What are you? Are you a technical specialist? What’s your specialty? What about your team: what’s their specialty?

How would you feel if your team members tried to manage the project in your place? How would you like the software engineer trying to replan the project to meet the deadline?

I bet you would not like it. Not one bit.

Yet, how often do we do this to our teams? How often to we try to be specialists in their own discipline?

It’s one thing to want to be helpful and to makes suggestions. It’s another to assume we know better than they do. After all, we’re the project managers because we are good a managing. She’s en engineer because she’s good at engineering.

Project Managers: we don’t need to know everything about everything

It’s ok to defer for the technical expert in your team. It’s ok if they answer the question and not you. They don’t get to do that often.

If they fix an issue, they should be rewarded for it. If you fix a team conflict, that your accomplishment.

It’s OK to say “I don’t know.”

As project managers, our job is not to know everything. Our job is to know where we can find the information.

Our job is to trust and believe that our teams are the best team to deliver on time and on budget. And if they’re not, it’s our jobs to develop the project team into the best team to deliver on time and on budget. That’s our specialty.