Who Pulls You Forward?

At my company, I’m manager of the project management department. This means I’m the person at my company with the most knowledge of and experience in project management.

It’s a great honor and a privilege to lead a department and a function, and to be the one to provide direction to my whole company on what project excellence looks like.

And yet at times being the top leader in something can feel lonely. I know I can provide good direction and make good decisions, but it makes me realize how often in my life I’ve had the chance to work closely with someone more experienced and farther down the road in a discipline than I was. And how important these people have been in giving me a blueprint of what the role I was growing into could look like. Maybe I wouldn’t do things exactly like the person I was observing. But having their example as a starting point from which I could adapt my own style would give me a lot of clarity and confidence to plow forward. It made things a lot easier than if I had no example at all and was making things up on my own.

So at this stage in my career, I do find I miss the opportunity to work with and learn from project leaders who are more experienced than myself.

But as I reflect, I find I do have “people,” or examples, who pull me forward in other ways.

As my husband and I have been watching the fifth (final?) season of Star Trek: Discovery, I’ve had the opportunity to “spend time with” and be inspired by my new favorite Starfleet captain, Michael Burnham (sorry Picard, I still think you’re amazing too). I consider her (Michael) a very strong person to regularly let herself be subject to extremely chaotic and personally threatening situations, make very good leadership decisions in the midst of them, and still allow herself a full range of emotional expression and experience (whereas I tend to shut down my emotions to cope with stressful stuff). Aside from risking my life on the regular, I’d like to grow into a project leader who exhibits these same qualities.

My husband, our roommate, and also I watched the Wicked: Part 1 movie this week, and I (as do many) get very fired up during the “Defying Gravity” song/scene. I have always felt like someone who would “defy gravity” in some (metaphorical) way, and this musical moment is a fresh burst of energy and inspiration to follow through on doing something big and meaningful when I feel I’m losing my way.

A few years ago, I also found this type of example-inspiration from Bill and Melinda Gates after watching the 2019 documentary Inside Bill’s Brain. Most public figures are far from perfect, but I got an up-close look at Bill’s analytical mind and Melinda’s big heart and how they have used these to create several major types of positive global change. My vague dream of “changing the world” immediately felt more possible because I’d now seen someone blaze this type of trail.

So who is paving the path you’d like to walk down? Who is casting your vision of what your next level of growth as a project leader could look like? If you’re just starting out, I hope you have more experienced project managers or PMO staff at your company who can be one form of example for you. I am also trying to be one of those people for you in my weekly blogs, peeling back the curtain on how I think through real situations I face and what I’ve found truly important to focus on after more than eight years in this field.

But don’t limit yourself to project managers. Like me, what other real or even fictional people look like the next version of yourself that you want to become? Project work may be specific, but great leaders are everywhere. Pull your chair up close to them, lean in, and let their examples pull you forward.