Project Managers Don’t Need Their Hands Held

Project Managers, at least good ones, don't need their hands held.

Literal holding of the hands

Imagine this: You are an Engineering Project Manager tasked with creating a training for an outside vendor assessment program at your company.  The company has significant operating procedures around this area, complete with checklists and general guidelines and definitions.  The experts on how the assessments work now are the current senior engineering staff and their management at company headquarters.  The customers of the training are the new engineering staff at headquarters and other locations.  You need to get the training ready in three months to enable onboarding of several new engineers next quarter.

Which approach would be more appealing to your manager?
A) Asking for specific direction for each step: schedule, content, format, assessments, ongoing training
OR
B) Developing 2-3 options for each step and reviewing them at pre-agreed-upon milestones throughout the project

Now ask yourself:
Which of these aforementioned options sounds more palatable to you as the Project Manager?

In both cases, the answer should be B).  Develop the options and review at pre-agreed-upon milestones; competent Project Managers do not need to have their hands held.  Furthermore, it is frustrating to a PM's manager to have to hand hold; that merely uses the time of both people equally, and half as much work gets done.

Once I worked with a fellow consultant for a client where both of us were acting in the Project Management role.  He consistently would ask our mutual manager for advice or help - thinking that he was getting the customer's complete buy-in and therefore assuring full alignment on his project.  However, our manager confided in me that she was feeling inundated by his daily questioning and wished he could just take the ball and run with it - stop asking her questions as she was super busy herself!  She actually asked me if I would (discreetly) speak with him about it.

To be fair, this person was relatively new in his career, and really wanted to make a good impression.  He honestly had no idea that it was annoying to our manager for him to constantly be asking her questions.  I suggested to him that often the reason clients hire consultants is so that they can outsource the entire project and solution and NOT have to intimately deal with it.  We discussed the ideas presented here; of developing a plan and schedule, getting alignment to that, and then meeting to review and approve milestones with some options presented for feedback at each step. 

It was a great conversation, and this person immediately implemented my advice much to our manager's relief.

Sometimes, however, the issue is not with the Project Manager, but the PM's manager or trainer.  This person also needs to let go and allow the PM to do his or her job, even if there is some risk of making a mistake.  You train the best you can, and put in controls (second level reviews, team approvals, etc.) at high-risk or critical points of your process or project, but until managers really step away and allow PMs to run projects independently, they won't know whether the PM is competent or not.  In addition, constant micromanagement undermines the PM's self-

confidence, and erodes the possibility of coming up with an even better method which can be implemented across the board to improve everyone's performance of similar projects. 

Bottom line: Hand holding Project Managers is not good for either PMs or their managers, and can stymie continuous improvement and productivity.  Just let go.