6.1 So, What Is Leadership?

Some years ago I asked Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen, the Grande Dame of leadership research, whose work very much influenced Chapters 3 and 4 of this book, for her definition of the word, and her answer was, “I cannot define the word leadership, but when I meet a leader, I make that out immediately”. Her former mentor, leadership guru Peter F. Drucker^*, considered “thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it, clearly and visibly” to be the foundation of effective leadership^*. He continues that a leader must see leadership not as rank and privilege but as responsibility, and that an effective leader considers creating human energies and human vision the ultimate task. For Drucker, earning trust is the final requirement, because without trust, there are no followers. While these are all valid descriptions of tasks that leaders fulfill, they are not a definition of what leadership actually is.

Other sources define leadership as “the ability to get things done through voluntary contribution by others”. I am not happy with the definition. It tries to define leadership by its effects, when a definition should help us understand its essence. Here is my opinion, based on experience and observations:

It was August 11, 1999, when a total eclipse of the sun was announced for major parts of Central Europe, including Münich, Bavaria, where I had a classroom training that day. The eclipse was to happen about an hour after lunchtime, so I made a decision with my students to stay longer after lunch break and watch the phenomenon together.

At the time of the eclipse, there were thick dark clouds hanging deep, and most people in Münich had no chance to actually watch it. All they saw was the world around them slowly getting dark, an evening just after lunch time, immediately followed by something similar to a morning. My students and I were lucky, however. We happened to find a major hole in the clouds above the restaurant that the training company had booked for our lunchtime, big and stationary enough to see the eclipse from start almost to the end. So, we stayed a bit longer at our lunchtime place. We sat on the terrace of the Michaeligarten park restaurant, which has a nice vista over a little lake and a free sightline into the sky. Just on time, as forecast, the sun circle became dented, and this dent—actually the moon covering parts of the sun—became wider and wider.

On that day, some flocks of greylag geese flew over the park from west to east, and when the moon covered around 90% of the sun’s area, a flock of about 40 birds landed on the water of the lake. As geese generally do, they had followed a leader goose, probably on the way to a meadow where they could graze, and this individual must have gotten confused by the slowly progressing disappearance of the sun. After the leader goose had landed on the lake, the other geese followed.

Swimming on the water, the geese were very noisy. The puzzling of their leader unsettled the other geese, and the impression was that they were frightened and did not know what to do. I had not known before how much noise a flock of 40 scared geese could make. Approximately one raucous minute later, another group of geese flew over the lake. This flock was more than twice as large, and they flew in the same eastern direction as the first groups. Their leader goose did not seem confused at all by the vanishing sun but instead flew ahead on its way, and so did its followers in the graceful ∨-shape order as geese normally do.

The frightened geese down on the lake reacted immediately. They started from the water, which made even more clamor when 40 pairs of wings flapped on the water, left the lake, and each goose found its place behind the wing tip of another goose, a place which gives them the comfort of being securely guided and of reduced air drag. They saw someone who seemed to know the way, and they preferred to follow the leader, which reduced their distress considerably.

I am not sure if anyone else in the Michaeligarten had observed this short episode of less than two minutes. People around me had their protection goggles on and were looking into the sky. I also did that, of course, when this short intermezzo was over.

But the event remained in my mind, and over the years, I reflected on it more and more. Hasn’t 1973 Nobel Prize winner Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz taught us to use geese behavior as a model for certain facets of human behavior? Humans are not geese, of course, but the dynamics between leaders and followers are probably quite common among different species. I concluded that an individual slips into the role not because he or she has been trained in specific leadership skills or has been placed in a powerful position, but because others have the impression that he or she knows the way, and that it is a good idea to follow that leader. The impression is often enforced or even caused by others, who already follow the leader. This signal may be wrong. It may be a factoid, but factoids can be powerful. Leadership in this understanding is more an expression of group behavior of the followers than of the personal skills or traits of the leading person. It also shows the difference between an Alpha animal, which gets into the leading position by winning a series of power play-offs against others, and a leader in a more narrow sense, who is in the position based on consensus of the followers. The consensus may be a result of swarm intelligence or swarm imbecility. Germany under Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1945 is a good example of the second, and so are the other evil dictators of the 20^th century, and all others before and after them. The impression that someone knows the way may be strong, but the followers may overlook how much the way is paved with blood.

