Exercising Authority Appropriately

The best project managers are stewards of the businesses they support. Part of caring stewardship is appropriately applying the project management authority conveyed by the project charter. Here are tips for ensuring you properly exercise your project management authority.   

• Use positive influence. Exercising authority can take many forms: forming partnerships or collaborating to accomplish tasks, or less positive approaches like coercion and other forceful methods. Coercion is not the answer. Use your authority to build relationships with stakeholders to achieve project goals within the current business context. Consider project objectives in relation to other initiatives and operational constraints. Here’s an example: Encourage a stakeholder to resolve a vital customer issue even if it means delivering a task late (as long as the delay won’t hurt the business as much as a disgruntled customer).
• Exercise your authority within the constraints of the project charter and your role – and no more. Going beyond those bounds, via direct or implied statements, might not cause problems immediately. Over time, however, stakeholders may question your leadership. This is especially true if you report directly to high-level managers. There is a risk that employees will assume what you say is coming from your senior manager. If used indiscreetly, this “referent authority” can dilute the respect you receive from stakeholders.
• Lead the project with compassion. Leading a project with compassion means maintaining balance with sometimes conflicting elements. You have to balance your care and concern for people, the project, the business, and yourself. If you focus on project goals without taking care of your people, achieving project objectives will be at risk. Being too accommodating with people’s concerns at the expense of project objectives also causes problems. The key is to be flexible while seeking the best overall solutions to all concerns.
• Enforce the boundaries of project scope. In some organizations, scope creep can reach pandemic proportions. Even a little bit of scope creep can negatively impact project success. To protect project scope, put all changes through a rigorous change review process. Don’t accept a change request unless there is a positive evaluation of the resulting scope, cost, schedule (as well as quality and changes in project complexity).  
• Provide the leadership stakeholders require. No more, no less. For example, giving task owners the flexibility to complete their work is appropriate. But if deliverables are unacceptable, you must take action to correct that issue. On the other hand, micromanaging (too much “leadership”) isn’t effective either. Take time to learn how to constructively apply your authority and expertise with each stakeholder, understanding you will need to adjust your style to match the needs of each person. 

Take a minute to consider your authority as described in your project charter (or write up what you think your authority is if the charter hasn’t been prepared yet). Then evaluate your approaches and processes to see how you might need to adjust them.

For more about project authority and leadership, check out Cyndi Snyder-Dionisio’s Project leadership course.

Coming Up

Join Angela Wick and me on Tuesday, August 13, 2024 at 12:00pm MT for our live broadcast PMs and BAs: We need to talk…about AI…and how it’s impacting our roles!

Everyone’s talking about AI these days. But is anyone listening? The focus is usually on how AI can make people more productive. Productivity boils down to doing the same old stuff faster. Our teammates and stakeholders use AI too! We will explore the benefits of focusing on using AI to make our deliverables more valuable to the people we work with and also how our roles impact our stakeholders who use AI!

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 74,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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