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Line Manager vs. Project Manager leadership skills

el Viernes 22 enero 2010

 As a part-time Project/Line Manager, and knowing the difficulties wearing one hat or another, sometimes I feel that you’ll never test your true leadership and social skills to the limits if you always work with your functional team and don’t have the chance to be a Project Manager.

A common Line Manager responsibility is to evaluate team members efficiency and productivity and promote them through their career path. This context gives the Line Manager some “power” the Project Manager never has over the project team. The project team is created ad-hoc for the project and its members came from different functional lines – obviously, I’m talking about multifunctional projects, not isolated projects -. And they know they will return to their functional “homes” when the project is over, where they’ll be evaluated and promoted by their functional boss.

From a social perspective, the interface Line Manager-Functional team is easier to manage than the Project Manager-Project Team interface. That “little” piece of “power” the Line Manager has, makes the whole Functional team adapt to the leadership style of their Functional boss.  Sometimes you could think you’re a social champion in this type of scenario. If this happens to you, dont build your hopes on.

Yesterday I was leading a brainstorming with some functional managers. We were trying to anticipate our user’s business needs in order to make a proposal for an information system evolution. This was a tiny effort in the inception phase of a new project. The fact was that the Line Managers rebate every single idea that seems to be a threat to the systems they’re accountable for. This is obviously something normal and a this is a must for a Line Manager. What I want you to imagine is the difficulty of manage the meeting and lead the crew to the goal. They’re personnel the Project Manager don’t have any authority over them. You don’t have any “power” over them. They will never adapt your leadership style. The Project Manager must adapt to them and negotiate every single step toward the common goal. This may be very stressful.

Sometimes I miss working with my functional team. But putting my Project Manager hat on, is always more challenging and definitely more fun.