Is leadership as a position arranged more by the followers than the leaders? What about the effect on the leading individual? The followers are perceived as a confirmation for this person that he or she is doing something better than others. It is impossible to look into the mind of a goose, but it is imaginable that the leader of the second flock felt so much empowered by the large group behind him or her that the vanishing sun came much less as something unsettling or threatening. The leader-goose’s self-esteem and self-confidence, or the feeling of being in charge of the geese behind, were strong enough to manage the unusual situation. The confirmation that the individual in the leadership role gets will enforce some behaviors more—those which the followers reward—and will weaken others that the followership ignores or even rejects. An additional imprinting effect may be the relationship with other leaders, which may be competitive, collaborative, or even true friendship, and also experiences of gains and losses during childhood. Over the years, this directs leaders to express the achieving styles profiles that were a topic in Chapter 3 and whose application in project management was discussed in Chapter 4.

Here is my definition:

Leadership is the authorization to lead, given voluntarily by followers.

Without such authorization, many self-assigned leaders are either just bureaucrats in powerful formal positions or authoritarian oppressors. The authorization may be implicit by actions or explicit by elections, and the followers may be lifetime devotees who follow the leader tightly and absorb every word the leader speaks, or they may be those who have made a more rational, distant, and temporary decision to follow the leader—something one would expect from members of most project teams. This definition reverses the causality in the dynamics of success and failure of leadership. Leaders become a far more passive part of the relationship than normally assumed: Their actions are not what makes them leaders, but they help followers to decide whether they want them to lead them or not. According to this definition, the true driving force in leadership are the followers. Strong leadership includes being a role model for the followers, but in this definition, the followers assign the role model function to the leader, rather than the leader telling the followers: “Follow my example”.

Are leaders then just passive front runners, driven by the followers and possibly by some extraordinary fate into their role? Of course not. They are required to balance the respect that their followers expect and in their understanding deserve, the positive confirmation of reward for efforts endowed by their followers, but also careful corrective feedback when necessary. One of the greatest problem that leaderless organizations (and projects) face is the lack of an accepted leader who praises employees and team members when they have done an outstanding job and celebrates their achievements in front of others.

For project managers, standing still at this point of passivity would not be sufficient. Project managers are expected to be active drivers and agents of change; they are administrators of investments, and when we have been untrusted with the management of these changes, we have to develop impact on ourselves and on others. There is also rarely sufficient time to let the leadership role grow; we must get our teams up to productivity in the short term. The leadership role has some confirmation for us and may be flattering, but it is also uncomfortable, as it comes with expectations on our behavioral self-control—something we may first have to develop—and on additional energy that we can call upon when required. All geese in the ∨-formation have the comfort of the reduced drag—except the leader^*.

When a requirement is made to become a “well-rounded project manager”, this definitively does not relate to the shape of the body but to the behavioral traits of the person. In Chapter 2, I discussed how project managers learn, and there is an element that was still missing in the analysis: Along the projects that we lead, we also learn a lot about ourselves. The ever-changing situations that we face teach us lessons on our strengths and weaknesses on technical, organizational, and interpersonal levels and on the preparedness of people to follow us on the way that we want them to go with us. The feedback that we get can be very direct: Technical failure, over- or under-organization, misunderstandings, conflicts, and team attrition are often early warning signs that the way we approach a situation and the character of this situation may not match. Sometimes, the feedback takes longer—when Nash Equilibria are growing almost invisibly until they get the power to wreck our project, or when time bombs are placed in concealed locations, remaining inactive for a long time until they suddenly go off. We also receive positive feedback through successes and the wows of impressed stakeholders. When these experiences tell us something about our own shortcomings, we will need to react. We may enhance the underdeveloped behaviors through training, possibly self-training, to better be able master situations that we experience as especially difficult and challenging, or we accept our shortcomings and avoid situations, where possible, that we feel unable to manage.

