Concurrent Project Leadership

Executive leadership includes responsibility for ensuring that enterprises have the capability of developing offerings that customers value sufficiently to buy. This includes creating a product development system that attracts customers by offering new product features at reasonable costs. Product development systems provide a contextual framework for executing a variety of outputs for integration into a portfolio of customer offerings. To execute the development of products, leaders need to guide the execution of diverse projects to populate the portfolio bit by bit.This chapter provides an inventory of best leadership practices validated by correlations with three indicators of project performance: requirements, schedule, and budget. Project leaders may review this checklist of proven practices to select behaviors for guiding their project teams. Ten overt leadership behaviors have particularly strong relationships with performance. This list has added credibility — research by Google recommends similar leadership practices.Distributed leadership has increased as product development has become more complex and dynamic. Leaders need to rely on team members to selfinitiate project activities, especially if specialized knowledge is required.Effective leaders must often rely upon team members to collaboratively steer projects toward successful execution. A consultative rather than a directive leadership style is required because much of the work in covert rather than overt. An example of team norms for distributed leadership teaming practices is provided with examples from corporate practices in Table 19.2. A key indicator epitomizing the concept of distributed leadership is the extent to which team members share collective responsibility for project outcomes regardless of function.Some of the effects of leaders on project performance is direct, but the bulk of their contribution is indirect by influencing team behaviors. Leadership behaviors also have synergetic effects on project performance. For example, strategic guidance by leaders provides vertical influence augmenting the impact of empowered project teams on performance. Coaching by leaders provides a horizontal control that synergistically boosts the impact of project teams on performance. These dual results reinforce the widely replicated finding that leaders and their teams need to combine guiding controls with exploratory freedom. Melding the advantages of mechanistic and organic forms of behavior, the axis of the composite model, also applies at the project as well as the system level of product development.A perennial issue is the extent to which leadership prowess is due to nature or nurture. Strategy, Process, Organization, Tools/Technologies (SPOT) practices for project leadership are relatively overt and seem suitable for use in training courses. A quasi-experiment tests the extent to which leadership training in the deployment of SPOT practices improved behaviors at Rolls-Royce Aerospace in Indianapolis in comparison with sister sites in Europe. Leadership behaviors at the experimental site rose above those of the control sites at statistically significant levels.Appendix Table 19 provides a 10-item practice checklist that readers may use to benchmark their overt leadership practices vs. best-in-class (BIC) standards and assess potential improvement actions. The 10 practices largely overlap with those recommended by Google. The 10 leadership practices are correlated with team behaviors consistent with distributed responsibilities for project execution. Discretionary leadership as well as covert teaming practices are more strongly correlated with project performance in enterprises with product development systems permitting “adaptive participation,” an organic duo of practices.