From Project Manager to Project Leader (18.75 PDUs)

15 in-depth interviews with global leadership experts from the Leadership Academy series. Earn 18.75 Power Skills PDUs.
What you'll learn

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Apply influence techniques that let you lead upward and sideways when you hold no formal authority over the people on your project.
Discover fifteen contrasting leadership styles, from a four-star general to an orchestra conductor, rather than following one prescribed methodology.
Apply coaching questions that develop your team members instead of supplying them with your own answers.
Earn 17.75 Power Skills PDUs toward your PMI certification renewal, at one PDU per hour watched, with a printable certificate of completion.
Analyze how your own behavior shapes team climate, motivation, and psychological safety on the projects you run.
Evaluate where to give your team autonomy and where to retain decision authority yourself.
Requirements

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No prior leadership training required. The interviews assume you manage projects, not that you have studied leadership theory.
Some hands-on project experience helps, since you will map each leader's ideas onto situations you have actually faced.
No software, books, or purchases needed. The guests' books are referenced but never required.
A notebook is worth having. Most of the value comes from what a conversation triggers about your own team, not from what the guest says.
Description

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Project management gives you methods for planning, organizing, monitoring, and delivering work. But the situations that test you most are the ones no process solves for you. Earning trust when you have no formal authority. Challenging a decision you believe is wrong. Helping a team member who is struggling. Creating clarity when nobody knows the path forward. Deciding when to step back and let the team take ownership.
That is where project leadership becomes something different from managing the project.
This course brings together 15 in-depth conversations with leaders from very different worlds, each one asked how they handle the problems that project managers face every week.
Who You Will Hear From
General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded 150,000 troops in Afghanistan
Dr. Dave Williams, astronaut, physician, and hospital CEO
Tom Peters, co-author ofIn Search of Excellence
Dan Pink, New York Times bestselling author
Michael Bungay Stanier, author ofThe Coaching Habit
Itay Talgam, orchestra conductor and student of Leonard Bernstein
Kristen Cox, CEO and constraint-management specialist
Drew Dudley, TEDx speaker on everyday leadership
Susanne Madsen, author ofThe Power of Project Leadership
Sergeant Major Jill E. Johnson
Jackie Barretta, CIO
Dr. Emad Rahim, leadership researcher
Dr. Tom Horvath, psychologist
Jonathan Kline, community development leader
Shyam Ramanathan, leadership blogger
A four-star general, a conductor, an astronaut, and a psychologist do not agree about leadership. That disagreement is the point.
Why These Interviews Go Deeper Than Most
Your host is Cornelius Fichtner, who has conducted more than 500 interviews for The Project Management Podcast since 2005. That experience shows in the questions. These are not publicity conversations where a guest recites the summary of their latest book.
Each guest is pushed to explain how their ideas actually work when a project manager has to apply them on Monday morning. When General McChrystal describes commander's intent, the follow-up asks what a project manager without command authority is supposed to do with it. When Michael Bungay Stanier explains coaching questions, the follow-up asks how you avoid ending up with more work on your own desk. When Susanne Madsen describes assessing your own leadership honestly, the follow-up asks whether anyone can assess themselves honestly at all.
The result is 18 hours and 50 minutes of conversation that stays anchored to project work rather than drifting into leadership theory.
What You Will Work Through
Across the interviews, you will encounter practical approaches to questions like these
How do you influence sponsors, executives, and customers when you do not control them?
How much direction should you give, and when should the team have more autonomy?
How do you build enough trust that people will tell you what you do not want to hear?
How do you make a project's purpose meaningful to someone who only sees their own task?
What does useful coaching look like when your instinct is to supply the answer?
How do you recognize when your own expertise, ego, or habits are getting in the way?
You will also see recurring themes approached from genuinely different angles rather than from one instructor's single interpretation. Trust appears in military units, in humanitarian development, in coaching relationships, in virtual teams, and in executive conversations. Autonomy looks different to a general, an astronaut, a conductor, and a business author. Several guests reach similar conclusions about failure, ethics, and feedback by completely different routes, and a few of them disagree outright.
Comparing those perspectives is where the value sits. The goal is not to memorize what 15 people said. It is to build a wider repertoire of responses you can draw on when a real project situation refuses to match the model in the textbook.
How the Course Is Taught
This is deliberately a conversation-based course rather than a lecture course. There is no sequence of slides building toward one unified framework, and there are no artificial exercises.
Each interview is divided into shorter lectures with descriptive titles, so you can find your way back to a particular model, story, or problem you remember. Every lecture is fully captioned. Each guest has their own section, opening with a short introduction to who they are and what they bring.
That format matters because project leadership is contextual. A project manager leading a remote technology team needs something different from one trying to influence an executive sponsor, recover a troubled project, or develop a new team member. Hearing how leaders from the military, healthcare, business, psychology, humanitarian work, and the arts approach the same problems lets you compare their thinking against your own environment and decide what fits.
Who This Is For
This course suits practicing project managers who already know the mechanics of delivery and now want to strengthen the human side of it. You do not need a leadership title. Many of these conversations focus precisely on leading without rank, which is the daily reality for most project managers.
It is not a good fit for someone new to project management or looking for step-by-step instruction. There is no methodology here. There are conversations.
Earn 18.75 Power Skills PDUs
If you hold a PMI certification, completing the course provides 18.75 Power Skills PDUs toward your renewal, earned at one PDU per hour watched across 18 hours and 50 minutes of content. A certificate of completion is available when you finish.
The credit reflects what the course actually covers: leadership, communication, teamwork, stakeholder relationships, coaching, and decision-making. Renewal cycles have a way of turning PDU hunting into a chore. This is 18 hours you might have watched anyway.
By the End
You will not have a new leadership formula to follow. You will have something more useful for complex project work: a wider set of perspectives, questions, models, and stories to draw on when you need to influence, decide, listen, challenge, support, or step aside.
Who this course is for

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Project managers with a few years under their belt who are being handed larger projects and can feel that technical competence has stopped being the constraint.
PMP or PMI-ACP holders who need Power Skills PDUs and would rather earn them from something worth watching than from a compliance module.
Project managers who lead through influence rather than authority, on matrixed, cross-functional, or borrowed teams.
Technically strong project managers who suspect their default move is still to supply the answer themselves.
Anyone who wants to compare how fifteen very different leaders actually think, rather than be handed a single framework to follow.
This is not for someone brand new to project management or looking for step-by-step instruction. There is no methodology here, only conversations.
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