In all these achieving situations that we face, we will often have to protect the control that we have over our own professional destiny and that of our projects in collaborative environments. In SitPM, we achieve this protection best by upholding our most profound personal assets: Empathy with stakeholders, authenticity, trustworthiness, integrity, situational intelligence, and by knowing the team and the other stakeholders.

6.2 As Project Leaders, What Should We Do?

I mentioned Jean Lipman-Blumen^* in the discussion of Achieving Styles in Chapter 4. She also describes a tension field, in which leaders act between two extremes, which she calls “Diversity” and “Interdependence”. In project management language, we respond to this tension field through “Heroism” and “Collaboration”.

Heroes and heroines fight alone. They are much stronger, faster, wittier, or cleverer than others and resolve problems singlehandedly, and they are prepared to walk alone the ways that lead to the achievement of their goals. The role of their followers may as feeble observers or as recipients of commands and direction. Leadership for heroes and followers is more a kind of closed-skill discipline, in which they develop and perform their programs in as much isolation, independence and possibly even opposition to others and the environment of their leadership domain as possible. If they consider it necessary, they build walls, physical as much as mental, to shelter their internal processes from uncertainty and external change.

On the other end of this continuum is collaboration. Collaborative leaders rely on others, and these others can in turn rely on them. Understanding the needs in interdependent societies for constructive mutuality, they try to achieve their goals by building alliances, thus combining their assets and resources with those of others. While heroes build walls and trenches, connective leaders permeate the walls with gates and build bridges over the trenches.

Lipman-Blumen describes three eras of leadership that are dominated by different behaviors of leaders in this tension field:

• The Physical Era. This era began in prehistoric times. The dominions of leaders were limited by natural borders such as mountains, major rivers, or simply vast distances over land and sea, and the leaders had to give protection to their followers inside these dominions, both from the dangers that nature brought about and those that came from time to time from marauding invaders or internally competing leaders.

• The Geopolitical Era. Leaders defined boundaries—not only in tangible form around their countries but also in the form of religions or ideologies—with which they separated their dominions from those of other leaders. When they developed alliances, their purpose was more to strengthen the borders against their enemies than to actually build strong bridges. NATO and the Warsaw Pact were examples in the 20^th century, and they were both kept together for decades over the real or assumed need on each side to protect the “Iron Curtain” against attacks from the other alliance.

• The Connective Era. In this era, the connections among concepts, people, and the environment are tightening. People seek to roam much more freely not only through geographical spaces, but also through cultures and understandings, and physical borders no longer protect cultures or powers from external influences. Alliances are forged much less to protect borders than to address emerging global problems, such as environmental hazards or diseases that have the potential to turn into world-wide epidemics. Lipman-Blumen describes the role of technology in this development. In the years since she published her theory in 1996, the connective aspect of technology has become even stronger with the success of the Internet, wireless mobile systems, and social networks. One should also not underestimate the influence of the deep-sea container in simplifying world trade. Business relationships have been internationalized with an unprecedented intensity, and when “globalization” became a political catchword around the change of the millennium—as a label of new hope by some, but of threats by others—it has simply become an accepted fact since that time, with all the positive and negative implications that came with it.

While Lipman-Blumen developed her analyses mostly from a political perspective, applied in project management, the model brings insights as well. Navigating between the monsters of too much heroism on the one hand and getting lost in collaborative groups on the other is among the most difficult leadership tasks for project managers. Positive heroism consists for them in being role models for their stakeholders, in developing a sense of urgency without pressure, and in maintaining the focus on the project’s objectives and deliverables.

