What To Look For In A Project Leader

In order to understand what you need in an international project leader, you must first understand some of the situations and barriers that such a person will face. Here are some of the pressures, duties, and other factors that we have gathered from project leaders in over 45 major projects:

Time zone differences create havoc in dealing with problems.

When you are traveling, it is difficult to stay in touch.

There are many family pressures when you are working on an international project.

Even when people speak the same language, the meanings are very different.

People in the country prepare too well for your visit so that it is difficult to get at the truth of the work.

After you leave a country, you find out about all of the hidden issues.

It is difficult to deal with the politics at headquarters and the individual political situation in each location.

Management in a location pays lip service to the project, but does not give it the right or even adequate resources.

It is difficult to coordinate the work of the team, consultants, and local management.

It is difficult to track issues and problems to see that they are handled when there are so many things going on at one time.

As you can see from the list, identifying one person as a project leader would lead you to select Superman or Superwoman. Given you have to deal with real people with their limitations and assets, you must center your attention on the most important attributes. Let’s try to identify some of the most important general attributes and then move down to the details.

Problem-solving ability. From our experience, this one has to rank very high. Managing even small international projects often means dealing with problems, issues, and opportunities. But there is more here than you might think. It includes the ability to sense and detect problems, know when to leave problems alone, know how to do research and investigate problems, and know how to get problems solved with the appropriate actions and decisions.

Ability to cope in multiple cultures. You might think that this refers to the country culture. That is only one of the cultures. There is also the company culture in the country. Then there is the culture in a specific department—in part generated by the personality of the department manager and what the department does. Can you as a project manager know about all of these cultures as you manage the project? Of course not. However, you must be sensitive to the various cultures that are present. Be ready to learn and listen to what people say.

Tenacity and the capability of pursuing issues, etc. Although this relates to problem solving, the tenacity is required in international projects, because it is often the case that an issue is not fully understood. There is often much ambiguity in what is a problem. It is a matter of culture and interpretation. You have to get behind what is being said, how it is being said, and the situation in which it is being said. In some projects, it took us over a month to run an issue to ground and to fully understand it. The final interpretation was much different than what was expected at the start. What is stated as a problem in one location may be really something very different due to what you learn in another location.

Ability to communicate. It would be nice to be functional in many languages. And it is too bad that many people know only one language. What is meant here is the ability to get your sentences and thoughts across in a clear and unambiguous way. It is also the ability to listen to what people are telling you. We have found that these qualities can go a long way even if you do not speak a foreign language. In terms of picking up foreign terms, it is probably easier in projects to work on the written, rather than the spoken word. You find that in most industries a base of about 50–100 words will keep recurring in projects.

A sense of humor. It is extremely important to be able to laugh and enjoy a project—even when the times are difficult. Both of us have found a sense of humor to be very useful politically as well. You have to be able to step out of the project and situation and look at things from the big picture view. This should help you see something funny about it.

Familiarity and knowledge of the business. Here a knowledge of the basic business processes and how things get done is useful. In-depth knowledge about a specific department or function can actually impede your work since it may give you a bias.

Prior experience in projects. It is not necessary to have headed up a large number of projects previously. However, you should have worked in projects and participated in project activity. Hopefully, you were in projects that were not successful so you have an idea of what can go wrong.