Leadership in varying situations at Avascent
Throughout all my projects I have seen how the experience of the team member, the nature of the project, and the pace of the project have impacted the specific situation and how a project manager or director chooses to lead in each of those situations. Given my experience level, I have spent most of my time in two of my projects in the “coaching” phase with high levels of direction and support. My project managers have been, in general, very hands on. They direct me to the most appropriate tasks for me to take on given my skills and the project’s needs, assist me if I hit roadblocks, and generally guide me through best practices of completing research. However, with the other analysts and senior analysts on my team, I can see how their approach is much more hands off. While I find it difficult to completely map their behavior towards full time analysts as there is still supportive and directive behavior, their directions seem to be more general and their supportive behavior seems to rest more on analysts asking for help rather than constant check-ins. I think this is completely appropriate– the number of check-ins I received helpmed prompt me to ask questions and gave my managers a good idea of the progress I was making, however with greater experience managers could trust that analysts would reach out to them with questions and fewer, more general, check in meetings could be arranged. This even changed for me from project to project. On my second project that was much more individual and required less guidance, my project manager took a much more directing/delegating role than any of my other project managers. Constant meetings would have been a waste of time and the work I was doing was much more straightforward and thus I needed less support and supervision. Thus, I have been able to see how project managers are able to assess the specific situation in each project given a number of external and internal factors and choose the most effective way to lead the team in general and individual team members.