Losing a project leader can be a traumatic experience for you and your team. What can we do in this type of situation to avoid a catastrophe?
Project leaders may leave a project for a variety of reasons. Sometimes life gets in the way of the project, other times we have to let them go if they are not aligned with our goals. And sometimes bad luck happens.
If you're lucky and your lead leaves on good terms, they'll probably stick around until you find and train a replacement. This is the best case scenario. Other times, they may leave immediately, but leave enough documentation so that a new project leader can take over as quickly as possible.
And then sometimes leads simply resign and leave the project hanging…
Stay calm
The first step, and the most important, is to diagnose the status of the project. For this, the help of your team will be invaluable. Each member will have a good understanding of where they stand, but not necessarily a complete understanding of the project.
It's as if each person is putting together a piece of the puzzle and the project leader is the one who has the complete picture. New project leaders will have to gather as much information as possible to understand where they stand.
From a management perspective, at this point, the best choice is to appoint one of the team members as temporary project leader or, if possible, suspend the project. In either case, the project will likely be delayed.
Don't make the mistake of seeing this transition phase as a waste of time. Quite the contrary, it is a necessary part of the process. No matter how strong the wind is, if the captain doesn't have a route mapped out, the ship won't go anywhere. In other words, don't push development until the new leader has a clear vision.
To hire or not to hire?
One of the biggest questions we have to face is whether we want to hire a new project manager or leader to take over the role or delegate the responsibility to someone already on the team.
Appointing a new leader within the team is usually the least traumatic choice. They already understand the project to some extent and the team already knows them. If they are up to the task, this is the safest way to go.
As we all know, not every developer is capable of becoming a project leader. Leadership and communication skills are important factors to consider. Even the best and brightest developer on a team may not have the business intelligence to manage a project (and may not even want to).
If you choose to hire a new project leader, your best bet will be someone with a lot of experience. Project leaders who have had multiple projects under their belt are more likely to be on a project similar to yours.
Part of this experience is related to your area, the more project managers understand your business, the faster they can familiarize themselves with the nature of the project and resume development.
If you choose to hire, you will do well to seek out specialist hiring consultants. Since speed is of the essence, you will benefit greatly from using a service that pre-screens candidates. In some cases, some of these services use AI to try to find candidates for your project with incredible speed and accuracy.
While you find the replacement, what do you do?
Managing the team in the meantime
The time between a project leader leaving and the appointment of a replacement is stressful for managers and product owners, and it's twice as stressful for a team.
One of the most common mistakes superiors make is repressing. On the one hand, it's perfectly understandable that we don't transmit information if we're not sure what's going to happen. But silence is also fertile ground for rumors.
People tend to be catastrophic, we are biased to think about the worst outcome. If we leave developers in the dark, they may start to think the project will be scrapped entirely.
This uncertainty has a powerful effect on motivation and well-being. In fact, this may cause more developers to preemptively leave the team or start looking for alternatives. To avoid it, we have to act quickly.
In the meantime, maintain a constant communication channel with developers and keep them informed. And frankly, if they've been working together for a while, ask them openly who they think could fill the role of project leader.
Many leadership scholars believe that leaders are neither born nor made, but emerge in complex circumstances. Such theories argue that there is no basic set of skills that all leaders share, but rather that context defines what skills leaders need to be successful.
So maybe a person isn't particularly interested in being a project manager, but they have a lot of experience with similar projects and a willingness to teach others. In the meantime, they will be able to fill the role.
Furthermore, who better to lead a group than someone chosen by the group itself, someone they are willing to trust?
What comes next…
It pains me to say this, but during the diagnosis phase, you may realize that there is very little in the project that can be salvaged. This is beyond the scope of this article, but let's just say that sometimes you need to know when to pull the plug.
On the other hand, if the project is going well and you find a new project leader, remember that you are entering a transition stage. At this point, your new leader will want to review the project, see where it stands, and have a clear understanding of the situation before starting production.
This process can be extremely fast or painfully slow, depending on the scope of the project and the experience of the leader. Dealing with a small-scale project is very different from dealing with a multi-level project with millions of lines of code.
We also have to take into account that with new leadership the team will have to follow a new rhythm and adapt to the new leadership. Sometimes the process can be smooth, other times it can generate conflicts, especially when the team has a contrasting style with that of the new project leader.
Our biggest role right now is to facilitate the process, first by finding the right person who aligns with the team's current rhythm and then giving the project the space and time it needs to adapt.
With enough patience and care, any project, no matter how terrible, can become something incredible.
