Why project managers get focused on the wrong things, and what to do about it
This was conceived of, and written by a person
I drafted this blog post in its entirety. AI helped with minor edits like correcting some grammatical mistakes and smoothing a few rough edges, but that’s it.
A negotiator, not a drill sergeant
Companies often hire project managers who specialize in cracking the whip. They want drill sergeants who can use their certifications and project tools to compel teams to execute.
I submit there is a better way to view project managers, and to go about project management in general. You don’t need a louder drill sergeant. You need a compassionate, persuasive negotiator.
There’s comfort in the framework
When organizations are filling the project management role, they often prioritize the search for expertise in processes, frameworks and tools. And on one level, this makes sense. These things are quantifiable. Project management frameworks provide a way to measure inputs and outputs against budgets and timelines. They can seem like proven magic bullets for organizational excess and inefficiency. Unfortunately, however, in most organizations, project managers eventually begin to treat the tools and the process as both the means and the end unto themselves.
Slowed down by overly complicated product releases? Lean-ify your process. Chronically late shipping features? Agile the insubordination out of your story points. Struggling with prioritization and getting the right things done? GTD those SOBs. Stakeholders unhappy about how things are going? Enforce the process with vigor. Scrum with intensity of a thousand suns. Jira harder than you’ve Jira’d before.
This will appear to be working at first. It will look and feel like imposing order on a chaotic, disorganized system. The problem is, however, that rigid project management processes often end up as just another instance of the problems they were originally implemented to solve: organizational excess and inefficiency.
The project management myth
All of this is an expression of a particular, widely believed myth about project management:
The right processes, tools and structure is all we need to get everyone inline so that our projects will start succeeding.
To be clear, processes and tools do matter. They just are not the center of the bullseye for what it takes to deliver projects successfully. Instead, at the dead center of consistently effective project management is a person, and not a program, or a process, or a protocol.
Let’s explore where things tend to get off the rails.
Losing the forest for the trees
Project managers often succumb to a form of the forest and trees problem. They get focused, almost exclusively on the trees (task lists, story points, ticket tracking), at the expense of the forest (meaningful outcomes, high-level goals, the reasoning behind those goals). They become specialists in the trees. They adore a good project management app. They are passionate about enforcing the right processes. And who among us doesn’t enjoy a complex Gannt chart? These things are necessary, they just aren’t the most important.
Really, the project manager needs to be able to keep both the forest and the trees in view. In most situations, goals and outcomes are actually far more important than the tasks and the system by which they are tracked. When our home was being built I wasn’t paying to make sure the builder had a good system for managing all of the things that needed to get done. I didn’t really care if they had robust burn down charts or an air-tight method for tracking percentage complete. All I really cared about was that the house got built and that the final result met my expectations. I assume that the builder does in fact have the systems they need to track all of the tasks. But I also assume they know that I, as the stakeholder paying for the project, don’t need to know anything about those systems.
Hard and soft skills
A masterful sculptor has a set of tools at their disposal. They have a process they follow. They have command of their chisel and hammer. But the artist isn’t going to sculpt something beautiful and lasting without also possessing some critical soft skills. They need the ability to deeply understand the intentions of the person who commissioned the work, a clear vision for the end state of the sculpture, a steady, patient hand, the ability to adapt when a piece unexpectedly breaks off, and a willingness to see it through to the end.
And it’s the same for the project manager. Their soft skills like patience, communication, empathy and flexibility are at least as important as their hard skills like process execution, task tracking and budget management.
Stability, clarity and focus
The best project managers are a stabilizing presence for the team. By keeping all of the details organized and in view, they offer a solid, foundational environment for the team to get work done. They bring clarity to things that are otherwise complex, obscure and nuanced and communicate about these things to help everyone understand them. They bring focus by answering, in clear terms, what should get done and what should not.
A team doesn’t need somebody who can perfectly enforce the rules and ceremonies of a framework like Scrum. A team doesn’t need somebody vigilantly harassing them about creating perfect Jira stories. Instead, they need to know there is a person on the team who is a stable pillar, who cares about all of the important details and keeps these details organized. A team needs someone who is unrelenting in their effort to understand how and why this work matters, how it maps to larger goals. A team needs someone who can do both the simple work of reminding everyone when this thing needs to be done. They need someone who can do the tricky work of communicating with people outside of the team about how things are coming along in clear, digestible terms.
Secret superpowers: empathy and communication
A project manager can only really understand what the project’s stakeholders want, if they have asked thoughtful questions and listened well. This empathy gives them the ability to be curious about the goal and the dynamics that drive the goal, while also helping them better understand, and therefore motivate the team doing the work. Their ability to communicate well allows them to navigate strong feelings and personal dynamics, while they negotiate, set and then re-set expectations about what the team can accomplish, when and why.
Project management is perhaps as much about persuasion as it is anything else. Will the project manager be able to compellingly articulate the business importance of this work to a team that likely doesn’t report to them? By understanding team dynamics and individual goals, they can motivate the team to deliver their best. Their communication skills allow them to frame important details, both small and large, in terms that will resonate and inspire action. A mature sense of empathy, and clear communication are the most effective, compelling tools for this kind of work.
Expectations will be misaligned. Deadlines will be missed. Products will be shipped with broken features or before they’re really ready. These things are inevitable. The best project managers I have worked with solve these types of problems by employing empathy and communication in order to consistently deliver successful project outcomes despite the multitude of things that invariably don’t go according to plan.
The qualifications I focus on when I’m hiring
When I am hiring for a project manager, or a leader of project managers, I don’t care about certifications, or expertise in frameworks like CPM, ECM or Scrum. I’m not particularly interested in someone possessing a deep knowledge of Jira, Notion or Asana.
Instead, I care about things like:
- Are you naturally interested in the details?
- Do you also care about understanding the big picture?
- Are you a good listener?
- Are you interested in understanding what motivates people?
- Are you a student of communication?
- Can you explain complex topics in simple terms?
- Do you have a system for staying organized?
- Are you calm when things are chaotic?
What I’m looking for has more to do with the way a person is, and less with how good they are with their tools.
The importance of soft skills over hard skills is largely true in many roles, but for some reason project managers seem especially prone to focusing on the hard skills at the expense of the soft.
Prioritize soft skills to take project management to the next level
For the most effective project managers I have worked with, their soft skills like empathy, communication, resilience and patience are just as mature as their hard skills, if not more so. These things allow them to develop a clear, actionable understanding of both the forest and the trees.
By embracing a more holistic view of project management, organization’s will realize new levels of sanity, clarity, and efficiency in their work. In order to take collaboration and execution for important projects to a new level, adopt the perspective that the project manager’s soft skills are equal to, or even more important than, their more tangible, quantifiable hard skills.
Real Kinetic helps technical organizations deliver complex, critical software projects in the cloud, develop a more holistic approach, and focus on the right things.
