When you’re pigeonholed as “great at project management”
Being good at project management is important. But ONLY being known for project management can limit your career.
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Read time: 7 minutes
An uncomfortable truth: Not all skills are equally valued in the workplace.
Some skills are seen as more important, prestigious, and associated with senior leaders. Other skills are associated with junior team members, or with less prestigious roles.
It’s unfair. It’s not reflective of the importance or difficulty of the skills in question. But it’s true nonetheless.
Project management is one of those skills.
Be good enough at project management
There’s a reason why no one says, “Wow, this CEO was so effective because they were good at project management. Let’s write a biography about this person.”
The CEO might actually be great at project management, but they are not KNOWN for it. They are applauded for contributions that are deemed more valuable, important, and rare…
Like being “strategic.”
I have a whole future post on what “being strategic” even means, but for now, we can all agree that being strategic is a good thing. Most managers have told their direct reports to be more strategic. Most of us have heard our managers tell us to be more strategic at some point in our careers.
If you want to be perceived as strategic, you need to be good enough at project management to get your own work done, corral others to get their work done, and shepherd projects across the finish line…
But not so good at it that you’re primarily perceived as someone who is only “in the weeds.”
I want to be extremely clear: Being good at project management is important. I’ve seen many operators stall in their careers because they were disorganized and not detail-oriented. And with the macro environment we’re in, more managers and leaders are being asked to be hands-on. Do not think project management is beneath you—it’s not.
I actually hate operators and leaders who think they’re above being in the weeds. I want to tell them to GTFO. I believe real leaders can be in the weeds and are great at their functional craft (beyond the role of managing people).
So I’m not talking about whether project management is important.
I’m talking about being perceived as being primarily good at project management—when you actually do much more.
Do a PR campaign for yourself
I’ve now worked with multiple coaching clients who are extremely competent operators and have been labeled “good at project management.” And it’s not a positive thing—at least not at this stage of their careers.
The folks I’m talking about are primarily leads or heads of marketing, community, growth, etc who are mainly “complimented” for being great at project management.
They have a solid reputation as operators who get things done if a project is put in front of them. To reach the next level, they are now being asked to prioritize what to get done, think more strategically, lead others, build systems that scale, come up with solutions to ambiguous problems, etc.
But here’s the kicker:
My clients were already doing many of these things, and much more than project management the whole time.
For them, this wasn’t a competence or skills issue. It was a perception issue.
They rightfully wanted to be complimented on their strategic contributions and outcomes: driving growth initiatives, creating new products, acquiring customers, etc.
If you do both strategy and execution, but people mainly see you as good at project management, or good at [insert a trait or skill usually associated with junior people], this is very frustrating.
You’re not being fully seen, which is demoralizing in itself. And to be ONLY seen for the more “junior” type of work damages your growth prospects and doesn’t give due credit where it’s deserved.
If you feel like you’re being mislabeled for your work, there are ways you can fight this.
The main suggestion I have: Do a PR campaign for yourself.
If you think about a PR campaign, it’s basically strategic messaging repeated over and over to replace something people used to think. That’s all it is.
Replace the label you dislike with another label. It’s much easier to replace than to remove entirely—if you remove, you create a void. Instead, give people new words to describe you.
Everything can be described through multiple frames. If you don’t proactively pick and assert a frame, one will be assigned to you—and you might not like the framing people use.
Stop describing everything through a project management lens
When you describe your work (and what you see around you) mainly through the lens of project management, it reinforces the perception that your main identity and value-add is, well, project management.
For example, here are phrases that sound very project management-forward.
“Coordinated between X and Y teams”
“Ensured stakeholders were aligned”
“Tracked deliverables and dependencies”
“Made sure everything ran smoothly”
“Kept everyone in sync”
“Herded cats to get everything done on time”
“Figured out the phases and milestones for the project”
“Created templates and workflows”
These phrases frame you as someone who facilitates rather than someone who drives the strategy and owns the outcome. If you are already doing strategic work, the issue isn’t the nature of the work—it's accidentally describing your work primarily through the lens of coordination and process.
Making stuff happen is hard. Getting people to do things is hard. It requires a lot more than project management.
Do not let people unintentionally mislabel and diminish your contributions.
Use language that sounds strategic
The same underlying problem, decision, and actions can sound more or less strategic--depending on how you describe it.
Before: “Coordinated between X and Y teams…”
After: “Led X and Y teams to [do strategic thing]”
^ The “after” isn’t only about avoiding the word “coordinated.” It’s about how you coordinated groups in order to achieve your goal. The focus is on the strategy, not on coordinating teams.
