It is hard to find good project managers because they need to maintain a balance of attitudes. Tom Peters, in his essay "Pursuing the Perfect Project Manager,"(6) calls these conflicting attitudes paradoxes or dilemmas. This name is appropriate because different situations require different behavior. This means that a project manager needs not only to be aware of these traits, but also to develop instincts for which ones are appropriate at which times. This contributes to the idea of project management as an art: it requires intuition, judgment, and experience to use these forces effectively. The following list of traits is roughly derived from Peters' essay:
Ego/no-ego. Because of how much responsibility project managers have, they often derive great personal satisfaction from their work. It's understandable that they'd have a high emotional investment in what they're doing, and for many, this emotional connection is what enables them to maintain the intensity needed to be effective. But at the same time, project managers must avoid placing their own interests ahead of the project. They must be willing to delegate important or fun tasks and share accolades and rewards with the entire team. As much as ego can be a fuel, a good project manager has to recognize when his ego is getting in the way.
Autocrat/delegator. In some situations, the most important things are a clear line of authority and a quick response time. A project manager has to be confident and willful enough to take control and force certain actions onto a team. However, the general goal should be to avoid the need for these extreme situations. A well-managed project should create an environment where work can be delegated and collaborated on effectively.
Tolerate ambiguity/pursue perfection. The early phases of any project are highly open and fluid experiences where the unknown heavily outweighs the known. As we'll discuss in Chapters 5 and 6, controlled ambiguity is essential for good ideas to surface, and a project manager must respect it, if not manage it. But at other moments, particularly in the later phases of a project, discipline and precision are paramount. It requires wisdom to discern when the quest for perfection is worthwhile, versus when a mediocre or quick-and-dirty solution is sufficient. (See the section "Finding and weighing options" in Chapter 8.)
Oral/written. Despite how email centric most software development organizations are, oral skills are critically important to project management. There will always be meetings, negotiations, hallway discussions, and brainstorming sessions, and the project manager must be effective at both understanding and communicating ideas face to face. The larger the organization or the project is, the more important written skills (and the willingness to use them) become. Despite his personal preferences, a project manager needs to recognize when written or oral communication will be more effective.
Acknowledge complexity/champion simplicity. Many people fall victim to complexity. When they face a complex organizational or engineering challenge, they get lost in the details and forget the big picture. Others stay in denial about complexity and make bad decisions because they don't fully understand the subtleties of what's involved. The balancing act here is to recognize which view of the project is most useful for the problem or decision at hand, and to comfortably switch between them or keep them both in mind at the same time (without your head exploding). Project managers must be persuasive in getting the team to strive for simplicity and clarity in the work they do, without minimizing the complexities involved in writing good, reliable code.
Impatient/patient. Most of the time, the project manager is the person pushing for action, forcing others to keep work lean and focused. But in some situations, impatience works against the project. Some political, cross-organizational, or bureaucratic activities are unavoidable time sinks: someone has to be in the room, or be on the conference call, and they have to be patient. So, knowing when to force an issue, and when to back off and let things happen, is a sense project managers need to develop.
Courage/fear. One of the great misnomers of American culture is that the brave are people who feel no fear. This is a lie. The brave are those who feel fear but choose to take action anyway. A project manager must have a healthy respect for all the things that can go wrong, and see them as entirely possible. But a project manager needs to match this respect with the courage necessary to take on big challenges.
Believer/skeptic. There is nothing more powerful for team morale than a respected leader who believes in what she is doing. It's important for a project manager to have confidence in the work being done, and see true value in the goals that will be achieved. At the same time, there is a need for skepticism (not cynicism) about how things are going and the ways in which they are being done. Someone has to probe and question, exposing assumptions and bringing difficult issues to light. The balancing act is to somehow vigorously ask questions and challenge the assumptions of others, without shaking the team's belief in what they are doing.
As Peters points out in his essay, it's very rare to find people capable of all of these skills, much less with the capacity to balance them properly. Many of the mistakes that any PM will make involve miscalculations in balancing one or more of these conflicting forces. However, anyone can get better at recognizing, understanding, and then improving his own ability to keep these forces in balance. So, while I won't focus on this list of paradoxes heavily again (although it comes up a few times later on), it is a worthy reference. Looking at this list of conflicting but necessary forces can help you to step back, reconsider what you're doing and why, and make smarter decisions.
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