Overtaking the Traditional Leadership Style in Megaprojects

The inability to effectively manage structural, social and emergent complexity is one of the main causes of megaprojects failure. The leader’s technical skills are beyond necessary but not sufficient to deal with situations of increasing complexity. High levels of complexity can only be addressed with radical new approaches. Specifically, this paper aims to shift the focus from a traditional concept of leadership acknowledged to a specifical individual within a project to an organization-wide, aware and sustainable (WAS) leadership exerted by key people. All key people involved in the implementation of the megaproject (designers, analysts, project managers, …) are invited to exercise a new leadership style that, in the model we propose, has three main characteristics. To give a practical imprinting to the research, a case study has been selected to describe the traits and skills of the WAS leader in megaprojects.