By The Readers # 102 - Psychology of Project Management: Leading Without Authority
S01E02 - Leading without authority sounds like a great feel good statement. But, any leadership requires power; power is Granted and Earned. How does one gain Earned Power without heavy titles?
Howdy Tribe -
Today's newsletter is going out to 187 dedicated readers.
Continuing with the series on answering questions from the readers.
(Dec 1) Lessons On Stakeholder Management For Large Cross-Functional Projects
(Dec 8) Psychology of Project Management: Leading Without Authority
(Dec 15) The Sprint Plan - 2, 6, or 8
(Dec 22) Power of Tribes - How To Build An Internal Network
(Dec 29) Challenges of Building In BigTech
Welcome to Building Romes Newsletter - By The Readers Issue, Season no. 1 Essay 2 🎉
Essay
What are we solving today?
There is a half truth and right approach to leading without authority or leading with influence. Both influence and authority are branches of power. How do you gain power and thereby increase both, influence and authority?
Lesson Learned and A Solution
There is a line Project and Product Managers alike say when we reach the theoretical limitations of our authority to make decisions:
I am Leading Without Authority. My power is my influence. It has limits.
Early in my career, this line sounded cool. What it meant was I am just like any leader minus the direct reports and never ending paperwork. Cool, right?
As time went on, my experience taught me a certain truth about this line. It’s a half-truth because to lead without authority, you need influence.
The standard approach to influence is . . .
. . . keep my head down and focus on my work.
. . . avoid politics at work.
. . . my work will eventually be recognized.
. . . with patience, I will climb the corporate ladder and my influence + authority will grow.
For someone starting off in their career, this academic approach would work, for a time. Suddenly, you see people around you growing in their careers, taking on harder projects and challenges, while your growth has stagnated. This frustrated me intensely.
In 2015, while doing my Advanced Project Management Certification at Stanford University, I took a seminar where I was introduced to the work of Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, an expert in organizational behavior at Stanford University, and his counter intuitive approach to Power. The seminar was a summary of his fantastic book - Power: Why Some People Have it - and Other Don’t. This book is on the list of education material that greatly influenced the future approach to my career and I recommend this to every project and product manager I meet.
I want to share the key advice from Professor Pfeffer that helped me, and I hope helps you.
All power falls into 2 categories:
Earned Power
Granted Power
Granted Power is simple. It is the power you derive from your corporate title and place on the ladder. The higher you go, the more strategic and broader your decision making can be thus more power. Ultimate power is the CEO.
Earned Power is more complicated and often what drives how much Granted Power you attain. This is the key behind leading without authority or with influence.
How does one attain Earned Power?
Based on Professor Pfeffers research, there are 2 dimensions and 7 important personal qualities that separate people who achieve great heights and accomplish amazing things versus those who don’t.
Two Dimensions:
A strong will to take on enormous, difficult, complex challenges.
The skill necessary to turn ambition into accomplishment.
Several Personal Qualities:
Ambition - You have to want power and desire to achieve great success. It often will require great sacrifice on your part (ex: working long hours) but to make that calculus work, you must be ambitious.
Energy - Drive without juice is pointless. The nature of energy means it can be expanded like exercise. As you get more experience you learn to use energy more efficiently. Energy impacts your influence and power in three ways.
Energy is contagious. We want to be around those that energize us.
Energy is endurance. Working those longer hours, and days during project crunch time to get things done sets you apart from others.
Energy singles commitment. As much as we want to not admit this but success comes to those who are willing to meet the challenge head on. Hard work and smart approaches get the job and promotion done.
Focus - Power requires focus. Focus comes from many dimensions:
Specialization in a particular industry or company. Become a subject matter expert.
Focusing on a small key set of skills and abilities. Constantly training and learning.
Spending energy on only the critical high output activities within your job and position. Learning to say no.
Self-Knowledge - In my opinion, this is by far the most important skill and the one I recommend any leader to immediately start working on - retrospection and a learning mindset. Growth cannot come without analyzing your successes and mistakes and drawing upon lessons/opportunities to change.
Confidence - We all suffer from imposter syndrome. Learn to be confident because it is the hallmark of power. However, there is difference between confident because you have the skills and knowledge to back it up versus lying your way to it. The latter will come to haunt you sooner or later.
Empathy with Others - This is the ultimate superpower all Project Managers need because when it comes time to negotiate the use of scarce resources between two competing priorities from two different teams, being able to empathize and understand where the other is coming from, will help you make better decisions.
Capacity to Tolerate Conflict - I hate conflict. My perception was that if I forayed into corporate politics, I will have to deal with conflict. If you want to attain leadership roles, you cannot run from conflict. So, you have to get good at tolerating it. This doesn’t mean you learn dirty tricks or get good at shouting in conference rooms. To tolerate means handling difficult conflicts and stress-filled situation with Jedi like patience and steadfastness. If you can do this and do this well, you are already ahead of your peers.
Final Thoughts
You must understand the Game of Thrones that takes place within your organization. Even the act of staying neutral is in itself a political act. You must learn to play the game if you are to be successful in your career. I learned this lesson much later in my career.
The qualities I have shared above give you a map on personal development but it is not the full answer. You can have all of these qualities but what is also required is your ability to deliver high-level output. Leverage these personal development to accomplish bigger, and harder projects.
At Apple, your influence as an Engineering Project Manager came from your ability to ship harder, complex, and bigger features. The Engineering Project Manager DRI’s - Program Leaders responsible for a given feature - at Apple were those people who could be trusted to deliver large and complex features on time, and with high quality. Same was true at Google. Success requires ambition, focus, energy, confidence, self-knowledge, the ability to tolerate difficult situations and empathize with your cross-functional partners during those difficult situations to deliver project successful with high quality and on time.
I recommend that you do 4 things right after finishing this essay:
Share this essay 😊.
Get Professor Pfeffers book - Power.
Take a hard look at the people in your organization that you believe have immense Earned Power that allows them to be influential. See how they map to the 7 personality traits called out by Professor Pfeffer.
Then, evaluate yourself and build an action plan to fix areas you are missing, so you too can attain Power, Influence, and Authority.
That is it for now. Good luck. Until next time! 🙏🏽
-Aadil
Was this edition useful? Relevant? Pointless? Help me to improve!
Follow-up Question from a Reader: This was a great one Aadil! I wonder what are the key factors the drives the decisions for project managers to allocate scarce resources.
In economics, price drives the allocation of scarce resources. In the project world, would it be timelines, potential revenue of product etc?
Answer: There are few key drivers
- The key drivers for decisions at organizations are strategic objectives or OKRs for those that use them - more customer acquisition, more sales, more membership retention.
- Revenue impact or increase is another key one important driver of scarce resource assignment BUT be warned that these numbers can be dubious at times. So, as a Project Manager, you job will be to understand how this revenue impact was derived and whether the math makes sense.
- Platform capabilities is another one. Should we build more platform capabilities or infrastructure or pay down technical debt or clean up our tech stack OR keep building more features to capture more revenue? This is delayed gratification calculus, short-term vs long-term thinking which I have written about in the past.