They need to be passionate subject matter evangelists with the ability to speak in condensed and ultra-direct no holds barred quips that get right to the heart of the matter. They need to be results driven people who could care less what people think of their style, only their results.

The timid, the angry, the indirect, the falsely polite, or those who speak in non-commital terms are rarely effective project managers, leaders or even organizers. Successful Projects and Programs are about visibility and execution, they are about metrics and performance, and everything else is just noise from the teams that can’t keep up.

We put in a tool that gave us access to the information and metrics we needed to find out how to lean out our IT service business (JobTraQ), and suddenly we found out that the real producers had very few of the fuzzy attributes we thought represented a good project manager. Clients, internal and external, find reassurance in take charge results driven leaders that are sometimes seen as “abrasive” being in charge of critical projects, and they complicate and confound the efforts of the accommodating.

Your team needs to be full of the super kind “nice” people who will act as project contributors, but successful projects need a Jack Bauer to drive them home. That’s the cookie on the pillow of project management. Just like a hotel needs a GM who will fire the impolite employee in a New York second, every project needs a leader with the crisp vocabulary that rapidly defies apathy, eliminates barriers, and submits “analysis based delay” to the brutal torture of performance testing.

My wife Linda has a degree in Hotel and Travel Management, a neighbor own a branch of HVS International (a hotel consulting firm). But will say that the Four Seasons is a top shelf firm, along with the Ritz Carlton and Linda’s former employeer Crystal Cruises (with many execs from both hotel chains). They can afford to treat their customer that way because they charge the rates that let them afford this kind of service. You won’t be seeing 4 Seasons and Ritz Carlton rooms on Hotels.com. Same goes for the Mandrin Chain out of Hong Kong. Before children, I used to travel to towns where Linda was working and getting comped rooms at the Mandrin and the service is beyond description. Open the resturant after hours to cook us a meal because we arrived late.

As far as Project Manager bahaviours go, I have to disagree with Vaughn a bit. Being ultra-direct may work in some domains – none I work in. What has worked well for our firm is to focus on deliverables and the measures of progress around these deliverables. It removes the personal and vagueness issues. But they do need to care what people think in many cases, where the PM is a “member of the team.”

Vaughn’s last sentence is the winner in our domains.