Before: “Created templates and workflows for…”
After: “Created the playbook in order to [achieve company priority]…”
^ Here, playbook sounds more strategic than templates and workflows. Also, there’s a focus on the company priority, whatever it is. The playbook isn’t an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. This makes you seem more strategic because it shows you have the bigger picture in mind.
Before: “Our homepage looks disorganized because there are too many product options in this dropdown. It’s messy looking.”
After: “When we have so many product options on our homepage, it dilutes our positioning. Customers aren’t sure what we can offer them, which means they might get confused and bounce. If we fix this, we can strengthen our funnel and make the most of traffic we’re driving to our homepage, which could lead to major improvements in our conversion/customer acquisition.”
^ The “after” focuses on the impact of the problem. The impact isn’t only that the page looks disorganized—this sounds tactical and trivial. The “after” talks about the business impact of the problem on growth and revenue, two things that are almost always on senior leaders’ minds (and are associated with being strategic).
I don’t have a list of phrases that simply sound more strategic because sounding more strategic depends on the content of what you’re talking about. The content is highly situational and context-dependent.
Still, here are some rough guidelines on how to sound more strategic:
Share the strategy. Don’t only mention tactical details.
Share your analysis and insights. Don’t only share status updates.
Frame the problem and why it matters. Don’t only say how to solve the problem.
Talk about your task as a means to an end. Don’t treat the task as an end in itself.
Share your point of view. Don’t only summarize what happened.
Discuss the business impact. Don’t only discuss the logistics.
As always, use your powers of observation. Look at peers or leaders around you who are seen as strategic. What do they say or do? How do they describe their work? It’s very doable to hear how they describe their work—you’re in meetings with them, you’re seeing their messages in Slack, etc.
Jot down how they tend to structure their thoughts, the vocabulary they use, and the way they position their ideas. This is all fodder for you to pattern-match and read between the lines. Borrow inspiration to describe your work so you can practice sounding more strategic.
Strong execution is about much more than project management
I want to be super clear: Executing well is incredibly important, especially in startups.
Some people might think “execution” and “project management” are synonymous, but I disagree. I believe project management is only one part of execution. Great execution actually involves many other things: strategic thinking, strong decision-making, creativity, good taste, judgment, and more.
Not everyone who gets things done is labeled in a way that’s holding them back. This post is ONLY for people who feel like their contributions are being diminished because their efforts are being unfairly labeled with lower-value positioning than what they actually do. I
If you aren’t dealing with that, that’s great. If so, most of this post probably doesn’t apply to your situation because it’s solving a problem you don’t have.
Lastly, you should obviously aim to actually be strategic, not just sound strategic. So you should work on your actual strategic thinking skills in lockstep with your perception problem.
And if you already ARE thinking about strategy, you may want to update how you describe your work to match what you’re already doing.
Has your work ever been mischaracterized in a way that doesn’t reflect your true contributions? Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.
Wes
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I’m a big fan of yours, Wes. You’re an amazing writer and thinker.
I led an executive search firm for many years (not anymore). I agree that project management skills are essential, but it is difficult to be recruited for a more senior role based on one’s PM abilities and experience alone. The reason has to do with perception. Most people in an organization have no idea what a project manager does, or most positions for that matter. They are only concerned with doing their job. You can be known as someone who 'gets shit done,' but that can be said of the mid-level manager. One wants to be known for one's leadership, ability to influence, strategy, ability to work across organizational boundaries, flexibility, and ability to communicate vision. Most senior executives equate PMs with a junior position. Sadly, they don't know everything the PM does, including the strategy and execution aspect of the position. Additionally, many employees with project management skills and jobs are not always called project managers, which may pigeonhole their careers even more. When I saw this lack of growth in a candidate, I advised them to look for another role at another organization. It is difficult to change another person's perception of you once an opinion has been made.
I think if you change 'project management' to being known as someone who 'get shit done', it's ok to be known for it in the first parts of your career. You put a big emphasis on not underestimating the project management skill, but I still think that people might use parts here to move past it and focus on the higher-level skills. Especially in engineering roles, people see project management as 'beneath' them.
I'll share an example from my career. Right now, I'm a director of engineering at a small startup, under the VP R&D. I'm known exactly for my 'project management' skills, as my team always delivers on time. Recently, I was asked to lead the most critical project in the company, which is not engineering related. It has to do with US government agency (NRSC under USDA - as I'm in an AgTech startup). I'm leading this directly under the CEO, working with all the leadership team. This provides huge visibility and future opportunities for me.
Your main audience is VP+ executives, so it's a different story, but for anyone below that I think you cannot overestimate how critical are project management skills.