But there is a flipside to this view of practiced autonomy: The need to rely on others and embed the projects in an environment that includes the performing organization, an “internal” or paying customer, contractors, and many other stakeholders from outside these organizations. The organizations involved present many chances and opportunities not only for support, satisfaction, and success to project managers and their teams, but also for perceptions of abandonment, frustration, and failure.

To make things more difficult, many project managers perceive themselves as odd men or women out inside their organizations. Unless the project is performed for a paying customer, the core processes of the organization are more likely to be focused on and optimized for operations—the business domain that provides the income to many organizations and gives them the justification for their existence. Project managers in customer projects are often much stronger in their own organization—where they provide the income and the business rationale—but they must spend a lot of time with the stakeholders on the customer side, where they in turn tend to be the misfits because they come from project management as well as from an external company.

In all these organizations, project managers must make resources free for their projects, get access to running systems to obtain information or implement changes, and spend money not only as obvious and visible costs, but also as the hidden costs of operational disruptions. While they are facing a lot of resistance, they have to find ways to engage adversarial stakeholders and redirect their energy from their opposition to a more productive and constructive path.

For this kind of challenge, there are no universal tools that a book can offer to project managers. The task is again fundamentally situational, and the technique that was applied successfully to master one situation may fail in another one. The recommendations that a trainer and book author can give to project managers in these situations are mostly “master your own frustrations” and “know your stakeholders and adjust your approaches to them”. The first is necessary, because grudges and anger consume mental resources that we need to master difficult situations. We must step back a bit to see ourselves and the people around us from a sounder distance before we make decisions. The second is crucial to understanding what motivates stakeholders and how we need to adjust our projects in order to reduce resistance and win support. If we succeed in bringing value to these stakeholders swiftly and visibly enough to be convincing to them, we may be able to change their minds and turn adversaries into supporters. Sometimes, bringing benefits to people can cost us nothing; at other times, it can be a burdensome effort regarding cost, time, and work and conflict with other goals of the project.

In all cases, if we want to run our projects with the attitude of leaders, not suppressors, we must consider the benefits that we can bring to stakeholders. Following is another example of how we can implement such an understanding in project management. This is case story that highlights the problem with ignored and rejected stakeholders. There was a similar case in the first chapter, but there, the project managers had no understanding of the attitudes of the stakeholders, as these were on the customer side and became part of the project only at a late stage. Here, the project managers in an internally performed program were aware of the stakeholders—their colleagues—right from the start, but they rejected the idea of developing connectivity with them.

From time to time, I am asked by organizations to help turn around projects. As a trainer, I am expected to know and master a wide variety of tools and practices and to be able to select those that may be most helpful in a given situation. In this secondary role, I am currently involved in a major strategic restructuring program in a group of companies that consists of about 20 individual projects. When I joined the program as an external analyst, the program and the constituting projects were suffering heavily from the resistance of employees involved. The resistance was rarely active but mostly passive, and the weak spots were generally hard to identify, but they were nevertheless strong enough to drive the program into a massive imbalance between resources invested and results achieved so far.

The organization considered the entire program to be in crisis. Each of the projects that constituted the program was late, and not one of them seemed able to deliver what was required to make the program finally successful. The program manager and the project managers firmly believed that no employee of the group would be worse off after the restructuring regarding position inside the organization, working environment, or income, but the fears of the employees in the organization were substantial. The program was very costly, and the resistance also disrupted the operations that needed to be run concurrently using essentially the same resources.

Management attention was again the most crucial resource; it was consumed by the program’s woes to an unexpected degree and was therefore not sufficiently available for normal day-to-day business and its challenges. The program manager told me that she considered the subliminal fears of the corporation’s employees unsubstantiated, but she predicted that further resistance from the employees would not only impact the projects and the overarching program, but also could drive the organization into a financial loss situation in which a number of those very jobs would in fact be lost.

