Five leadership lessons from Professor Mike Bourne

Mike Bourne, Managing Editor of the forthcoming eighth edition of the APM Body of Knowledge (APM BoK), is Professor of Business Performance at Cranfield University, where he leads the Project Leadership Programme for senior civil servants which is supported by PA Consulting and The Project Academy.

He says leading the programme is his “proudest professional achievement” – and 2,000 students have graduated from it in the past decade or so. “We’re building a cohort of people who are changing the culture of projects in government,” he says.

The rise of project leadership

So, if anyone know about leadership, projects and the APM BoK, it’s Bourne.

“There is a lot more project leadership in [the updated APM BoK] than there was, and that is very deliberate. Look at all the huge changes we’ve had – COVID19, the war in Ukraine. A lot of projects these days don’t stay on the rails because the world changes faster than the project can deliver. It’s about dealing with a VUCA [volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous] world.”

Success in such a world requires not only the traditional virtues of project management, such as scheduling and budgets, but also a greater emphasis on active and ongoing project leadership to make sure that what is actually being delivered remains relevant to changing needs and requirements.

“Much of project management is about process. There is a lot of process in the APM Body of Knowledge, things like scope creep and cost control. But when the world really changes, like it did in the pandemic, cost controls go out of the window and you have to start again by asking, ‘What is it that we really want to do?’ That’s really about judgement, which is where leadership comes in,” he says.

People and (un)certainty

Bourne has two big overall messages for project professionals. The first is that people are as important as process – indeed, they are the process to some degree. “You need good people with the right values, and you need to lead them well. Some of the best project controls are people – people whom you trust, who are doing the right thing in the right places.”

The second is to realise the limits of certainty. “People tend to think that projects are certain – they are not. Sometimes, when you start out, you don’t know what you are trying to deliver, and sometimes you don’t know how to deliver it. Letting go of the idea of certainty and embracing ambiguity – that’s got to be where the profession goes.”

So, here are Bourne’s top five tips on being a great project leader.

1. Be open to challenge. Judgement is a very important part of leadership. Good leaders are open to challenge, because they know that having their ideas questioned informs their judgement and ultimately leads to better decision-making.

2. Work on your ‘inner face’ of leadership. The inner face starts with knowing yourself. It takes confidence to face up to your own strengths and weaknesses, but it enables you to build a team with skills that complement and compensate for your own as required. If you don’t know yourself, you can end up surrounded by a load of ‘yes’ men – and they usually are men, because women tend to object more.

3. Be trustworthy and calming. Leaders need people to follow them, and that requires trust from those they are leading. And leaders are usually also working for someone else, so need to be trusted by those above them. Projecting a calming presence helps to build trust. You don’t always have to be calm, but you should try to be calming.

4. Focus on moving forward. Time and energy are the only real resources you have at your disposal, so use them well. As a leader, you should spend most of your time looking forwards and outwards rather than backwards and inwards. But you should make sure that someone on your team is looking backwards and inwards, because if no one does it will have consequences.

5. Learn to embrace ambiguity. This is where a lot of project management fails – something fundamental changes and, as a result, the way things have always been done doesn’t work anymore. Leaders need to be able not only to recognise when that happens, but also to cope with the uncertainty it creates – to hold everything together.

Read a full interview with Professor Mike Bourne in the spring 2025 edition of Project journal