Generalist vs. Specialist

I read a great article in HBR today in which the authors, Wanda T. Wallace and David Creelman, discuss what to do if your leadership role demands dealing with team members who are much greater experts in their domains than you could hope (or have time) to be. The article basically confirms, in a much more elegant way that I would have managed to articulate, my own perspective on how to be a good project manager: A PM should be able to look at the project from a high level perspective, visualize the potential problems that may still be on the horizon, and get together a team of experts in the material to come up with applicable solutions to these problems.

There are four points that the article presents for a generalist project manager:

1. Focus on relationships, not facts,
2. Add value by enabling things to happen, not by doing the work,
3. Practice seeing the detailed picture, not mastering the details, and
4. Rely on "executive presence" to project confidence, not on having all the facts and answers.

In my view, the main objective of good PM should be to be a facilitator for a smooth operation of the project team. Being a facilitator means that you, as a PM, should be able to present a problem to your team of experts in a clear and precise way and have a two way communication going to arrive at the optimum solution. As a PM in your industry you need to be a generalist and be knowledgeable about the broad strokes of what needs to be done so that you may prod holes in your experts' logic and lead them to think about alternative failure modes and scenarios. You do not need to know the ins and outs of the calculations required for finding a solution. You should be able to understand the parameters and limiting conditions that set up the proper execution of, say, a software although its internal runnings, which you may leave to your experts, may be a black box to you. Being a generalist, with an all-encompassing view of the project, is much more important for a PM than being a specialist in a narrow field of application

Being a good facilitator requires a lot of up-front work. This will include a good project execution plan (PEP) so that all stakeholders are clear on the objectives of the project and what will be done (and how) to achieve the stated objectives, a well thought out project schedule to clarify not only the sequence of activities but also the dependencies and conflicts between these activities, and a well defined communication plan so that team members know whom to approach in case conflicts and issues arise.

There are, of course, numerous other issues that a PM will have to take care of in his (or her) day-by-day running of the project but, I am sure, if these three aspects of the project are well taken care of during the planning stages of a project things become much easier to manage during the execution stage of the project, even if the team members are much more of an expert in their areas then he (or she) will ever be!