Professional-PM Project Management - News, Articles and Recommendations on Project Management

Definition of leadership

root — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:38:11 +0200

Definition of leadership has many aspects yet it agrees that a leader is one whose magnetic personality galvanizes people for some cause. Great leaders influence their followers not by words but by their actions. They do what they preach. They act as a catalyst and their presence is enough to motivate people.

It is often argued that leaders are born they are not made. Sufficient examples can be cited for both the arguments. However, history has been a testimony to the fact that several leaders have shown extraordinary leadership capability in later parts of their life. No one can become a leader unless and until he is able to influence others. A leader is one who is able to create a lasting influence in the minds of the people making them believe that whatever the leader is doing, it is for his own benefit.

One definition of leadership categorizes a leader as ‘X’ leader if he has an extraordinary personal leadership capabilities. The ‘X’ leaders have inner instinct to lead. They demonstrate their leadership ability by developing requisite skills and knowledge. They lead from the front and show utmost care for his followers. These leaders also do not hesitate in admitting his mistakes and learning from it. They constantly keep on innovating themselves. They are open to new challenges and are ready to adopt unconventional approach to achieve their objectives. These leaders also have the ability to take big risks.

While defining leadership it is imperative to understand that a leader is one who is effectively able to communicate with his followers. One definition of leadership defines leaders as natural leaders. These natural leaders are called charismatic leaders. The charismatic leaders have the potential to bring radical changes in the society.

Leaders need to monitor the environment continuously. They cannot just act locally but instead they need to have a broader outlook. They should be very flexible and adaptable. A better leader is one who is able to foresee the future and take steps to deal with it. Leaders can be nurtured also. It is for the leader to groom the future leaders for their organization. Proper training, guidance and responsibility help an individual to emerge as a leader.

It is often argued that there is not any single definition of leadership. Every leader in the past exhibited some unique trait, which made them the hero of their followers. Consistency of purpose is necessary. A fickle minded leader confuses his followers and takes them nowhere. A leader should lead a life of discipline. He should act as a catalyst and should not jump to take credit for any success. Once it becomes evident that the leader is behind name, fame and money, he loses the credibility and trust of his followers. A leader should show utmost restraint and patience. During adversity, he should create a positive environment around himself, which will motivate his followers. A leader should not only be visionary but he should be practical also. He should be able to establish a chord with his followers.

Business Leadership Coaching

root — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:35:01 +0200

While working in MNC or starting any small business, the leadership quality plays a vital role for making such business successful. There are several companies, which conduct business leadership coaching for improving the managerial techniques of their employees.

In various professional courses like MBAs, business schools, the syllabus is incorporated with techniques of business leadership coaching. The key role behind such coaching is to familiar the future trainee CEOs with responsibilities, difficulties in the business world which they will face in future. So this business leadership coaching is one kind of disaster management program in corporate world. By using such coaching, the trainee students actually deal with how to take decisions in critical situations, how to make co-ordination among teammates, how to convince them in some of managerial disputes, how to make mutual understanding with employees and how to encourage and admire their skills and competence.

Apart from such internship and training program of business school, various renowned corporate houses, organizations organize business leadership coaching for their managerial level employees. These types of business leadership coaching program hold several advantages for the growth of employees and their organization.
By giving proper attention to such business leadership coaching, the CEOs and managerial persons find out their strong and weak points and they are facilitated with proper solutions on such negatives which assist them for contributing more in the excellence of their organization.

Also these type of leadership coaching endow with proper techniques which is useful for solving several kind of critical situation like employee strike, working shifts, problems regarding the salary of employees and other conditions of employees association.
Also such business leadership coaching facilitate some techniques the HR manager of the company about how to appoint key and eligible candidates for the company. That include how to check the business knowledge of the candidate by conducting technical, aptitude test. This coaching also gives idea about how to set a paper for various recruiting positions of the organization.

Also such coaching sessions really assists to increase the trustworthiness of the executives towards the ideology of the business organization and their kind attitude towards the welfare of the employees.

The business leadership coaching helps to enhance the leading quality of the executives. So that gives us idea about how to handle the employees for achieving the targets. By using such leadership coaching, we see the enhancement in the working stamina of the Employees. So that really helps to utilize the available working hours for making the enhancement in the production rate. Also such leadership coaching illustrate various inventive ideas which really useful for making development of the company.
By using the coaching techniques, the executives exactly knows what is the current position of their organization in the market.

In the business leadership coaching, the students are facilitated with how to take decision on any critical situation. For such important topics various techniques, mental and physical situation are discussed in the coaching session. Through this leadership coaching, the situational approach of leadership to such critical situation or dispute makes the condition safer.

Top Project Dropout Reasons

root — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:25:40 +0100

I thought I'll start to compile a list of top reasons why
people working in my projects dropped out (and left me hanging with either nothing, unfinished crap or "so-called" finished crap)

1. Pregnancy

- Programmer was pregnant, didn't tell (to plan for it) and thought she would finish the stuff before - this happened twice in 1 year to me, and while I wish only for the best for mum & kid, I feel it very irresponsible to hide that fact ( and break or unnecessarly delay the project way beyond acceptability )

2. Can-do attitiude

- well, this is an obvious reasons, but as you can imagine even the hardest and most extensive selection process including questionaire and multiple interviews can not assure that person can deliver - be it in link building or software development

3. Shameless Availability Lies

- this just happened to me once already on RentACoder, where they even offer an Expert Guarantee where the coder has to pay in 15 or 20% of the overal project fee - and if the drops out, this money goes to charity (an I get my money back) - believe it or not, just yesterday I realized somebody committed to a bigger software development project 2 months ago just to find out he's only spending some weekend time on it... and now 1 week past deadline he's not even close to code complete, not to speak about his horrible source formatting style (which says A LOT about the quality)

4. Incompetence to test & fix

- when I'm running some smaller freelancer projects I specify exact requirements , which I in turn expect to be implemented and tested against. More than once I had people declaring "work complete" when basic functionality was just BREAKING ... throwing ugly PHP errors etc... once I even heard "I know it's not finished yet, but you know I put so much work into this that I believe I deserve all of the money and leave you [with my shit there]" ... wtf do some freelancers think they are?!?!

5. Arrogance

- I am the best coder your company can get, you just don't know about it. Well, this attitude tells a lot - except that basic data modelling experience, stable error message handling and clear code comments where missing - instead we got some broken code with dozens of duplicate files in the project directory - essentially needing a decision to reverse engineer or re-do the whole crap we got from a rookie-coder who thought he's gonna rule the world because of some completed simplier scripts

6. Pussyness

- this title sounds a bit rude, but in fact describes the problem of a guy being to much of a pussy for sticking to his own code guidelines, when the senior architect in my project setup other rules for the code to be accomplished. Obviously the initial guidelines where made to allow for a consistent code style, not for evangelic discussion about how anybody in the world should write code. They were practically set. I think we had a couple weeks discussion (which I should have stopped earlier as responsible PM, which WE should have charged this guy on later for wasting our time - or me actually) before he completey disillusioned about his status left the project... WTF I thought - that was the perfect sample for a "negative performer" - costing both you and your company more time than the new hire could ever bring in. Drop him earlier than later.

Hmmm ... I feel I should end this post now to research my RAC arbitrations a bit more - tomorrow - as I still need to DIFN other stuff ...