• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Consultation & Leadership

Question 13: Are you achieving the right balance of consultation and leadership?

Good Practice: There should be widespread consultation with many parties during all project stages. However, control of the project should ultimately be by a small, dedicated core project team focused on achieving a concrete result. This approach will ensure that when making difficult decisions, they get made clearly, forcefully and quickly.

Engage in lots of consultation but do not have too much democracy. Supposing you want to achieve tangible business results in a realistic timeframe. In that case, a small team operating on Stalinist principles is more likely to succeed than large committees acting as talking shops. This management style is especially applicable to regional, cross-regional and global projects.

Common Mistakes

• Making a decision and then starting a debate.
• Not getting an absolute agreement and then having to revisit the issue.
• Failing to stay goal focussed.

The Romans did not build a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.

During the design and build stages, the project manager should answer questions 14 to 17.