In Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management: Practices that Deliver Remarkable Results Alexander Laufer offers a series of
eight project management vignettes that demonstrate the importance of
leadership in the project management context. Each of the vignettes
offered covers the difficulties of project management within a different light
looking to the unique challenges that projects can entail. The most powerful aspect of Mastering the Leadership Role in Project
Management is that it steps away from the mechanics of project management
itself and instead shows the importance of communication within modern projects
and the steps that the project manager can take to assuage the personalities
involved.
Laufer works to stimulate
the reader’s creative thinking skills by providing clear examples of how
project leaders have worked to recover projects and what steps they’ve taken to
ensure that risks associated with the complexities of multi-entity project
management are accounted for. Laufer
goes to great lengths to profile the personalities of the project leaders
discusses as well as to provide a second-hand understanding of their management
style through the eyes of the people that they manage. On top of providing relevant and adaptable
insights that project managers can put to immediate use, Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management delivers an
interesting set of narratives that present the salient points in an
entertaining format.
Mastering the Leadership Role in Project
Management serves as an excellent
personal development tool for those looking to advance their effectiveness as
leaders in project management. While it’s
difficult to translate leadership ideas from text into practice, Laufer’s
vignettes paired with the book’s epilogue which highlights and reinforces the
practices documented allow for the reader to develop a conceptual understanding
of how they can modify their own approach.