The project managers told me that they did not want to deal with these fears, because they were unfounded and irrational. They stated that if the employees would fully understand the benefits that they would gain from the projects—including protection of their jobs—they would all support the program. When I talked with the employees in mostly private settings such as the company restaurant or the café zones, this was basically confirmed. They told me that no one from the program talked to them, that their fears were ignored—except for a virtual all-hands gathering and a static website in the intranet that did not offer any interactivity and was filled with platitudes such as, “This site is intended to help you understand the upcoming changes to the group”. E-mails to the project managers remained mostly unanswered, or replies were received with preformulated, standard text that did not address the specific concerns of the original e-mails. There was no communications platform or system established that gave employees the feeling that their fears were taken seriously; instead, their impression was rather like, “Leave us alone, we have work to do in order to run our projects”. Many employees had a grain of information about the projects, and when they sat together in small groups and exchanged and combined these knowledge bits, they came to conclusions regarding the projects that did not help build trust in their future but were instead deeply unsettling.

When I came back to my project managers with this information, they told me that they were fully aware of the problem, but what should they do? They were too busy to manage the delays and fix errors and did not have time to address the clandestine hostility inside the organization. Again, the urgent was the enemy of the important, and while project people had to fix too many problems at a time, they lost sight of the way to achieve the final project goals. An essential task would have been to fully on-board the employees, giving them opportunities for feedback and to communicate their concerns to the right people; but implementing such a practice would have consumed unplanned time and technical resources.

Another observation was that my talking with employees already changed things: They felt comforted that someone was there, listening to them, taking their concerns seriously and promising to pass on the message to the program manager and her team. I was not part of the decision process and was not in a position to help them directly, but my active listening brought some initial relief, upon which further actions could be built.

The corporation then arranged a number of gatherings with the employees in circles small enough to allow for questions by attendees, and the website was replaced with a portal solution that allowed open discussions with direct contributions from decision makers from the project where appropriate. Most interesting was their “Frequently Asked Questions” section, which consisted of questions that were actually asked by employees, something rather unusual for FAQs.

The investment in the engagement of the stakeholders seemed quite large, given the problems that the program had to cope with, but it was amply paid back by smoother project execution and by emotions turned from fear and distrust to positive interest and encouragement.

The program is ongoing as I write these lines. It will not be finished on time, as too many delays have added up already, but there are no new major delays adding to the existing ones, and the stress on all teams involved has significantly decreased. Also visible was a positive effect on the group’s operations, which are now much less disrupted by actions based on fear of the program and are able to contribute more to the success of the organization in financial terms and otherwise.

Following the model of the three eras above, the program and its projects in the case story was moved from the geopolitical era to the connective era. When I was introduced to the situation, program and project leadership were understood as happening only inside the performing teams, including a number of subcontractors hired as consultants. The program’s dependence on the employees of the organization as stakeholders was ignored, as they were not meant to be negatively impacted and therefore had no say in the projects. It was instead assumed that once the employees would see the benefits for their jobs, their support would come automatically, and, as the program manager once said, “At the end of the day, they are paid to do their job, so this is what we expect them to do”. This approach may work in other organizations and other programs or projects, but it did not work here.

The project was a clear Brownfield project, and stakeholder concerns and fears must be considered in these projects as much as technical legacies. For most of the consultants, the project was a Mark n project—they had done similar projects in the past and did not see the small and marginal early signs of opposition that would finally lead the program into crisis. The consultants could not help prevent the situation either.

In the first chapter of this book, I discussed the different definitions of the term “stakeholder” over time, as it applies to investors who put tangible assets into a project, to active participants whose assets involved may be intangible, to all people, groups, or organizations whose interests may be influenced and who in turn may influence the project. With every new definition shown there, the group of people who should be considered and treated as stakeholders was expanded beyond the previous group, and it seems to me that we are in such a situation again. When one analyzes troubles that projects have with stakeholders who refuse passive acceptance or even active engagement in the project, a further extension of the definition seems necessary, adding those who perceive themselves as potentially impacted by the project or its outcomes, whether or not this is true. There may not be actual threats, but people’s fears, concerns, and worries may make them stakeholders who should be identified and taken into regard. This group also includes all those who need to trust in our capabilities on technical, organizational, and interpersonal levels or will otherwise turn to fear for things they see at stake.

