On Becoming a Servant Leader, Issue No. 6

Fellow Project and Program Manager,

In the spring of 2025, I decided to study and prep for the PMP exam offered through PMI Global. I had came across a learning management company that had partnered with my former employer as we received internal promotional emails about this resource.  I learned that the outside company, O’Reilly offered a 35-hour PMP Prep course taught by Joseph Phillips, a widely known and respected project management instructional expert.  When I approached my supervisor at my PMO to cover the associated PMP exam fee at PMI, she rejected my request.  I took this as a confirmation that my managers did not care about my own personal growth desires and goals. 

I decided to invest time in the course anyway as I had learned decades ago that I must intentionally manage my own career.  My personal believe includes a tenet that corporate employers for the most part don’t really care to invest in individual employees to grow their technical and ‘soft’ skills to support career growth including leadership ability. 

A few months later, in the third and fourth quarters of 2025, I went a step further. Joseph Phillips had launched a new startup project management certification program, Projects Under Realistic Expectations or ‘PURE’, a 29-course program with 60 PDU credits.  I wanted to go above and beyond by investing in it personally as one of its early participants. I thoroughly enjoyed the coursework and passed that program exam last December.

I am not telling you this to point at a set of credentials. I am telling you because of what the decision felt like while I was making it. There was a quiet determination and passion  underneath it, the kind most of us carry that have a desire to position ourselves for career success and for those that simply love to learn and have internal goals to do so for a lifetime.  As we think about intentionally managing our careers as project and program managers, do we have anxieties, stress and fears about these questions: What if the work changes and I am not ready? What if the people above me in the chain of command do not see the value in what I do? That fear, stress and anxiety is the subject of this issue, and I would like us to look at it together and ask what it is asking of us to consider.

Many of us entered project management during a period when the role felt secure or we simply ‘fell’ into doing projects without ever intentionally planning on becoming a project manager. Today we hear that new and fancy AI tools can build schedules, summarize status reports, and draft risk registers in seconds. I understand why that produces anxiety. I felt it in 2025, and I feel it at times now starting a new consulting agency even though I have more confidence from building a personal AI assistant this year and using Claude Pro every day.Many of us entered the project management space during a period when the role felt secure or we simply ‘fell into’ doing projects without ever intentionally planning on becoming a project manager. Today we hear that new and fancy AI tools can build schedules, summarize status reports, and draft risk registers in seconds. I understand why that produces anxiety. I felt it in 2025, and I feel it at times now starting a new consulting agency even though I have more confidence as a result of building a personal AI assistant this year and using Claude on a daily basis.

Here is what I have come to believe. Fear of replacement or a future reduction in force is a signal about where we feel least certain of our value. It is information, not a verdict. If we treat it as a self-fulfilling prophesy or probable verdict, we tend to freeze, simply ignore the feeling or we scramble once we get the pink slip. If we treat  the disruption globally with the acceleration of AI in our project management space as growth, an opportunity for additional resources and learning, we can ask a better question: where does our value actually come from, and how do we strengthen it on purpose as we re-invent ourselves with new skills gained from using AI?

My answer is that we have been measuring ourselves in the past by the wrong part of the job that is technical and mechanical in nature. Scope, schedule, timelines and costs matter. Yet when I think about the projects that reached valued outcomes for a plan sponsor, the difference was almost always a human one. An effective project or program manager earned trust that was not there on day one. The project or program manager noticed a worry nobody had said out loud.  They developed a project teammate who then carried part of the load with ownership and accountability.

I find it helpful to think of project leadership as a chain. It begins with empathy. Empathy feeds social awareness and relationship management with every stakeholder and team member. Those skills allow us to influence people associated with the assigned projects skillfully and intentionally. Over time that influence becomes real executive presence, and executive presence moves projects toward the outcomes our project sponsors value.

Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, in Emotional Intelligence 2.0, describe four skills that sit underneath that chain: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Notice that they present these as skills, not as traits we are born with. A skill can be practiced. A musician does not become fluent by hoping. She practices their music on days when nobody is listening, and over a year the hands know what to do by repetition. 

