As a project leader, how much time do you spend managing up? What about managing your peers? And your reports?

I don’t know the norms, but I have some ideas about the ab-norms. A VP I once worked for required 40% of my time doing his bidding. While he fiddled, projects burned.

One ‘team’ was offsite-obsessed. While four of the team members debated endlessly, the other eight of us were locked out of the conversations as those four plowed streams of interruptions and talking-over into the landscape of our ‘meetings’. So much for participation; they blustered while the project burned.

I have always spent time with my teams; probably to a fault in the eyes of some of my executives. But it’s the team that delivers the project, not the meetings, not the pert chart, not the offsites, not the executive sponsors. The team delivers the project.

We conducted a one-minute poll on this subject. The results were interesting in that the respondents averaged spending 59% of their time managing down, 17% of their time managing their peers and 24% of their time managing their boss. So what would they change? On average, they would reduce the time they spent with their boss by 5% and add it to the time they spent with peers. They reported that the amount of time they spent with the team that reports to them would stay essentially unchanged at 60%.

Read the results of our November 2003 survey on project team diversity.

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