Project managers as creative and innovative leaders

Abstract

Organizations need successful project managers who are also effective leaders. Successful project managers manage teams most effectively by motivating and inspiring their teams, building high performance teams, consistently delivering successful projects, and continuously developing new leadership skills to complement those that made them successful as managers.

Organizations must utilize creativity and innovation to achieve their organizational goals in highly competitive global markets. Project managers as creative and innovative leaders have a prime role in delivering successful projects and innovative products and in nurturing the team's creativity to achieve the team's peak efficiency and performance.

This paper focuses on the leadership competencies required for project managers to manage their teams most effectively and as creative and innovative leaders, lead their teams in an organizational culture of creativity and innovation. An innovation framework for project management will be introduced — a structured approach for project managers to utilize in starting and delivering innovation projects.

Introduction

In the current global economic climate, organizations are forced to “innovate or die.” Only innovative organizations can survive the very competitive global market. We have seen many organizations become a thing of past, if they don't introduce new and/or improved products, services, or processes that the market looks for. To stay alive, organizations must innovate.

But where do innovations come from? How do organizations come up with innovative products? If it were easy, why did many organizations die when they seemed eternally successful just a few years ago?

Most innovations result from the systematic pursuit of innovation opportunities (Drucker, 2000, ¶1). Many innovations are a result of a collaborative process utilized within a team environment led by project managers. Innovations may be based on new knowledge that has a great impact to customers in the market. They may be ideas that are translated into new or improved products, processes, or services. Whatever the sources of innovation, the systematic pursuit of innovation opportunities and eventually translating the opportunities to actual products, processes, or services require project managers. Project managers deliver the innovation through teamwork. Project managers motivate teams (including all project stakeholders) to seek innovation, engage the teams in creative work, look beyond established practices, and deliver new or improvements in products, processes, or services.

Leadership Skills for Project Managers

Project managers focus their efforts most in delivering successful projects consistently. Project managers accomplish the desired project results by delivering excellent work through their project teams. They use the necessary technical, business, and leadership skills to manage their project teams most effectively, building high performance teams to achieve the project objectives.

Essential leadership skills for project managers were discussed in a congress paper presented at the 2009 PMI^® Global Congress—North America (Kumar, 2009, pp 3–4). Several authors, including Ginger Levin (2005) and Vijay Verma (1995), provide great resource materials for project managers to learn to develop leadership skills and operate as effective leaders. Starting with motivating and inspiring teams, project managers utilize leadership skills, including negotiating, communicating, listening, influencing skills, and team building with specific focus on improving team performance.

While delivering successful projects solving a specific problem, fulfilling a specific need or providing a specific solution for existing problems seems to be a sufficient performance level for project managers; the very competitive global economic climate requires project managers to perform at a higher level in their organization. Building high performance teams with fully satisfied team members working together to achieve the organization's mission, strategy, and goals is only the beginning. Project managers must work to unleash the team's creative potential and develop an innovative team that delivers innovative products, services, and processes.

Creativity and Innovation

What is creativity? And what is innovation?

Is being creative synonymous with being curious, having a sense of wonder, always thinking “out of the box,” or coming up with new ways of doing things? Or is it combining known things with new information to come up with a new idea or exploring, evaluating, creating new approaches? Is being creative a talent that one is born with or is it a leadership skill that can be developed?

When applied to a team, creativity is the process of developing and expressing novel ideas that are likely to be useful. It is not so much a talent, as it is a process of developing a collaborative approach that maximizes utilization of everyone's distinctive talents, knowledge, skills, experience, and expertise in solving a particular problem or satisfying a specific need. Creative ideas do not always come in flashes of inspiration from a genius team member or a group of “creative types” from your team. Often, creative ideas are a results of a deliberate process, leveraging the group dynamics, working the team environment (including all stakeholders) into a collaborative “innovative thinking” group. And innovation is the end result of creativity.

Innovation is the embodiment and the combination of knowledge and creative ideas in original, new, or related products, processes, or services. Innovation is the end result of a creative group process that progresses through several stages, which include generation of ideas, evaluation of all identified ideas, selection of a few options that are likely to succeed and finally, implementing a selected idea into a “new” or “improved” product, service, or result. Innovation is a result of collaborative creativity.