Robert Greenleaf gives us the measure that matters most in my view. He asked in 1970 whether the people we serve grow as persons, and whether they become more capable of serving others in turn. That is a test no software tool or agentic AI passes on our behalf. Project reporting can be assisted and even auto generated now. Developing the next project leader cannot be handed off to a machine.

None of this means we should ignore the incredible tools available at our fingertips. I would argue the opposite. The more routine work we can delegate to AI, the more time we free for the work that only a human can do, provided we spend that time deliberately and not simply on more process workflows or automating tasks.

That is what I was trying to do in 2025. When my PMO declined to fund the PMP exam, I could have simply given up due to not wanting to pay for this investment out of my own pocket.  I decided that growth does not need permission from an employer. When I invested in PURE, I was acting on the same belief. I am not suggesting that everyone should pay for their own certifications or even want to gain multiple credentials as a project management professional. Many employers support this well, and that is a good thing. I am suggesting that when support is not available, we still have career positioning choices, and the choice we make says something to ourselves about who we intend to become professionally. 

It is also acceptable to change organizational environments and cultures. If a corporate PMO is not the place where your skills are valued or developed, moving toward a more entrepreneurial path may be the right step or to intentionally look to other desired, target firms and organizational cultures.

That is a decision to make carefully, with your  trusted inner circle, including family and with a clear view of your short and long-term career needs. I only ask that we make it from our own management and ownership for career navigation  and not from  the emotional states of fear, anxiety or stress as impacted by the advent of AI or toxic work cultures and toxic direct managers.

Seth Godin addresses this directly in the book Linchpin. Paraphrasing his argument, Godin says that the people who become indispensable in an organization are rarely the ones who follow the manual most precisely. They are the ones who do the human work that has no manual: making connections between people, navigating uncertainty, taking responsibility for outcomes nobody assigned them, and offering something of themselves (giving) in the process.

Becoming a linchpin is a choice available to anyone willing to make it, not a trait reserved for a few. (Paraphrase of Seth Godin, Linchpin)

Read that as a project leader and not merely as a manager of project execution and assigned tasks. A linchpin is not a title and it is not a personality. It is a practice. That connects well with what Bradberry and Greaves describe and with what Greenleaf asks of us. All three point toward the same place. Our long-term value in the marketplace as project management professionals grows when we grow other people, and we grow other people by investing in our own capacity and skill set first.

I do not want you to simply read this and move on. I want you to take it into your own real work this week. Here are three deliberate steps you can start now.

1.        Name the part of your role that only you can do, and protect time for it. Write down two or three things you do that depend on trust and judgment, such as a difficult conversation, a project sponsor relationship, solving a key project dependency discovered or new risk.  Or it could be coaching a teammate directly. Before your calendar fills with meetings, block time for them. You are choosing where your real value shows up.

2.        Choose one of the four emotional intelligence skills and practice it daily for two weeks. Pick the one you feel less confidence about rated lowest from a previous survey today. Each evening, reflect by writing one sentence about a moment you used it or missed it. Visible growth is what turns anxiety into confidence, and a written record lets you see it.

3.        Ask someone a few steps ahead of you how they stay valuable and a linchpin in their current role. Listen for what they practice daily, not what they predict about the future. Mentors tend to share more than we expect when we ask a specific open question and then stay quiet long enough to hear the answer.

If we deliberately build the human skills that carry projects to valued outcomes, we stop asking whether we could be replaced. We start asking whom we will develop. Over the long term, that question changes careers, and it changes the teams and families affected by how we influence other internal and external stakeholders. You can do this!

If you would like to practice emotional intelligence and servant leadership skills alongside other project and program managers, I am opening a founder cohort that begins on January 11, 2027. Founding seats are limited so every member receives real attention in our live sessions. You are welcme to take a look at our founding cohort landing page here:  https://mark-hedquist.mykajabi.com/becoming-a-project-leader-waitlist

Serve well, lead well, and grow the leaders around you.

Mark

On Becoming a Servant Leader is a bi-weekly newsletter on servant leadership and emotional intelligence for project managers who want to deliver valued outcomes for their teams and the people they serve.