Battle Hardened PM

I’ve seen adverts for battle-hardened or battled scarred PMs, this being some kind of measure of their resiliency. And yet the times I’ve worked with these individuals I’ve sometimes seen total detachment or a level of helplessness over their work.

I can suffer from the opposite issue – taking on too much personal responsibility for the outcomes of a whole project or programme. Small projects with enough personal empowerment let me guarantee excellent results to the client, but beyond a certain size, this is impossible and remaining identified ultimately leads to anxiety.

Like all things, I think the real solution lies in taking the middle road, rather than total detachment or total responsibility (ignoring single-person projects, of course). This looks something like the following:

1. Accepting personal responsibility for those things reasonably in your control
2. Acknowledging the success of projects and programmes are greater than one person
3. Being OK with the fact that some projects and programmes do fail in one way or another in spite of all personal endeavours from team members

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