CEO chat: APM’s Adam Boddison and PMI’s Pierre Le Manh discuss project leadership

In April, for the first time, the CEOs of APM and PMI came together for a conversation, hosted on the APM Podcast. They discussed what it takes to be a leader and shared their advice on staying calm through a crisis. Below is a taster of their conversation (you can listen to the full thing here).

Professor Adam Boddison OBE (CEO, APM): One of the things we’re obsessed about in the project profession is learning lessons and applying lessons. Are there any kind of leadership principles or lessons that you’d pass on?

Pierre Le Manh (CEO, Project Management Institute): I define leadership as ultimately the ability to inspire others around you to take action and drive change. That is not industry specific, and it’s not even business specific. On the personal side, I feel that you have to at least try to be authentic and not be overly scared about not saying the right things. Also, I believe it’s important to avoid platitudes and thinking and saying the same thing as everybody else – you have to form real personal opinions on things.

When it comes to leadership in the corporate world, I think it’s very important to focus on long-term purpose and values, things that are universal and that people will follow even when the lights go off. It’s not always easy because people often ask for a blueprint – you try to resist that and really show them the long-term vision and purpose, because you want them to find their own way. It’s more effective than trying to tell everyone, especially when you run large organisations, what they have to do right.

I think it's important to focus on team dynamics, not just the individuals. You learn this a lot from sports. My favourite football team, Paris Saint-Germain, had great individuals and now they finally have a team. You build something where the sum of the parts exceeds the parts themselves. Also have to think about how you raise both the ceiling and the floor – so the minimum performance that is expected, but also make sure that you bring some inspiration and get people to trust, to have the confidence that they can deliver things that they would never even think they could.

Adam: I reflect on my own journey through leadership, and there are three or four key moments where I’d say something happened that was not planned that I had to deal with, and it’s shaped my whole approach to leadership. Are there any that stand out on your journey that have shaped your own approach?

Pierre: You have those moments when you are outside of your comfort zone, and this is when you learn. There’s an old saying that anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I think nothing is truer than that. You have to develop the resilience when things are going really wrong to remember that, if you fight, one day the sun will rise again and you’ll be in better shape.

It’s in these ‘curves’ that you have the opportunity to improve more than in the straight lines. So, I have had moments in my career, of course, where I had to step up – the pandemic taught me a great deal. It helped me to become more resilient. Also, I have a tendency to be very calm when in situations of danger. I don’t know why, but it’s always been like that, even when I was a child. So that helped me. If you communicate with determination and calm when things are not good while still being able to make tough decisions, that makes people feel safer. They feel like they have strong leadership and it calms them down.

Adam: Your point around being calm in a crisis is well made. I always say to my team: the day you see me panic, everybody should be worried, because then we really have got something to worry about. But probably you’ll never see that, because I think it’s part of our job as leaders to hold steady in times of turbulence.

Listen to Adam and Pierre’s full conversation on APM Podcast wherever you find your podcasts.