Personal Branding of a Project Manager: Part – 1

Md. Abdullah Al Mamoon, PMP

Managing projects has inherent challenges. The magnitude of the challenges is even greater in functional or matrix organizations. Challenges get further multifaceted based on the level of organizational maturity on project management. A Project Manager (PM) is the first point of contract to encounter every such challenge in a project.
It is thus pivotal for a PM to have the aptitude and prudency to manage these challenges across the project life cycle.  Holistically, leadership is the fulcrum of managing such challenges and under the microscope; it is personal reputation of a PM that does matter to a large extent.

In my years of project management experiences in various companies and varied organizational environments involving heterogeneous group of stakeholders and team members with diverse cultural background from home and abroad, I truly felt the significance of personal branding of a PM. There were couples of instances where I took over projects from previous PMs since project progresses were almost stagnant. I found those PMs were not inferior in their hard and soft skills but they were not somehow able to pursue the project progress. And gradually, they lost the confidence of project team members since they failed to demonstrate any rays of hope of winning moments.

So, why did those PMs fail despite having required knowledge and experiences? One of the most prominent root causes that I found was their failure of managing the most influential stakeholders. They failed to manage those stakeholders because they were not acceptable to the stakeholders.  They were not acceptable since they failed to establish their personal reputation or personal branding in the organization. This ultimately caused every single project issues; some of which could have been resolved through project team meeting; turning up as major challenges and remained unresolved that literally halted the project progress. Project Steering Committee and the sponsors, the highest project governance body in the organization, at some point gave up the hope of project delivery when they observed that they needed to intervene into the small issues or minor operational details even though those were delegated to PM. This also caused many administrative issues of the project and project team remained unaddressed and unresolved; and hence project team started losing the confidence on the PM.

I presume this is a typical aftermath of many failed projects in the domain of project management all over the world. And the phenomenon; i.e. absence of personal branding or reputation that mainly caused the ramification is one of the most essential components of leadership in general and a vital element of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in particular. Project Management Institute (PMI), the leading not-for-profit professional membership association for the project management profession reemphasized the importance of stakeholder management in the project and incorporated a separate ‘Knowledge Area’ namely ‘Project Stakeholder Management’ (which was previously part of Knowledge Area of Project Communication Management) in the fifth edition of ‘A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide)’.

I hope to continue writing on the impact of personal branding of a PM and what can be done differently to establish personal branding in the organization. I would appreciate your feedbacks.