Positive Leadership in Project Management
SERIES ARTICLE
By Frank Saladis, PMP, PMI Fellow
New York, NY, USA
Leadership is a topic with an unending supply of opinions, tips, secrets to success, guaranteed techniques for developing high performing teams and sure fire methods for leading and managing any type of organization. An interesting statistic I found about a year ago indicated that there are more than 400 books about leadership published every year. It is also interesting that each year, there is a new list of emerging leadership trends. It seems that leadership, as a skill or competence, continues to be redefined, fine-tuned, dismantled and reinvented, and adjusted on a continuous basis. It seems that after hundreds of years of refinement and enhancement, there is no universal definition of leadership.
If you ask a group of people, in any organization, to define leadership, the responses are generally the same:
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- Vision
- Knowledge Champion
- Holistic Perspective
- Use of systematic processes and frameworks (The power of visualization)
- Effective communicator
- Effective interaction
- Openness
- Creative /Innovator
- Strong Beliefs
- Optimism
- Courage
- Teamwork
- Prepared
- Confident
- Passion
- Has Values
- Creativity
- Humility
- Planning / organizing
- Business Savvy
These are characteristics typically associated with a leader, but these responses do not answer the question “What is leadership?”
Years ago, when I attended the PMI ® Leadership Institute Masters Class, the professor, Jerry Brightman asked the class, as a homework assignment, to define “leadership”.
One of the classmates decided to ask her 5 year old son what he thought leadership is. His response was “Leadership is like follow the leader, you follow someone until they do some really stupid, and then you follow someone else.” An interesting observation and, pretty much an astute response. That quote does give us cause to step back and reevaluate what we believe leadership is.
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Editor’s note: This article is one in a series on Positive Leadership in Project Management by Frank Saladis, PMP, PMI Fellow, popular speaker and author of books on leadership in project management published by Wiley and IIL in the United States. Frank is widely known as the originator of the International Project Management Day, the annual celebrations and educational events conducted each November by PMI members, chapters and organizations around the world.
How to cite this paper: Saladis, F. (2021). Leadership in 2022: Positive Leadership in Project Management, series article. PM World Journal, Vol. X, Issue XII, December. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/pmwj112-Dec2021-Saladis-leadership-in-2022-positive-leadership-series-article.pdf
About the Author
Frank P. Saladis
New York, USA
Frank P. Saladis, PMP, PMI Fellow is a Consultant and Instructor / Facilitator within the project management profession and has over 35 years of experience in the IT, Telecom Installation and IT Project Management training environment. He is a senior consultant and trainer for the International Institute For Learning Inc. and has been involved in the development of several project management learning programs. Mr. Saladis has held the position of Project Manager for AT&T Business Communications Systems, National Project Manager for AT&T Solutions Information Technology Services and was a member of Cisco Systems Professional Services Project Management Advocacy Organization. His responsibilities included the development of Project Management Offices (PMO) and the development of internal training programs addressing project management skills and techniques.
He is a Project Management Professional and has been a featured presenter at the Project Management Institute ® Annual Symposiums, Project World, PMI World Congress, CMMA, and many PMI Chapter professional development programs. He is a past president of the PMI New York City Chapter and a Past-President of the PMI ® Assembly of Chapter Presidents. Mr. Saladis is a Co-Publisher of the internationally distributed newsletter for allPM.com, a project management information portal, and a contributor to the allPM.com project management website.
Mr. Saladis is the originator of International Project Management Day and has written numerous leadership and project management related articles. Mr. Saladis is also the author of the Project Management Workbook and PMP ® / CAPM ® Exam Study Guide that supplements Dr. Harold Kerzner’s textbook – Project Management, A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling?, 9th Edition published by John Wiley & Sons and the author of Positive Leadership in Project Management, published by IIL Publishing. He is a member of the International Executive Guild and the NRCC Business Advisory Council. He has also held the position of Vice President of Education for the Global Communications Technology Specific Interest Group of PMI ® and holds a Master’s Certificate in Commercial Project Management from the George Washington University. Mr. Saladis received the prestigious Lynn Stuckenbrook Person of the Year Award from the Project management Institute in 2006 for his contributions to the organization and to the practice of project management. He can be contacted at saladispmp@msn.com
To view other works by Frank Saladis, visit his author showcase in the PM World Library at https://pmworldlibrary.net/authors/frank-p-saladis/
