Leadership is often associated with authority and the ability to guide others toward a common goal. We tend to imagine leaders as those who provide direction, have all the answers, and take responsibility when things become uncertain. Maybe it’s easy to talk about leadership when everything goes according to plan, but what happens when things go south?
Throughout my time in the industry, I’ve encountered many leaders, and I’ve tried to learn from each of them. A leader needs to have both technical competence and soft skills. Even the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), in its 8th edition, emphasizes that leading a team involves both management and leadership. Management and leadership are two different abilities, but they both complimentary.
Management and Leadership
When we talk about projects, management focuses on meeting project objectives through planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling. Meanwhile, leadership focuses more on the people aspect, like how to influence team members to willingly perform their work to achieve project objectives. In simple terms, management is about what needs to be done, while leadership is about how to make people want to do what needs to be done.
I did a lot of reflection during my PMP preparation, and one idea that really stuck with my mind was Servant Leadership. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines servant leadership as the practice of leading a team by focusing on understanding and addressing the team’s needs to achieve the highest level of team performance. It is about how leaders humbly listen, help, motivate, and enable their teams to deliver the intended outcomes.
Leader Provides Psychological Safety
When I learned about servant leadership, two things came to my mind. The first was Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety, and the second was (again) Simon Sinek’s book, Leaders Eat Last. Both capture the idea of servant leadership itself. Instead of relying on authority, a leader should serve others. They should provide psychological safety for their team and eat last.
Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as a shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks within their team. The way I understand it is that, whatever the situation, whether it’s bad news, a disagreement, or admitting a mistake, team members are not afraid to bring it to the table. Psychological safety could prevent a risk from growing into a larger problem.
A servant leader can create this psychological safety through how they respond to their team. How a leader listens when a team member makes a mistake, trying to understand what happened and focusing on how to solve the problem. How a leader responds when there is a concern or disagreement. These responses shape whether people feel safe to speak up, whether they have good news or bad news to share. This environment also encourage people to offer their ideas.
However, psychological safety is not about keeping everyone comfortable while avoiding accountability. When mistakes happen, the team still needs to address them and meet their commitments. It is about creating room to be honest, address mistakes, learn, then move forward.
In Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek also emphasizes that people perform at their best when they feel safe and trust those around them. Sinek introduces the idea that great leaders create an environment where people feel protected and supported, allowing them to focus on working together rather than protecting themselves. I briefly discussed his book in my previous post.
Well, in the end, I think servant leadership and psychological safety come together. Reflecting on these ideas also reminds me that leadership is a continuous learning process. Leaders may not always have all the answers. Sometimes, they need to learn from their teams as well, and things may not always go according to plan. However, what matters most is not how much authority we have, but how we respond when things go south, how we make people feel safe enough to speak up, and how we help each other move forward.
