Project Management Leadership: Styles, Skills, and Their Impact

This essay explores the crucial role of leadership styles and skills in achieving project success. It emphasizes that a competent leader is essential for managing budgets, time, resources, and ensuring high-quality outcomes. The essay discusses various leadership styles, including visionary and democratic leadership, highlighting the importance of adapting the appropriate style to the project's needs. The author identifies with the democratic leadership style, which encourages team participation in decision-making. The essay references a study by Kurt Levin, demonstrating the benefits of democratic leadership over autocratic approaches. Ultimately, the essay underscores that effective leadership, particularly democratic leadership, empowers team members and significantly contributes to successful project management.

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT 1
Project Management
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For any project’s success it all depends on the leadership style and skills of the project
manager. Accordingly, like any other undertaking a project cannot be successfully
accomplished minus a competent leader. Matters such as budget, time management as well as
resources allocation and the promise of high quality and satisfactory outcomes calls for the
project manager to have exceptional leadership skills. Indeed, this exceptional leadership
style and leadership ensure that the project manager makes right and informed decisions
(Burke, & Barron, 2014). At the same time, the manager should be in a position to respond
the changing nature of the project and appropriately handling risk factors. Also, it should be
noted that leadership styles are not of the same size. Therefore, the capacity to understand
when to apply a certain leadership style is the most significant if a project managers want to
become a more effective manager. In this light some of the leadership styles include
visionary, and democratic.
Visionary leadership style is based on inspiring thus this type of leadership offers the
project team with direction but does not mandate on how to reach there. Consequently, this
type of leadership motivates the project team to make initiative when resolving issues to
ensure that the project realize its objectives (DuBois, Koch, Hanlon, Nyatuga, & Kerr, 2015).
Accordingly, this leadership style provides the most positive outcome hence it is used when
communicating with team members. On the other hand, democratic leadership style is a well-
round leadership where the project manager depends on the knowledge and skills of the entire
team members to create the project’s common goals. In this sense, each member is heard
which fosters relationships. Therefore, the leadership style which best describes me is the
democratic leadership style.
According to Trivellas, & Drimoussis, (2013) democratic leadership plays a
momentous role to the success of the project because it encourages participation of the whole
team in the decision-making process. Thus, democratic leadership empowers team members

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to have a strong hand towards the management of the project. Democratic leadership started
way back in the late 20th century when Kurt Levin a behaviourist was performing a group
experiment to determine the benefits associated with a participatory category (Gastil, 2018).
During the research it was found that an autocratic bellwether only performed well in the
presence of the leader to exercise control. Though, its members experienced a growing
dislike towards their leaders. Conversely, a group of democrats coped with the task and its
members experienced positive feelings towards their boss. Therefore, apart from democratic
leadership being efficient it does not decline in the absence of the project manager.

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References
Burke, R., & Barron, S. (2014). Project management leadership: building creative teams.
John Wiley & Sons.
DuBois, M., Koch, J., Hanlon, J., Nyatuga, B., & Kerr, N. (2015). Leadership Styles of
Effective Project Managers: Techniques and Traits to Lead High Performance
Teams. Journal of Economic Development, Management, IT, Finance &
Marketing, 7(1).
Gastil, J. (2018). What is Democratic/Participative Leadership? Retrieved from
https://online.stu.edu/articles/education/democratic-participative-leadership.aspx
Trivellas, P., & Drimoussis, C. (2013). Investigating leadership styles, behavioural and
managerial competency profiles of successful project managers in Greece. Procedia-
Social and Behavioral Sciences, 73, 692-700.

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