So what is Project Leadership? Is it task lists? Is it Gantt charts? Schedules? People stuff?

The answer is YES, all of the above, and much more. But the simple way to explain it is in 3 words: results, relationships, and expectations.

To elaborate, project leadership is managing results and relationships to satisfy expectations.

The results of the project must be clearly understood at all times throughout the project by the team members, management or stakeholders, and the customers. The team must have a way of dealing with the constantly "morphing" project. They need to understand and communicate those changes and be able to make decisions regarding those changes all during the project life.

The relationships must be nurtured and grown to motivate the team members to accomplish the deliverable results for the project. In this time of cross-functional, cross-cultural, and cross-global teams, relationships are the heart of getting the work done. Some people are wooed into a false sense of security because they have people on their team that are "assigned" to be there. These people don’t work for the leader directly but they are assigned by their functional leader to be on the team. The problem here is that they are on several, sometimes many teams, so, with all good intentions, they try to work on the project but run out of time and tell the project leader they would love to work on the project but don’t have the time. So it becomes a challenge in influencing on the part of the project leader to motivate these team members to perform. SO, relationships are very important.

Lastly, satisfaction of expectations must be accomplished so at the end of the project the stakeholders and customers and team members are happy with the results. This is accomplished by maintaining active communication with the stakeholders and customers about what the project is becoming. There must be balance used here to maintain the right amount of communication. A team needs to know how and when to communicate these changes and decisions regarding the changes.

The project leader that can manage results, relationships, and at the end of the project can present deliverable results that satisfy everyone’s expectations will no doubt be successful. They may even want to do it again!