Leadership Skills for the Project Professional

• Characteristics of Manager vs. Leader
• Roles and Responsibilities Clarity
• Leading Virtual / Matrix Teams
• Situational Leadership
• Conflict Management and Resolution
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Delegation
• Communications Leadership
• Strategic Planning and Change
• Motivation and Inspiration

I. Strategic Project Leadership
This section focuses on defining the project's vision and properly aligning it with the overall organization's vision and strategy. In doing so, project leaders can formulate a vision statement (a.k.a., "core doctrine") that effectively articulates the project to stakeholders throughout the organization.

• Foundations of Leadership
  - Definition of Project Leadership
  - Project Manager vs. Project Leader
  - Individual Exercise: Management and Leadership Attributes Assessment
• Vision & Purpose Alignment
  - Project Position in the Organization
  - Pyramid of Project Alignment (Vision, Mission, Values, Strategies, Goals/Objectives, Actions)
  - Exercise: "Visioneering" (defining an aligned project vision and purpose)

II. Stakeholder Alignment
Every project has countless numbers of stakeholders – people, groups, organizations that have a vested interest in the results of the project. - And it is virtually impossible to adequately address every need of all stakeholders. As a result, it is imperative that project leaders identify, analyze, and prioritize not only the stakeholder groups, but also determine their relative importance. In this section participants will learn better ways to identify and analyze the respective importance of the stakeholder groups. This lesson will help project leaders do a better job of selling the project before, during, and after delivery.

• Stakeholder Identification
• Stakeholder Analysis
  - Impact: Influence and Importance
  - Powers of the Stakeholder
  - Exercise: Stakeholder Identification and Analysis

III. Change Leadership
Contrary to common belief, changes are not necessarily a bad thing for projects. Some changes actually can enhance the delivery of the project's products, services, or results. The key to project change management is having the ability to identify, assess, and incorporate the right changes at the right time. The lessons of this section will help project leaders serve as agents of change while helping to facilitate the organization through the chaos triggered by requests for project and organizational changes.

• Definitions and Sources of Change
• Change Model and Equation
• Agents of Change
• Factors of Sustainable Change
• Change Readiness Assessment
• Leading Change
  - Steps; Flow Modeling
  - Dealing with Resistance
  - Change Window
  - Exercise: Identifying Real and Potential Project Changes
  - Exercise: Change Readiness Assessment

• A highly experienced instructor will use interactive lecture format, numerous hands-on exercises, team activities, group discussions, individual discovery and other techniques to drive home the essential points of this material
• We will build on your prior experience in this topic, while providing you with a structure and vocabulary to use in future projects.
• If you have modest experience in leadership topics, you will find that the clarity of the material and direct presentation style of the instructor will make the subject matter easy to understand.

• If you are new to project management, the material will explain why your actions as leader are important to your success as project manager.
• Experienced project managers will draw on the wealth of experience they already have to crystallize a better understanding of their role as leader.
• All participants take home a set of best practice, tools and techniques to help them deal with team issues and interact more effectively with upper management.
• Even an experienced project manager can obtain insights from this PM course that will help solve common and persistent problems.
• The exercises in this advanced PM training will give you the hands on experience you need to put best practice and new tools to immediate use.