Leading the Project Revolution

Reframing the Human Dynamics of Successful Projects

Darren Dalcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429627392
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

People play a vital part in the success of projects, initiatives and organisations, yet traditional project management sources offer limited guidance and insights that extend beyond technical roles and prescriptions. Leading the Project Revolution delves into the dynamics of people, teams and organisations exploring their impact on leadership, strategy, success and achievement.

The book offers a progressive agenda for improving project practice, enabling the dialogue to advance from the typical coverage of static toolsets towards an understanding of flexible mindsets. Flexibility, agility and resilience are addressed as the social, cultural and complexity dimensions of leadership, strategy, organisations and project execution are examined and practical insights are synthesised into pragmatic models and frameworks.

The volume brings together some of the best writing by leading authorities on teams, leadership, corporate culture, human behaviour, organisational dynamics, psychology, complexity, strategy, execution, innovation, social media and decision sourcing.

1

Leadership

The leaders we deserve?

Darren Dalcher

Over the years, many of us have must have looked at our own bosses and wondered how they ever became leaders. We all recognise the profile; bereft of strategic thinking, enmeshed in local and personal considerations, unable to see the horizon of opportunities, antagonistic, incapable of inspiring others, lacking a vision, unable to consider consequences and options, incapable of making informed decisions, uncaring and ignorant of how to engage with and motivate followers. Poor leaders deliver a toxic long-term legacy, which affects team members and followers, and ultimately, impacts the bottom line of the organisation, team or unit. The typical traits of poor leaders (Leviticus, 2017) include:

• Lack of communication;

• Tendency to micromanage;

• Unclear expectations;

• Intimidation and bullying; and

• Poor people skills.

Many of our appointed leaders would appear to exhibit such symptoms, causing untold damage to organisations. Management scholar Laurence J. Peter reasoned that people simply rise to their level of incompetence. Selection to higher office and new positions is often based on performance in previous assignments. The Peter Principle suggests that people rise, or get promoted, until they reach a job they cannot really manage, leaving many individuals to operate at their ‘level of incompetence’.

‘In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties’ (Peter & Hull, 1969: p. 36).

Inevitably, therefore:

‘Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence’ (ibid.).

The Peter Principle became an international best seller, selling well over a million copies. The original manuscript had been rejected by 30 publishers, before William Morrow & Company accepted it and printed a small run of 10,000 copies. The book made it into the New York Times best-seller list, selling over 200,000 copies in the first year. It has since been translated into 38 languages.

A generalised form of the Peter Principle asserts that anything that works will continue to be utilised in the exact same format, in increasingly more demanding contexts and applications, until it ultimately fails. The temptation is to develop a habit that keeps replicating exactly what has worked previously and impose it on new situations as they are encountered.

Ironically, Peter and Hull also noted that highly competent individuals may struggle to progress through the system.

‘In most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence’ (ibid.).

Peter and Hull duly warned that extremely skilled and productive employees often face criticism, and would be fired if they don’t start performing worse as their presence ‘disrupts and therefore violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: the hierarchy must be preserved’.

A crisis of leadership

In an increasingly uncertain world, leaders are called upon to deliver both hope and change. When there is a need for a clear direction, followers turn to their leaders for the courage to make the right decision and the inspiration and assurance that allow followers to believe.

Many of the leaders we encounter in all spheres of life place their desire to be right above the wish to achieve the right outcome. Ego boosts, quests for power and the thirst for greed are often confused with leadership.

As a result, many followers, citizens, and workers remain concerned by the apparent lack of leadership skills. The World Economic Forum identified lack of leadership as one of the major global challenges facing the world in 2015, and commissioned a survey to investigate further. A staggering 86 percent of respondents worldwide agreed that there is currently a global leadership crisis (World Economic Forum, 2015).

The figures divided by region support the global perception of the problem, with respondents acknowledging a leadership crisis divided by continent and region as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 The problem with leadership regional survey

Region	Recognising a global crisis
Asia	83%
Europe	85%
Latin America	84%
Middle East & North Africa	85%
North America	92%
Sub-Saharan Africa	92%

It appears that if there is one thing we all agree upon, regardless of location, is that leaders are unable to perform as needed.

