Level 5 Leadership with Project Management 2.0

In my last post, I raised the question of how a new type of leader that emerges with the development of collective intelligence looks like and what his/her role is. We concluded that Project 2.0 leader’s role is to motivate his/her team and make the team members more productive, in order to complete the project on time and on budget. He or she needs to be able to guide the collective intelligence of his or her team and leverage it to the benefit of the whole company. Now I hope to enrich my initial idea with thoughts taken from a well-known Level 5 Leadership concept, introduced by Jim Collins in his “Good to Great” book.

First of all, let’s quickly review Collins’s concept. Level 5 refers to the highest level in a hierarchy of executive capabilities. Leaders at the other four levels may be successful, but are unable to elevate companies from mediocrity to sustained excellence.  A Level 5 Leader builds “enduring greatness.” This type of leader represents remarkable personal duality. Collins’s formula is simple: Level 5 = Humility + Will. A Level 5 leader’s ambition, first and foremost, is “for the company (or for the project) and concern for its success, rather than for one’s own riches and personal renown.” Talking about a “Level 5 leader,” Collins usually means a CEO or a company leader, but I believe that his outstanding concept also can be successfully applied to project leaders. Read on and you’ll see why.

According to Collins, a Level 5 leader utilizes several simple, but powerful, strategies. Here I’d like to highlight only three of them:

• Confront the brutal facts: A Level 5 leader must create a culture wherein people have a tremendous opportunity to be heard.

• Culture of discipline: Level 5 leaders rely on:

                  Disciplined people – you don’t need hierarchy,
                  Disciplined thought – you don’t need bureaucracy,
                  Disciplined action – you don’t need excessive controls.

• Technology Accelerators: Level 5 leaders avoid technology fads and bandwagons, yet they often become pioneers in using carefully selected technologies that help them to gather momentum.

All these concepts are reflected in the idea of Project Management 2.0:

Opportunity to be heard

The collaborative environment provided and maintained by Project Management 2.0 tools lets everyone on the team share knowledge and relevant information. Thus everyone on the team can be heard and can introduce ideas about the development of the project.

Culture of discipline

In Project Management 2.0, the collaborative environment is a perfect incubator for the culture of discipline. Project Management 2.0 relies on emergent structures, not on a hierarchy. In Project Management 2.0, people can update their parts of the project plans by themselves. Thus, superfluous reports and documentation are eliminated. That means less bureaucracy. Project Management 2.0 supports free-form collaboration; at the same time, it lets managers keep control of what is happening on the project and who is busy with what. Still, the control is not excessive, and it does not damage the collective work.

Gathering momentum

Project Management 2.0 can be executed only with the help of special tools -- Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information-sharing, emergence and integration capabilities for the team. These technologies include linking, tagging, building project views and tasks hierarchies. Project Management 2.0 tools are empowered by collective intelligence and emergent structures. Thanks to these two powerful practices, Project Management 2.0 tools can make companies more agile, projects more controllable and people more productive.

As a conclusion, I’d like to say that Level 5 leadership and Project Management 2.0 are two great concepts that can be followed simultaneously. Project Management 2.0 amplifies with Level 5 in many ways, some of which I tried to explore in this post. In both concepts, the team and its collective effort and efficiency are the focus, not the leader. A Level 5 leader, as well as Project 2.0 leader, aims at success and creates superb results, while inspiring and motivating his/her team. A Project 2.0 leader’s role, just like a Level 5 leader’s role, is to empower his/her people and guide them toward achieving a common goal, be it successful project completion or greatness of the whole company.