhibited courage when he went against his 20 science teams, forcing them to significantly reduce the technical scope of the project so that he could secure a stable budget. Jenny Baer-Riedhart convinced her entire team to sing karaoke in order to obtain the marketing services of Dave, whereas Terry Little guided his contractors to disregard the military standards so that they would feel free to innovate.

Although courage is regarded by many authorities as a key component of leadership, like many good things, too much courage may at times have a corrosive impact, as illustrated in the following story by Terry Little.I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career, but the one that I think of as providing the greatest learning opportunities occurred while I was program manager of a large Department of Defense (DoD) project designated by Congress as an acquisition reform program. I was told I would have my department’s support to try almost anything—so long as it wasn’t illegal—to improve acquisition in the DoD.

One of the things that came to me was to emulate a practice used by many commercial companies: profit sharing. I wanted to establish a way for the people working for me to share in the savings of the program. As I saw it, it was a win-win situation.

I was sure the savings were going to be enormous, and I believed it would stimulate my people to be more creative, innovative, and give them a greater sense of ownership over the outcome of the program. Thus, I set off on my Don Quixote quest to get approval.

When I went back to tell the people in my department my ideas about pay-for-performance incentives, I found their reaction to be a little too cool for my taste. But I already had fallen in love with my idea and was determined to get approval at the Pentagon no matter what. I commenced to making trips from Florida to Washington DC every week, talking to various people in the Pentagon, explaining what I had in mind and why it was such a wonderful idea. … Over the next two years, I spent almost half my time in Washington.

So carried away did I get with my brilliant idea that I decided to try and see the Secretary of Defense himself.

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