Chapter 5: What the United States Defense Systems Management College has Learned from Ten Years of Project Leadership Research

Owen C. Gadeken, D.Sci., PMP US Defense Systems Management College

Introduction

The traditional view of project management emphasizes both the technical and management expertise required of project managers. The words by themselves, project and management, imply a technically complex effort for which organization, planning, and control are required. However, an emerging view of the project management profession is that while technical and management expertise are important, the primary role of project managers is to provide the leadership focus on their projects. This is becoming even clearer as current project managers are forced to cope simultaneously with both internal project and external market shifts such as global competition, rapid technological obsolescence, unpredictable organizational transformations, and unstable international political and economic conditions.

Many project managers fail to recognize the shifting role demands over their careers. Most project managers begin their careers with a strong technical or functional focus. By demonstrating their technical abilities, project managers arefrequently promoted to supervise or manage other technical professionals. But when project managers are asked to take on large, complex, or one-of-a-kind projects, technical and management skills alone are not sufficient to ensure success. Leadership skills become the predominant focus. This gradual career evolution toward leadership is depicted in Figure 1. The shifts between the dashed lines from a technical to a managerial and then to a leadership focus are actually quite dramatic and call for significant new skills development. The underlying question to be addressed in this chapter is what are the specific leadership skills required to be successful as a project manager.

Figure 1: Project Management Career: Balance of Expertise

While much has been written about leadership in the literature, there is some question about its applicability to project managers. The following excerpt from the classic War and Peace (Tolstoy 1993) illustrates the idealized view of military leadership. There would appear to be little here which would apply to project managers.

Napoleon was standing a little in front of his marshalls, on a little gray horse, wearing the same blue overcoat he had worn throughout the Italian campaign. He was looking intently and silently at the hills, which stood up out of the sea of mist, and the Russian troops moving across them in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the valley. His face-still thin in those days-did not stir a single muscle; his gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot …. When the sun had completely emerged from the fog and was glittering with dazzling brilliance over the fields and the mist (as though he had been waiting for that to begin the battle), he took his glove off his handsome white hand, made a signal with it to his marshalls, and gave the orders for the battle to begin.

Perhaps a more relevant analogy to the project manager's job is found in Dallas, Texas Mayor Erik Jonsson's account of what it is like to be the mayor of a large city (Kotter and Lawrence 1974).

Being a mayor is like walking on a moving belt while juggling. Right off you've got to walk pretty fast to stay even. After you've been in office a short time, people start throwing wads of paper at you. So now you've got to walk, juggle, and duck too. Then, the belt starts to move faster, and people start to throw wooden blocks at you. About the time you're running like mad, juggling and ducking stones, someone sets one end of the belt on fire. Now, if you can keep the things you are juggling in the air, stay on the belt, put out the fire, and not get seriously injured, you've found the secret to the job.

Although this account matches the crisis management atmosphere of many project management experiences, the question remains as to where leadership can or should be included in the above example.

The nature of the leadership challenge facing defense project managers has been extensively researched by the United States (US) Defense Systems Management College (DSMC) along with other US Defense Acquisition University schools. This chapter summarizes the results of five separate research studies conducted from 1989 to 1999. The first two studies were conducted by DSMC (Cullen and Gadeken 1990; Gadeken 1991). Then, three follow-on validation studies (Best and Kobylarz 1991; McVeigh 1994; Armstrong 1999) were performed by graduate students at the US Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) and the US Naval Post Graduate School (NPGS). All of the studies were based on the premise that the best way to find out what it takes to be a good project manager is to analyze a current group of outstanding project managers and identify what they do that makes them so effective. The research studies involved both surveys and in-depth personal interviews of a broad cross-section of project managers as illustrated in Table 1.

Table 1: Defense Project Manager Research Studies

Year Completed	Conducted by	Target Population	Project Size	Project Interviewed	Managers Surveyed
1990	DSMC	USA (All Services)	Large/Small	52	128
1991	DSMC	UK (All Services)	Large	15	111
1991	AFIT	USA (All Services)	Large	--	53
1994	NPGS	USA (US Army)	Large	7	25
1999	NPGS	USA (US Army)	Large/Small	--	39
				_____	_____
			Total	74	356

This chapter will use the research findings to focus on four key areas which must be considered in developing successful project managers: defining project manager leadership competencies, assessing the leadership competencies, methods of developing these competencies, and selecting project managers who possess the necessary leadership competencies.