Creative Group Process

The project manager has a key role in managing the group dynamics as the team navigates through the different phases (steps) in a creative group process. The creative group process is described by the following steps:

• Preparation — select team members to maximize the team's creativity potential; maximize intellectual diversity
• Identification of innovation opportunity — identify the problem that requires a creative and innovative solution
• Generation of ideas/options — generate different approaches, promote divergent thinking through brainstorming and other techniques
• Evaluation — consider the ideas/options for possible new/improvement in product, process, or service; test, experiment to make sound assessments
• Convergence — come up with one solution, move from many options to one innovation or innovative idea

Each step presents opportunities for the project manager to leverage in enhancing the team's creativity. Other ways to develop the team members' creative attitudes and innovative mindsets are:

• Explore possibilities for stimulating physical work areas, enriching the workplace environment—the psychological and the physical environments.
• Build the team spirit through social (team) events that help improve team camaraderie.
• Create activities that make creativity much more likely to occur, increasing the probability of innovation.
• Establish a supportive environment in which team members are encouraged to test and experiment with different approaches and are allowed to learn from failure. Coach the team on methodical experimentation with clear expectations.
• Encourage constructive debates and discussion. Carefully manage conflicts and divergent thinking.
• Celebrate small or big innovative idea results.

This is a very demanding and challenging role. But to the extent that the project manager has unique “access” (relationship) to the team and to all the stakeholders, this challenging role is an opportunity to leverage.

Managing for Creativity and Innovation

Leaders seek innovation. Innovations can start as potential projects or project opportunities. Project managers as creative and innovative leaders must motivate and inspire the teams to look beyond established practices and seek simple focused solutions to real problems. Project managers must then take the teams in a disciplined approach through the different phases of the creative group process that leads to an innovative product, service, or process.

Organizations expect project managers to manage for creativity and innovation. For example, SAS Institute (Florida, 2005, ¶7) expects its managers to harness the creative energies of all the stakeholders, including customers, developers, senior managers, and support staff. SAS Institute managers help create a culture of creativity and innovation. They

• Help employees do their best work
• Engage them intellectually and eliminate distractions
• Make managers creative
• Make managers responsible for sparking creativity
• Challenge your team
• Manage (not minimize) risks
• Eliminate obstacles, hassles on and off the job
• Engage customers as creative partners
• Hear customers' voices loud and clear
• Listen on why/how to improve your products/service

We have seen how an organizational culture of creativity and innovation can lead to organizational success. Organizations such as Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat exemplify the practice of developing creative and innovative staff, whereas organizations such as Kodak, RIM, Best Buy, and Circuit City failed due to lack of creative/innovative ways to stay in business.

Luc de Brabandere (Brabandere, 2006, ¶1) emphasizes that the key to creativity is learning to articulate and changing the stereotypes that limit the organization. Managers can circumvent these blocks and hone creative powers. These days, when popular tastes continually change, and technologies advance very rapidly, organizations must continually innovate to keep up. Leaders need to be creative. They must detect and respond to rumblings of change—generate innovations.

Innovative Framework for Project Management

Project managers need a structured approach that they can use along with project management processes in starting and in delivering innovation projects. The innovation framework for project management must include creativity and innovation processes to supplement the project management processes they already use in implementing projects.

Exhibit 1 depicts an innovation framework for project management, describing a structured approach to incorporate integration innovation management processes with project management processes. Innovation processes include:

1. Discovery — ideas for solutions can come from many unsuspecting sources
2. Open innovation — be receptive to all possible sources of ideas, solutions that can turn into innovative products, services, or processes
3. Seek innovation partners — consider all stakeholders as potential sources of innovation
4. Idea Management — generate and evaluate all ideas, converge into one solution
5. Knowledge Brokering — sustain innovation through “the use old ideas as the raw materials for new ideas” (Hargadon,2000, ¶1)
6. Innovation Opportunity Management — manage solicitation and development of innovation opportunities

Project management processes include the five Process Groups: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing, as defined in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide) (PMI, 2008, pp 42–44). Emphasis is given to scope management, requirements management processes, human resource management (including management of group dynamics for creativity and innovation), and opportunity management.

Exhibit 1 – Innovation Framework for Project Management

Organizations must determine suitable innovation processes to integrate with project development/management processes. They must select innovation processes that are consistent with the organizational culture and are aligned with the organization's goals and strategy. There are innovation tools currently available on the market that support the implementation of these innovation management processes; however, to avoid having tools drive processes, organizations must first define and develop the (innovation) processes before selecting the suitable tools to support the processes.

Integrated innovation management processes and application of the innovation framework for project management will be covered in detail in a future paper.

Conclusion

It has become imperative for organizations to innovate, deliver innovation products, services, and processes, if only to survive the current global economic conditions. Project managers have a prime role in developing creativity in the team environment, building high performance teams, and delivering innovative products/projects. Project managers as creative and innovative organizational leaders must manage the teams for creativity and innovation: creating a creative/innovative attitude/mind set in each team member, and promoting an organizational culture of creativity and innovation. The organization must define an innovation framework for project management that integrates innovation processes with project development/management processes that are already being utilized in the organization. The innovation framework for project management provides a structured approach for project managers to use in starting and delivering innovation projects.