What Your Manager Really Expects When They Ask You to Lead an Important Project
Successful project leaders see the big picture, keep momentum, and get answers to the toughest questions before they need to be asked.
Photo by Tim Bogdanov on Unsplash
You’ve been asked to lead a strategically important project for your company. Many people are involved in launching your initiative, and it impacts multiple business teams and applications.
You’ve probably participated in a project like this before — but leading one is different. And most manager’s don’t clearly spell out what they want you to do.
Why Your Leader Tapped You
Most senior leaders are seasoned operators — they’ve shepherded plenty of projects in their careers, and their successes contributed to their climb up the ladder. But they no longer have the time to lead projects themselves. Now that they oversee teams of people (who are leading multiple concurrent initiatives), they need dependable delegates who can keep momentum, ask the right questions, and get results — just like they would if they had time to lead it themselves.
Your core mission is to become that delegate: the person who sees the big picture, keeps momentum, and gets answers to the toughest questions before they need to be asked. You’re not expected to know all the answers at the start — but you should know which questions to ask and how to get them when you need to. You’ll have to step out of your comfort zone, take some initiative, and roll up your sleeves to help others accomplish the big-picture goals.
The 4 Key Job Requirements of a Successful Project Lead
Whether you’re overseeing the whole project or just your department’s involvement, there are four critical responsibilities that your manager is expecting from you in your role as a lead.
1. Set the Pace
Most team members are waiting for someone else to tell them what to do. As a lead, you need to understand the overall target timeline and the underlying activities required to launch. Your manager expects you to ensure that everyone on your team knows what to do and that they’re getting things done on time. You may have a project manager to help, but your leaders want you to influence the team toward getting tasks completed.
2. Pitch In Everywhere
Sometimes, getting things done will require you to be an extra pair of hands. You won’t do all the work, but you will need to dive in to unblock progress — clarifying a requirement when needed, brainstorming a solution, or drafting a communication. That could require you to learn someone else’s processes or system requirements. It’s not part of your everyday job description, but your manager is expecting it from you in your role as a project lead.
3. Detect Risks Early On
Identifying where things might go off the rails is probably the most important skill when overseeing a project. You’ll need to stay alert for unresolved issues (I usually look for problems that could change the agreed scope, timeline, resources, or budget). You don’t want to be alarmist, raising every small concern, but you do need to proactively identify and mitigate those concerns. It’s an art form to communicate risks to your leadership team while instilling confidence that you can handle them. Encourage the team to escalate issues to you quickly so problems don’t grow into full-blown delays.
4. Give the Team a Voice
As a project lead, you should be in a position to regularly brief the impacted executives. This gives you an opportunity to surface risks that the team can’t solve alone and to celebrate wins that keep morale high. You’ll want to align your messaging with the broader team so there are no surprises (and make sure you’re communicating at the right level of detail for an executive audience). But your leaders are expecting you to proactively keep them apprised of progress and concerns so they can help you steer the project to success. Great project leads distill complexity into clear takeaways, focus on decisions that need support, and keep execs looped in — without overloading them.
6 Questions You Should Always Be Prepared to Answer
The following questions will always be top of mind for any leader overseeing an important project:
Where are we in the project? Executives want a crisp milestone snapshot — phase, percent complete, and major achievements — so they can gauge momentum. A quick understanding of the overall timeline and your current position gives them the right frame of reference to ask follow-up questions (different issues are more important in different phases of a project).
Are we on track? Once they know where you are in the timeline, they need to understand if you’ve made as much progress as you originally expected. This isn’t to point fingers or to place blame. They need an honest health check against the baseline to decide whether to add resources, increase the budget, reduce scope, or reset expectations before delays become political. The earlier you identify that you’re running behind the initial plan, the more options you have to course correct.
Do we have any issues that could cause delays? Even if you’re currently on track, your leader will always want to know which issues could cause future delays. Early warning of roadblocks (dependencies, approvals, technical debt) allows your leaders to unblock problems while options are still inexpensive. No one wants to see a project status go straight from green to red, and communicating potential problems can help you remove the risks before they become issues.
Are all the right people involved? Excluding important stakeholders can cause project delays, missed requirements, political turmoil, or failure to adopt the project post-launch. Including every critical stakeholder prevents rework and late-stage surprises. Most leaders want to feel confident that the right people are involved at the right time, so be prepared to answer how key stakeholders are engaged.
Are any unexpected costs cropping up? Leadership teams have a lot of options to pursue when things go off track, but budget variances often trigger heightened scrutiny. Most companies tightly manage their budget allocation, and asks for additional funding have to be carefully navigated. Surfacing unexpected costs early on lets your executives adjust scope or strategically seek more funding before it becomes a bigger concern.
Is the solution adaptable if business needs change? In fast-moving businesses, leaders need assurance that the solution can flexibly adapt to new priorities without wasting sunk cost (within reason — there is typically some added cost to embed future flexibility, and those tradeoff conversations are great for steering committee reviews). Be prepared to talk about future requirements that have been considered when designing the solution for your project.
Your job as a project lead is to make sure that the team can answer each of these questions — clearly, confidently, and with the right supporting information to back it up.
4 Leadership Qualities That Will Set You Up For Success
It might seem like leading a project is a lot of work — and it is. But successfully leading a project can lead to heightened visibility and faster career advancement. If you can adopt these five core leadership qualities, the rest will come to you more naturally:
Take full accountability for the outcome — You’re probably used to operating inside your own job function. As a project lead, try to see yourself as responsible for the end-to-end success of the project, not just your typical role. When you feel responsible for everything, you’re more inclined to want to understand the details for the whole project, and you’re more likely to take proactive ownership of next steps. It’s uncomfortable, but assuming accountability will help it feel more natural taking control, and keeping things moving will benefit everyone.
Become okay with not knowing, and be willing to learn — It’s perfectly okay that you don’t know everything. That’s why there’s a project team’s worth of people involved. You’re fully entitled (and actually encouraged) to ask other team members what they do, what they need, and why it’s important. Once you can fully accept that you don’t have to know everything (especially as you’re getting started), you’ll become more comfortable asking people to explain things to you.
Ask for help early on — Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you don’t know what to do. Your manager, project sponsors, steering committee, and even the rest of the project team are there to help you be successful (you’re doing them all a favor by taking the burden of leading the project). Asking for help creates transparency, and transparency builds trust. That trust will make it easier for you to approach your stakeholders when you need to, preventing small issues from snowballing.
Have a growth mindset — By taking on projects others avoided, I learned how global brands operate across all business functions. My salary doubled in just a few years, and I was able to take control of my own career. It will be hard work, but if you go about it with the right mindset, leaning in will pay off.
Your First Step: Define Success for the Team
Leading a project is a big job. It comes with added responsibilities, cross-functional complexity, and the pressure to get it right — without always getting the setup, support, or clarity you need upfront. It’s overwhelming, and it’s okay to feel that way — that’s normal.
Now that you understand the job description, your first real move is to define clear project objectives. Without them, your team won’t know exactly what they’re aiming to accomplish, and your leadership won’t have a reliable way to measure progress. Well-defined project objectives set the strategic target so your team knows what they’re aiming for and why it matters. They’re the north star when trade‑offs get messy.
Want a Head Start?
If you want ready-to-go templates, real-world examples, and a KPI library with over 100 success measures you can plug into your projects, check out the Project Objectives & Success Criteria Bundle.
I built it based on the same tools I use with my own clients, so you can get clarity, alignment, and results — faster.
