Leading Complex Projects

CHAPTER 5FROM PERSONALITY TO PRACTICE

In the last chapter we focused on the personality types and the sorts of emotional intelligence that are associated with more and less successful complex project leaders. In and of itself, however, that proves nothing. Personality and emotional intelligence don't do projects. People do projects by the way they behave. The only way the personality and emotional intelligence can have any effect on projects is if they induce, steer, or otherwise influence what leaders actually do day to day.

Superficially, there is very little that differentiates successful and unsuccessful leaders in our sample. Both groups are made up of mostly deeply experienced project professionals. Most had extensive formal training in how to do projects correctly. Almost all of the companies for which they work use very similar, stage-gated work processes. Nonetheless, we found in Chapter 4 that the successful leaders had rather different personalities from the unsuccessful and responded to the emotional intelligence scale survey in quite a different fashion. The connecting link is how personality and emotional intelligence affect leadership behaviors. Those behaviors in turn affect the level of cooperation and commitment that team members, internal stakeholders, and external stakeholders provide to the effort. Finally, what the leaders focus on and the cooperation they receive from others shape their ability to execute the practices that actually drive project outcomes. ...