Leadership and gut calls

During the last 2 months, I had a lot of personal change going on my life. I did get started on a book chapter on software release decisions which I am writing with Dr. Guenther Ruhe of the Software Engineering Decision Support Lab.

I have also been reading quite a bit, notably books as "Winning" by Jack Welch and "Personal Styles and Effective Performance" by David Merill. These books have so much value for a project manager. If you are interested in improving your leadership and soft skills, these books are definitely for you. Talking about Leaders, Jack discusses 8 basic rules of leadership. Out of that the most interesting one is: "Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls".

As PMs, most of us face situations to make very unpleasant decisions. I have faced this a couple of times with stakeholders. But obviously, we think twice... and sometimes we have sleepless nights once we make such a call due to the simple fact that we don't like to huty anyone's future.

By nature, some people are consensus builders. Some people long to be loved by everyone. Those behaviours can really get you in the soup if you are a leader, because no matter where you work or what you do there are time you have to make hard decisions ... like let people go, cut funding and so on.. yeah... life's tough afterall.