The One Thing Everyone Gets Wrong About Managing Project Managers
Misunderstandings: Leaders often misinterpret the requirements of managing project managers, leading to common mistakes.
Oversight Myths: Managing project managers isn’t just oversight; it involves fostering diverse skills and team cohesion.
People vs Projects: New leaders sometimes manage personnel like projects, neglecting the need for individual career development.
Feedback Limitations: Relying solely on feedback can misrepresent PM performance; alternative metrics are necessary for accurate assessment.
Strategic Underestimation: Project managers should be viewed as strategic leaders, not just executors of tasks, to add organizational value.
On the surface, managing project managers sounds simple enough. These are professionals trained to organize complexity, wrangle stakeholders, and keep work on track. Surely managing them is the easy part. But ask anyone who has done it — or been on the receiving end — and a different picture emerges. The role is riddled with misunderstandings, and the mistakes leaders make tend to be the same ones, across industries, organizations, and career stages.
What is the one thing everyone gets wrong? It depends on who you ask — but the answers cluster around a common thread: leaders consistently misread what managing project managers actually requires. It is not oversight. It is not status tracking. And it is not the same as managing any other kind of team. Here is what our experts said when we asked them, "What's the one thing everyone gets wrong about managing PMs?"
Mistaking Oversight for Leadership
One of the most persistent misconceptions about managing project managers effectively is that it is simply a matter of being the most senior PM in the room — a kind of elevated peer whose job is to keep an eye on everyone else’s projects. Suzanne Peck, Sr. Business Partner - PMO at Grampians Health, has a name for this trap. “People think that if you’re managing project managers, then you’re just the first among equals and that it’s about oversight of the projects that the project managers are running,” she says.“And that it’s not about managing diverse people with diverse skills and creating a real team.”
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People think that if you’re managing project managers, then you’re just the first among equals and that it’s about oversight of the projects that the PMs are running and not about managing diverse people with diverse skills.
The phrase “first among equals” — borrowed from her time working in the courts — captures exactly where the thinking goes wrong. When leaders see their job as watching over projects rather than developing people, they skip the harder and more meaningful work of building a cohesive, high-functioning team.
Treating People Like Projects
For project managers stepping into leadership, there is a nearly universal stumbling block: they default to managing people the same way they manage work. It feels natural. PMs are trained to direct resources, coordinate deliverables, and move tasks to completion. The problem is that this mindset does not transfer.
Pam Butkowski, SVP of Horizontal Digital, has seen it play out countless times. “As a project manager, you are always leading. You are always kind of managing people. And so you can slide back into looking at your new direct reports as members of your project team,” she explains.“But personnel management is very different from project management.” Her advice to new leaders is direct: “Don’t look at your people as projects...This is a group of people now who... you are responsible for their career growth, for their goals, for their performance.” That, she says, “is a mental shift from I’m doing indirect management of a project team to direct management of a team I am accountable for fostering growth in.”
Personnel management is very different from project management. Don’t look at your people as projects…This is a group of people now who you are responsible for their career growth, for their goals, for their performance.
Tracking Status Instead of Removing Roadblocks
Another common failure mode is mistaking accountability mechanisms for actual management. Leaders who focus heavily on risk registers, action logs, and status updates often believe they are doing their jobs well. But according to Bill Dow, Director of Enterprise PMO at UW Medicine, this kind of tight control misses the point entirely.
“A lot of times the people want to understand and put tight controls on the PM... where’s your risk? Where’s your issues? Where’s your action?” Dow says. “But what I think people get wrong is not understanding the environment the PM is operating in. What decisions can they make? Where are they empowered?” He argues that managers who understand their PMs’ operating parameters can do far more meaningful work: “If we understand the environment and the operating parameters they work in when you’re managing PM’s, you can really help reduce and remove those roadblocks.”
What I think people get wrong is not understanding the environment the PM is operating in. What decisions can they make? Where are they empowered?
Relying on Feedback Alone to Gauge Performance
Performance management is hard in any role, but when managing project managers, the feedback loop is particularly broken. The nature of the work makes it easy for strong performance to go unrecognized and poor performance to go unchecked.
Nalini Vadivelan, Sr. Principal Technical Program Manager at Oracle, puts it plainly: “Managing project managers just based on verbal feedback really doesn’t work.” The reason is structural. “Good project managers rarely get open appreciation. And the same goes on the other side – bad project managers don’t often get called out.” Because PMs operate in the background of other people’s success, the anecdotal feedback that managers typically rely on is an unreliable signal. Vadivelan’s recommendation: “For managing project managers, we have to draw upon different kinds of performance metrics.” Anecdotes still have value — but they cannot be the foundation.
Good project managers rarely get open appreciation. And the same goes on the other side – bad project managers don’t often get called out.
The 3 D's: Defend, Develop, and Delegate
Some of the most damaging mistakes in managing project managers are not dramatic failures but quiet, chronic ones — patterns that erode trust, limit growth, and cap what a team can achieve. Kiron Bondale, Mentor at Aksys Consulting Inc., has spent 25 years watching the same dysfunctions repeat.
“Things like either not delegating enough or pushing too much onto their staff with insufficient guidance and guardrails,” Bondale says, listing the patterns he sees most often. Beyond delegation, he points to a failure of advocacy: leaders who are “not willing to defend their team and support their team to the extent that they should... not willing to create that safety for their team, not willing to challenge their own leaders when those leaders are maybe saying things that they shouldn’t about the team members and not really creating the opportunities for development or growth.” Psychological safety, he argues, is not a soft concern — it is a leadership responsibility.
[Poor management looks like] either not delegating enough or pushing too much onto staff with insufficient guidance and guardrails.
Underestimating the Strategic Dimension of the Role
Perhaps the deepest misunderstanding of all is treating project managers as executors rather than leaders. When PMs are pushed into a purely tactical role — focused on data, deliverables, and deadlines — organizations lose something significant: the strategic judgment that effective project managers are uniquely positioned to provide.
Jeremiah Hammon, Leadership and Project Manager Trainer at Project Revolution, speaks to this directly. The best PMs, he argues, operate at a level far beyond task management. “We have to be really good in leadership, communication, casting a vision, letting team members know here’s what it is we have to achieve, but here’s who you’re going to become on that journey.” When managers understand the financial and strategic objectives at stake, Hammon says, “we can make decisions that add value to the organization, the company, and also the customers.” But too often, the role gets narrowed: “A lot of us get pushed into a little corner. And we’re told that we have to just be the data analysis, the doers when really we are the strategic leaders.”
We have to be really good in leadership, communication, casting a vision, letting team members know here’s what it is we have to achieve, but here’s who you’re going to become on that journey.
The Real Job
Managing project managers is not an extension of being a project manager. It requires a fundamentally different orientation — one that prioritizes people over process, environment over output, and strategic clarity over status reports.
The leaders who get it right are not the ones asking the loudest about risks and issues. They are the ones building the conditions in which their PMs can actually lead — clearing roadblocks, defining authority, defending their people, and challenging them to grow. That is the job. And it turns out, most people get it wrong.
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