Leadership Principles for Project Success
Filled with samples, templates, and guidelines that readers can immediately use in their projects, this practical guide covers the five principles of effective project leadership and how they can be applied in daily project work.
Based on experience in project management and the literature on leadership, project management, business, systems, and complexity theory, the five principles include building vision, nurturing collaboration, promoting performance, cultivating learning, and ensuring results. The book explains these principles in simple, nontechnical language and shows how they can set up, manage, and align projects for success.
Review By: Jan Scott
04/29/2011
"In Leadership Principles for Project Success," Thomas Juli makes a distinction between a project manager and a project leader. He feels that managing a project according to standard project management techniques is not enough. To be successful, the manager must show leadership as defined by the following principles:
- Building Vision–sharing a common vision of the product and having the same goals and understanding about progress
- Nurturing Collaboration–building and maintaining a team
- Promoting Performance–creating and maintaining an environment that stimulates teams and individuals to high performance
- Cultivating Learning–allowing time for the sharing and learning from mistakes
- Ensuring Results–project delivery of the results defined in the vision
I think we all would agree that these principles are critical for building and delivering any kind of project, and all of us aspire to following them. Juli does a good job of explaining these principles and how they are interrelated.
However, he doesn't spend much time discussing how to achieve them. He has an impressive body of experience, but he does not translate that experience into concrete examples that would help the reader learn to implement the principles. The chapters tend to repeat the same generalities. Only in the final chapter does he talk about how to become an effective leader. The templates in the appendices also offer a clue to his thoughts on implementation.
The book is a quick read, though, and offers food for thought on how the principles and workshops he describes might or might not work within the culture of a particular organization. An experienced project manager or leader will find little or nothing new here, but a first-time project manager might find inspiration.
User Comments
Having read "Leadership Principles for Project Success" I was looking forward to the StickyMinds-Review. Well, as much I really liked the book, the book review was really disappointing and missed the mark. It is in sharp contrast to my own view and to the many reviews this book received since its publication in late 2010. The blurbs on the back cover of the book may be misleading you may think. But then they come from experts in the field who can't all possibly be wrong (http://tinyurl.com/5s4lf5s or http://amzn.to/h5Vt9D).
I highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in project success and learning how to become a project leader rather than just mastering the skills of project management. It seems that Jan Scott who wrote the book review has mastered project management already. This is great. But is this typical? If so, most projects these days have to succeed. Reality looks different though.
If you are interested in the 5 principles the author of "Leadership Principles for Project Success" describes, have a look at his synopsis recently published on Ezine: http://amzn.to/h5Vt9D .
T Mind