As a follow-up to my last article about management as a skill, not a career path, I would like to also point out that project management skills are not the same as people management skills. Just because someone is great at one type of management doesn't mean they are naturally great at the other.

I previously warned against promoting your best engineer or developer to be the manager of those teams, because being good at a job does not necessarily translate to being good at managing people doing that job.  The same principle holds true for project managers being promoted to people managers (i.e. manager or director of the PMO), but for a variation on the same reasoning.

Note: to understand this reasoning, you must first read my article on Builders vs. Maintainers

Project management is usually a "builder" activity - there are beginnings and ends, deliverables, and usually, something created during the process which did not exist before.

People management, on the other hand, is largely a "maintenance" exercise - there is a lot of routine, the tasks are more about "care and feeding" than building or constructing, and there is usually no end date unless you change jobs.

There is one exception (that I can think of) to the above rules, and that is when a person is hired to "build" or "restructure" a team or organization.  Interestingly, the types of people who are good at doing that work (builders) typically do not stick around very long once all is well and the ship is sailing smoothly.  It seems like hypocrisy to build a team and then not want to manage it long-term, but it's really just a natural inclination of the different personalities to enjoy and thrive at different parts of the job.

Project Management and People Management are two different jobs, best filled by two different personality types.  Be sure that when you are hiring one or the other, you are taking that into account, and don't make the mistake of assuming those skills will translate.

I would love to hear your comments - particularly if there are other exceptions to this rule that you have seen or experienced.