Principles that are established should be viewed as flexible, capable of adaptation to every need. It is the manager’s job to know how to make use of them, which is a difficult art requiring intelligence, experience, decisiveness and, most important, a sense of proportion.
– Henri Fayol, General & Industrial Management
Leadership is all the current rage in project management circles. Courses on project leadership. Forums and Blogs on how to "lead" a project.
Leadership is the articulation of vision, organizational vectoring (direction and velocity), and the creation of a business environment for fulfillment of these "goals." Management, which is now subservient to the leadership discussion, is the orchestrating of the production objectives to fulfill these objectives.
Much of the scholarship and writing about leadership comes from people have never led or managed anything other than in the classroom or in their book on leadership. In much of this leadership literature, management is at best ignored and worst disparaged as a hurdle to project success. The basic "blocking and tackling" skills of project management are skipped over for the higher goal of "leadership."
Many failing projects have crippled management processes. The Knowledge Areas of PMBOK are missing. The measures of physical percent complete are absence. Risk management is nonexistent.
The source of many of the project performance problems is poor leadership. The synchronization between leaders and managers is missing. This unity of effort toward a common goal is the first requisite for project success. The false notion that "leaders" can replace "managers" is misguided at best and disastrous at worse.
Both leadership and management are required for success. The common approach of flattening the organization has led to the removal of "management" and the insertion of a "Leader" and a collection of followers. Or - another false notion - a collection of "leaders" in a self directed team. Not a self organized team, a self directed team.
If increasing the probability of project success is the goal of Project Management, the MANAGEMENT role must be present as well as the LEADERSHIP of the project.
