Welcome to this lecture on project leadership. This video will introduce you to the topic of leadership and how it applies to project initiation and startup. While you watch this lecture, note the use of colors on the slides. In general, the color red suggests leadership and green, management. I will clarify these terms momentarily but knowing ahead of time will enhance your comprehension. So, what is leadership? Generically, leadership is the art of influencing others to accomplish a shared goal. Note the importance of the term shared. Any attempt to accomplish a goal using the talent of others without everyone involved gaining in some way leads to coercion, not leadership, not influence. Influence simply means, you must connect your goal to the goals of others in some way so everyone wins. Influence suggests that to lead, you must get others to want to accomplish your goal for their own reasons. This is exemplified in the quote by famed motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar. When he often stated, you can have anything you want in life if you will just help enough other people get what they want. Now in order to lead people in a productive way, there are three key people issues to focus on. These are skill, will or motivation, and confidence. As a leader or project manager, you'll be asking people to accomplish specific tasks. Well, they can't do those tasks if they lack the skills to perform the work required. Additionally, they don't want to do the task, compliance is highly unlikely. Finally, even if they have the skill and the will, If they lack the confidence to perform that task they are likely to procrastinate or avoid the task altogether. If any one of these is lacking, it's your job to provide it. If they lack skill, train them. If they lack will, give them reasons to want to do the task or incentives that will inspire them. If they lack confidence, either hold their hand until they build the needed confidence or provide a support system that comforts them as necessary. Keep in mind that leadership is a position of trust from the bottom up. That is people you lead are trusting you with their career, reputation, maybe even their lives. One final note to keep in mind is from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He emphasized a simple ethical rule applied to leadership. Treat people as an end and never as a means to an end. Whatever you ask people to do be certain it's in their best interest. Looking at the right side of this chart, we will find management in green. Management is the skill set of efficiently using resources to accomplish a given goal. Notice that leadership is influencing people to have a shared goal, while management is focused on efficiency in the use of resources to achieve that goal. To use something efficiently basically means, to find ways to do more and more, with less and less. While leadership is about making people productive, management is about making things productive. Those things include machines, materials and money. Good managers can do much more with the same resources than bad managers. As leadership is a position of trust from the bottom up, management is a position of trust from the top down. This means that someone is trusting you with their resources, their money, their machines and their materials. In return, they expect you to provide a return on that investment that exceeds the cost in some way. Fail at this and you won't be managing long. When we combine leadership and management, we get managerial leadership. Managerial leaders are front line leaders who not only establish a vision and goals, but also direct people to accomplish those goals. This is the definition of a project leader. As a project leader, you'll be required to discover what has to be done in real time and direct people to do that work as it arises. The key to managerial leadership is twofold; set a standard and meet that standard no matter what. Once you identify a task that must be done, the next step is to set the standard. You have to know what done looks like and be able to communicate that standard effectively. Keep in mind that whatever you accept becomes the standard. You can always relax a standard but it's very difficult to raise a standard once it becomes an unwritten policy. As a project leader your desire is to create systems, processes, policies and procedures that people can follow that will automatically meet the standard. Your role as manager is to create a system to meet a standard. Your role as leader is to influence people to want to follow that system and meet that standard. Here is your first challenge, get people to make a commitment and your second challenge, get them to keep that commitment. Keep in mind that their failure is your fault not theirs. If they repeatedly do a poor job, it's because you have failed to ensure they have the skill, will, and confidence to perform this task and achieve a shared goal.
