Challenges: #2 Leadership

Expanding on a previous posts I've looked at other challenges organisations face with realising the potential value from projects, and there are many examples of how the consequences of poor or misplaced leadership can impede it:

• Changing goals frequently or failing to define them clearly, results in stagnation, an absence of action, increased cost and degraded benefits
• Granting autonomy to the team but in name only, causes distrust, frustration and disengagement
• Focusing on extrinsic-motivation over intrinsic-motivation, making the job task orientated rather than outcome focused, further disengaging and demotivating the team
• Engaging in political infighting, taking attention away from the important jobs to be done, obstructing collaboration and information sharing, slowing delivery down

The actions you can take to overcome these examples should be fairly straightforward for any good leader, right...but let's not forget that leaders have a challenging role, they need the capacity to manage at two levels, being able to support by articulating a compelling big picture vision of the future which is different to what is done today, while simultaneously managing technical and operational issues in the organisations day-to-day activity.

Does this sound like a familiar challenge - what impact is it having in your organisation and how are you overcoming it?