Leadership in project management is a very popular topic for discussions, seminars and even training courses. Many books that aim to help people become great leaders were written. Sometimes, it even seems that very little new aspects of leadership can be found. Yet the development of collective intelligence and collaborative Web 2.0 solutions gives this topic a whole new angle.
The power of the collective brain, or collective intelligence, has been a buzzword for several years. Everywhere around us, analysts, bloggers, business consultants and professors in business schools keep talking about the value of empowering your team and unleashing collective intelligence.
Moreover, a growing number of people are discovering through their own experience that wholes are indeed far more than the sum of their parts. If individuals are coming together with a shared intention in a conducive environment, then the result of their collective work will far transcend the work of the individuals involved.
I support Andrew McAfee’s view that leveraging this collective brain can help an organization to deal with many financial challenges. McAfee, the creator of the Enterprise 2.0 term and philosophy, suggests that the answers to a company’s challenges reside in the minds of the employees dispersed across the organization. Each particular individual may not have the best answer, but technology can be used to pull together the bits and pieces of employees’ knowledge to find the right solutions.
In one of its reports, Forrester indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises to enhance performance in different spheres. In this respect, project management is perhaps the most popular field for adopting a new technology. Indeed, various Project Management 2.0 technologies do a great job in giving team members more opportunities to communicate, share files, update each other on the latest project news, and work together in real time, despite time zone differences and vast distances. With Project Management 2.0, collaboration is freeform. The structures, decision right allocations, interdependencies, etc. are not imposed, but instead, they emerge from the bottom up. This is done with the help of simple tools like linking, tagging, building views and hierarchies.
However, there are many concerns on the project managers’ side that this freeform team collaboration can turn into chaos. Does the growth of the collective power of a team decrease the power of a project manager?
To answer this question, we need to take a look at the team itself. With the next-generation technologies, people have more freedom of collaboration and can access to more information. Yet having more information, more new ideas and more choices can puzzle people. This is where people start looking for somebody to guide their actions and decisions. They are looking for project leaders. So we can conclude that collective intelligence and adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools and practices do not eliminate the need for project leaders. On the contrary, with the growing collective power, teams need leaders more than ever.
However, it looks like project leaders of the new collaborative age cannot follow the old-fashioned command-and-control pattern anymore. Many experts agree that project leadership is undergoing a radical redefinition. For example, Edward Marshall, president of The Marshall Group, Inc., writes: “We are at a turning point in organizational and leadership history. The 20th century command-and-control approach, which worked quite well in the manufacturing age, no longer works in the 21st century information age, which is global, high-tech and incredibly competitive. It’s time to catch up to current realities.” I couldn’t agree more. Project Management 2.0 transforms traditional perceptions of leadership. Well, what does the new Project 2.0 leader look like?
Seth Godin addresses this question in his latest book, “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.” “Tribes”, according to Seth, are groups of people with a shared interest and a way to communicate. Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the formation of such tribes. Facebook groups are a perfect example. However, to be really effective, tribes need leaders. Leadership, as Seth puts it, “is about creating change you believe in.” What I like about this rather laconic definition is that it highlights two important things. Leaders should:
1. “create change”, i.e. improve the existing state of things.
2. “believe in” this change, i.e. they should join accountability with passion.
And what’s the leader’s main role? According to Seth, it’s to “increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members” by:
• transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change,
• providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications, and
• leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.
Seth speaks about tribes that are formed on the Web, not in the corporate environment. Yet to me it looks like this leadership concept can be applied to Project Management 2.0. Indeed, the Project 2.0 leader’s role is to motivate his or her team and make the team members more productive, in order to complete the project on time and on budget.
He or she can do it by:
• setting a goal that the team will be aspiring to and make this goal clear to every team member,
• providing the tools that will make the team’s collaboration most efficient, and
• leveraging the team’s collective brain and capabilities.
Let me underline that this type of leadership is more about empowering a team by helping it to collaborate than about telling people what they should do. Also, the emphasis is more about the effectiveness of the people on the team level in achieving the goal. While the leader is the one who has accountability and personal commitment, it’s really the team that is the focus.
In many ways, this echoes the concepts of “Level 5 Leadership” as described in the book, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. In addition, the point about setting a goal is very much aligned with Collins’ BHAG concept. In my next post, I’ll explore this concept in more detail and will try to present it from a Project Management 2.0 point of view.
Author: Andrew Filev
Since 2001, Andrew Filev has been managing software teams in a global environment. His technical expertise and his management vision are reflected in online and offline articles that have had hundreds of thousands of readers. His ideas on new trends in project management are published in the Project Management 2.0 blog. Andrew has given speeches on new trends in project management and deployment of the next-generation, Web-based applications on deferent events, including the PMI Silicon Valley Tools and Techniques Forum and the Office 2.0 Conference (Project Management panel).
Andrew’s innovative ideas and passion to improve project management tools are applied in Wrike, a leading online project management solution. Andrew now leads the company as a founder and CEO.
