Diary of a Leader: How Leadership in Project Management Drives Collaboration & Success
- Lindsay Sheldrake
- Feb 13
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 20
Welcome to "Diary of a Leader" - Real Stories, Leadership Lessons, and Personal Growth
Ah, leadership. It’s messy, rewarding, and full of lessons you can only learn by doing.
Welcome to Diary of a Leader—a behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to lead high-performing teams and deliver results in project-based businesses.
Whether you’re scaling operations or managing creative chaos, this space is for leaders who want to grow with clarity, confidence, and impact.
If you lead a design firm, creative studio, or project-driven team, you’ve likely felt the tension—trying to maintain excellence while everything around you shifts.
As a Fractional COO and project leadership partner, I’m here to share the insights, tools, and real-world strategies that help teams work smarter, move faster, and build better.
And today, I’m serving up a leadership lesson on what creative teams actually need when it comes to leadership in project management.
Project Management Isn’t Just About the Plan
It’s easy to believe that once the schedule is built, the job is done. But if you’ve ever been responsible for delivering a project, you know that planning is only the beginning.
Execution lives in the gray space—where people, priorities, and project scope constantly shift.
What keeps things on track isn’t the Gantt chart. It’s leadership.
In creative businesses, leadership in project management means guiding your team through ambiguity. It’s not about doing the work for them—it’s about creating the conditions where they can do their best work.
What Leadership in Project Management Really Looks Like
When I step into a company that’s struggling to deliver consistently, the problem usually isn’t process. It’s leadership.
People are unclear on priorities. Expectations are fuzzy. Decisions stall out. Clients get frustrated. And teams start working around systems instead of within them.
Strong project leadership solves for that—not by controlling every task, but by driving alignment and ownership at every level.
Here’s what that looks like in action:
1. Clear Priorities
When everything feels urgent, nothing gets done well. Creative teams thrive when they understand the why—not just the what.
Leaders provide focus. They clarify what’s most important, and they give their teams permission to let go of the noise.
2. Alignment to Process
Structure gives people something to rely on when things get messy. But too often, creative teams bend the rules—or skip them entirely—because they don’t see the value.
Leadership bridges that gap. It means reinforcing expectations, helping people understand the why behind the process, and making sure systems are working for the team—not against them.
3. Support for Decision-Making
Projects slow down when no one knows who can say yes—or how to move forward.
Leadership in project management means giving people guardrails and then trusting them to move. It also means stepping in to unblock things when needed.
If your team is stuck waiting for a decision, that’s a leadership gap—not a project delay.
4. Communication Cadence
Every high-performing team I’ve worked with has one thing in common: they talk regularly, clearly, and consistently.
Check-ins aren’t just for status updates. They’re where roadblocks surface. It’s where trust is built. And they create space for issues to be resolved early—before they become fires.
Leaders own the rhythm. They don’t just show up when something’s gone wrong—they’re present throughout the process.
The Leadership Lesson
You don’t need to be a certified PM to lead projects well. But you do need to lead.
When teams have clear priorities, alignment to process, empowered decision-makers, and regular communication—you’ll start to see projects run smoother and clients stay happier.
That’s not just project management. That’s leadership.
Wrapping Up (Because Time is Precious)
Here’s the takeaway: project management is more than task lists and timelines. The way you lead sets the tone for how your team performs.
If you’re seeing scope creep, delays, or internal friction—don’t start with the tool. Start with the leadership.
Catch you next time, fellow leaders-in-training—and remember, great projects don’t just happen. They’re led with clarity and intention.
Want support building stronger project leadership across your team?
Book a free consultation to explore what that could look like in your business.
Stay tuned for more real-world lessons on leadership, operational clarity, and successful project delivery in the next installment of Diary of a Leader—because leading teams and managing projects isn’t about doing it all; it’s about doing what matters, exceptionally well.
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