In a recent blog post Elizabeth Harrin points out how important the right attitude is for effective project leadership.  She writes, “leadership attitude is summed up by being open, honest, trustworthy and acting with integrity.”  She continues, “If you adopt [these] four pillars of leadership (openness, honesty, trust and integrity) all your management actions should be guided by these watchwords.”

I believe that Elizabeth Harrin hits the nail on its head.  I couldn’t agree more as I have outlined in my book “Leadership Principles for Project Success”.  Following the 5 leadership principles – building vision, nurturing collaboration, promoting performance, cultivating learning, and ensuring results – and understanding that each principle has to account for all other principles as one unit is a call for holistic leadership.
It is crucial that an effective project manager knows that the heart and soul of a project is the team of which he/she is a part.  Hence, a model of servant leadership is much more than a model that “could be used here”; I think it is mandatory if you seriously want to help create the context for high-performance teams. The combination of holistic, servant leadership and creating the right environment for your team to excel helps secure project success.
Have a look at 2 of my recent posts on the very topic:  http://tinyurl.com/3t8s2df and http://tinyurl.com/3t6gkrt.