Executives In Training?

Can a project management career path eventually lead to the corner office? From what I've seen in my own organization, PM experience is more highly valued than ever when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder. And technical skills have little to do with this.

To begin with, project managers can get a fantastic strategic perspective by working across the length and breadth of their organizations. No silos for US. You may be a technology PM, but your projects can immerse you into the arcane worlds of marketing, supply chains, procurement, human resources, facilities, vendor management, and legal contracting. Every time you design an IT solution for a business, you learn a surprising amount about how that business operates.

The next advantage flows from a project manager's basic talents. The negotiating, influencing, planning, risk management, and budgeting abilities required to deliver complex projects mirror an executive skillset. In an article in The International Journal of Project Management, Linda S. Henderson observed that "projects are incubators for the development of future leaders. Experience on project teams often tests a wide variety of skills and behaviors." None other than Harold Kerzner concurred, noting that "project managers already consider themselves to be executives on the project, and naturally expect their next steps to be as executives in the company." More evidence is provided by CIO Insight magazine, which surveyed thousands of IT executives in 2006 and found that 82% of CIOs had been project managers at one point in their careers.

Those project managers with superior interpersonal skills, however, may have the decisive advantage. The aptitude to manage conflict, instill trust and team unity, sense and address unspoken emotions, ask incisive questions, please clients, work across international borders, and solve problems collaboratively is vital at the next level. Catherine Daw notes in her article Turning Successful Project Managers Into the Executive Leaders of Tomorrow, for example, that "the ability to influence, motivate team members, and achieve significant project results through a team are all key skills that successful project managers have and executive leaders require."

Daw also observed that while project managers often enter the field due to their technical abilities, they are quickly called upon to display executive behavior such as "more clearly understanding the corporate objectives; gauging the big picture; dealing with executives as sponsors and being able to draw teams from disparate departments and geographies together to deliver specific business results." While technical skills remain important to simply getting the job done, the interpersonal and leadership abilities demanded of project managers are truly essential for moving up the career ladder.

In some sense, as Kerzner noted, project managers are already executives. Every cross-functional project is like a mini-organization. No surprise to me that project managers are finally getting rewarded and promoted for what they've been doing all along: successfully leading people toward a common goal.