When asked what skills would be needed to win back their confidence, respondents identified a set of virtues, including:

• A global interdisciplinary perspective;

• Long-term, empirical planning;

• Strong communication skills;

• A prioritisation of social justice and well-being over financial growth;

• Empathy;

• Courage;

• Morality; and

• A collaborative nature.

It is no longer enough to be inspirational. Leaders are expected to engage different stakeholder groups, listen, mediate and include the opinions of diverse constituencies before making their decisions.

Successful leaders of the future are expected to be good at execution, team building and delegation, combined with honing a positive and reassuring attitude in the face of growing uncertainty and adversity.

Leadership matters

US Professor Warren Bennis is widely recognised as a pioneer of the leadership movement. Indeed, the Financial Times referred to him in 2000 as ‘the professor who established leadership as a respectable academic field’. In August 2007, Business Week ranked Bennis as one of the top ten thought leaders in business.

Professor Bennis and Professor Bert Nanus wrote the first book dedicated to leadership. Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge was released in 1985 providing an insightful and much-needed guide to the area of leadership. The book is based on a series of interviews with successful leaders. The original edition proved a success, and the book was translated into 21 languages.

The book has evolved over time. It might be instructive therefore to conduct a brief guided tour through the three different editions, paying particular attention to the changes in emphasis.

The first edition (1985) predates most other writing in the area of leadership. It identifies a tendency to replace management with leadership as people do not want to be managed, but would prefer to be led. Leaders were not ‘incrementalists’; they were looking to create new ideas, new policies and new methodologies. The authors identified four major strategies that emerged from their research that all of their 90 subjects embodied:

• Attention through vision is the creation of focus which matches the leaders’ agenda and grabs followers;

• Meaning through communication is used to capture imagination and create alignment;

• Trust through positioning is used to maintain organisational integrity; and

• The deployment of self is essential to ensuring that leaders manage themselves. Without it, leaders will do more harm than good as ‘like incompetent physicians, incompetent managers can make people sicker and less vital’. (ibid.: p. 58)

The second edition (Bennis & Nanus, 1997) offers new emphases. In particular, upon reflection, the authors felt that the following points were important:

• Leadership is about character and character is a continuously evolving thing;

• To keep organisations competitive, leaders must be instrumental in creating a social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital;

• Strong determination to achieve a goal or realise a vision must be a conviction or even a passion;

• The capacity to generate and sustain trust is the central ingredient in leadership;

• True leaders have an uncanny way of enrolling people in their vision through their optimism; and

• Leaders have a bias towards action that results in success. It comes from their capacity to translate vision and purpose into reality.

More crucially, the book identifies a need to refresh and update leadership thinking as millions of new leaders will need to come on board and play a part in driving new achievements. Gazing into the future, the authors conclude that the leaders who succeed most will be those who are able to:

1 Set direction during turbulent times;

2 Manage change whilst still providing exceptional customer service and quality;

3 Attract resources and forge new alliances to accommodate new constituencies;

4 Harness diversity on a global scale;

5 Inspire a sense of optimism, enthusiasm, and commitment among their followers; and

6 Be a leader of leaders, especially regarding knowledge workers.

The final update of the book took place with the publication of the third edition in 2003, enabling the authors to reflect on 20 years of development in leadership. In summarising the achievements of the book over that period, the authors identified five key contributions to leadership:

1 Distinguishing leadership from management: Leaders serve a different organisational purpose from managers and have a unique perspective and responsibility. The distinction that ‘managers do things right while leaders do the right thing’ had been widely accepted and quoted.

2 Empowerment: Empowerment replaces power and control, enabling concepts such as collaborative leadership and servant leadership.

3 Vision: A clearly articulated vision, or a strong sense of direction, focuses the attention: Ultimately, a widely shared vision enables organisations to succeed.

4 Trust: Trustworthiness is a vital characteristic of successful leadership, whilst the lack thereof has proven to be a key ingredient in organisational failures, scandals and disasters.

5 Management of meaning: Leaders play a key part in shaping meaning and communicating the culture. Indeed, they have primary responsibility for articulating organisational values, interpreting reality, framing and mobilising meaning, and creating the necessary symbols and role models to communicate a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Leadership
• 2 Perspective
• 3 Teams
• 4 Culture
• 5 Strategy
• 6 Complexity
• 7 Shadow working
• 8 Implementation
• 9 Connecting
• Conclusion
• Index