Leadership is a matter of perception, and so are many expectations that people have when they see our projects. When we actively identify stakeholders, the question should therefore not only be who will be influenced by the project and will be possibly influencing it, but also whose confidence and backing may we need. This question includes considering the anxieties that people may have, taking them seriously and responding to them as much as we would respond to actual impacts. Statements are not rare by project managers, project sponsors, and other individuals who assume a leadership role in a project that the resistance of people may stem from “groundless fears”, from “irrational anxieties”, or from their “ignorance of facts”. While this may be true, motivation and engagement are also irrational, and irrational feelings often come with energy that we should redirect toward a positive course for the project. (Regarding the comment on ignorance: It is the job of the project managers to inform these stakeholders of the facts; if they fail in this task, they should not complain about behaviors caused by things people do not know.)

The dynamics of success and failure in project management pose many challenges to us that extend beyond the technical tasks that we need to perform, and also beyond the organizational and interpersonal tasks that are common in projects. We have to look at the distinctiveness of any given situation, including the people and organizations involved. We have to understand the common conflicts between particular interests and common interests, well described by game theory, and ask how we can avoid them becoming Nash Equilibria—steady and stable states to the detriment of all parties involved.

We have to look at individual people and ask what motivates them in their given life situations, and when we see that these life situations are changing, we have to ask the question again. We have to understand that in certain moments, sets of practices including behaviors, approaches, tools, and techniques may be helpful, but that they may fail in others. We should be able to classify projects and project situations and then choose the most beneficial practices for given situations, staying aware that for other situations, even in the same project, other practices may be better.

We should remain open to the fact that each project is a new learning process, and that the fundamental uniqueness of projects comes with assumptions and other kinds of uncertainties that we should actively manage. I think that one of the most basic questions for every project manager during a project should be that of the most appropriate horizon for predictions and planning. Too much agility may make us unable to cope with necessary lead times for early booking of resources and similar tasks; too much prediction may make us unable to cope with change. As leaders in our projects, we also have to give people confidence that we know the way that this project is going to take and that it makes sense for others to follow us on this way.

One may complain that these requirements make project management too difficult to handle. But they come with a positive corollary: Project management in all its complexity and unpredictability cannot be done by computers or robots. New and smarter approaches to production and administration are currently communicated under the buzz word “Industry 4.0”, and there are voices that this will be the first industrialization wave that destroys more old jobs than it creates new ones. An example: During my time practicing production engineering before 1995, it was generally clear that automatic production robots were placed behind high safety fences and that humans were not allowed to enter the fenced-off areas while production was running. Today, a growing number of robots have been released from their cages. They work hand in hand with humans, and when I see these working setups, I still feel a shiver going down my spine: What will happen if the robot hurts a worker some distance from the next security cut-off switch? It is reported that the engineers of Industry 4.0 can cope with this risk, but an uneasy feeling remains.

It is unlikely that this development will negatively impact the need for project managers. Well-educated, reliable, and capable project managers will instead be needed in even higher numbers to perform just these changes to higher smartness in organizational processes, and our situational skills will be in strong demand in order to combine understanding both of the process itself and of the people involved. Computers and robots can manage many things, but they are (still?) unable to cope with unpredictable situations, and they are still not able to assume leadership positions.

* (Reed, 2014).

* J. Lipman-Blumen quotes Peter F. Drucker, saying that the word “guru” is often used by newspapers, because the word “charlatan” would be too long for their headlines.

* (Drucker, 2001, p. 270).

* It has been reported that on long-distance flights, geese change the lead goose when the flight work gets too exhausting for the leader.

* (Lipman-Blumen, 1996, pp. 4–11).