The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Program and Portfolio Leadership Under Pressure: Building Clarity and Confidence at Scale

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

In this episode, Program and Portfolio Leadership Under Pressure: Building Clarity and Confidence at Scale, Kevin Pannell shares how executive leaders can bring calm, clarity, and confidence to complex programs and portfolios. Learn how to think strategically, mentor effectively, and build operational excellence that drives lasting results.Key takeaways: Clarity builds confidence and progressStrategic thinking connects every initiative to the missionMentorship strengthens future leadersOperational rhythm turns chaos into consistencyBooks and resources at peopleprocessprogress.comThese are my thoughts and experiences and do not represent any current or previous employers.Own your mind, move your body, anchor your spirit, and keep making progress.

Have you ever been in a meeting where 10 different projects were moving in 10 different directions? And somehow everyone thought they were aligned. I've been there in health care and public service, now in IT leadership. What I've learned is this. Plans do not fail because people do not care. They fail because people do not know where to plug in. That line from my book, The People Process and Progress of Project Management, still hits home. Because at the program and portfolio level, our job as leaders is not to do the work.

work is to bring clarity to it. Welcome to People Process Progress. I'm Kevin Pinell, author of The Stability Equation and the People Process and Progress of Project Management. On this podcast and the People Process Progress YouTube channel, I share lessons from life, leadership, training, and exercise ideas to help you own your growth, align your work, and anchor your teams through practical steps. Now let's get into it.

Welcome to the People Process Progress podcast. I'm Kevin Panell, husband, father, veteran, and healthcare IT project management office leader. This shows about empowering leaders to think strategically, mentor effectively, build operational excellence that drives lasting results. And as always, this is my two cents, my thoughts, and experiences. They do not represent any of my current or previous employers. Let's talk about the theme of today's episode, Leadership Under Pressure. So when you move from managing projects to leading programs and even helping align our entire portfolios, the pressure changes, right? It's no longer about Gant-Charty.

and task lists, it's about alignment, visibility, influence. The challenge is not just doing things right. It's making sure we're doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons. When budgets tighten, as we see today, priority shift or executives demand answers, strong leaders don't panic. They pause, assess, and act with intention. So today we're going to talk about some people considerations about building strategic leaders, process building operational excellence and progress leading through clarity. So let's talk about the people. People drive every portfolio, right?

But too often, organizations can promote great project managers into program managers without mentoring them on how to think differently. A project manager focuses on delivery, a program manager focuses on direction, and a portfolio leader focuses on value. To help people bridge these levels, we need to model that mindset, right? ask why before how share the why behind every decision invite your team to think at the next level think bigger and mentorship we'll get folks to the program level and it's not about checking the boxes right it's about preparing those other folks your project managers to lead when we're not there so let's talk

about process how can we do this build this operational excellence right so programs or portfolios i've found thrive on structure not bureaucracy but clarity it doesn't have to be super rigid in fact it should be a pretty agile structure, whether it's actually an agile methodology or not, but there needs to be clarity, right? I've seen where organizations have fallen apart because they say, hey, we have templates, so that's good governance. And operational excellence is not about paperwork. It's about predictable rhythm.

Right. So here's what I found works best. Define a clear intake process, right? Make it easy to propose work and hard to skip the strategy step. And it's a must do. build a cadence of communication, monthly portfolio reviews at the high level, weekly leadership huddles,

daily focus blocks, right? Get in a rhythm so you're always talking about the things you're always aligned, or at least to the best of your ability. There is no always, really, I'll say in this. And probably most important is create transparency, visuals, dashboards, roadmaps that keep the big picture visible to everyone.

When people know how to plug in, then they can start to lead wherever they are. Let's talk about this progress, this leading through clarity. Leadership under pressure is really about creating calm in chaos. When everyone else is moving fast, the leader slows down, ask better questions, checks for alignment, it reminds people that, hey, this is what success looks like. This is what separates program and portfolio leaders from task managers.

They guide the progress through clarity, not control. So let's talk about some of my lessons learned that I'll share. When I started to be more involved in portfolio coordination, planning, visibility, I made mistakes of trying to do too much by myself, too tactical. Let me get all this together. Let me get as much as I can ahead of time. And I like to come to the table with answers. But I misunderstood that I had to have every answer.

meaning the answer on all these projects, these multiple projects that are in programs and different work streams. And the thing is, like I said earlier, it doesn't have to have, I don't have to have all the answer. It means creating an environment where the right answer is surface naturally because of the tools we use and the discussions we have, right?

And the right people are connected, that most important asset is our people. So once I shifted from kind of being in the weeds, right, and step back and looked at, okay, how do we want to look at this collective? how should we talk to each other collectively, look at different choices, work with my colleagues. We all have different pieces of it, right?

Some folks look at how do we bring things in and others, how do we ask for new things? And then how do we look at this whole big portfolio of work that consists of multiple programs and, of course, many projects? So here's something that I'll prompt you all to look at is if you're leading programs or portfolios, right? So as a reminder, a project is very ground-level execution. A program is multiple projects together

in a similar kind of silo, if you will, though we're not going to silo ourselves. And our portfolio is all of it. Right. So take some time this week to revisit your organization's why, the real why, not the nice thing that's on the website or on the billboard or whatever. What are we really trying to do that our teams can repeat

when we're at the project level program and portfolio level? Identify one project manager that you can mentor toward a program mindset because they're different, right? And simplify one process, one thing. that's adding friction instead of clarity. What are you doing that's hard for people to do? That's not clear about the steps people should do. They don't know where to go to give you the ideas or something like that.

Whatever it is in your organization, identify it and then take a step to help improve it, right? These small steps and clarity, today will build lasting progress tomorrow. I promise you that. Thank you all for listening to this People Process Progress episode, this executive series. I'm going to focus a lot on kind of leading at the higher level, right? leading, even if you're not an executive by title, leading up and down and sideways with a bigger picture in mind, right? If it helped you think differently about leadership at scale, shares with your team and your fellow PMs and other folks that you know that are trying

to figure out, how do we get a handle on all this work that our organization has? You can learn more from my book, The People Process and Progress of Project Management. Visit Peopleprocessprogress.com for articles and tools and new episodes that I'll post there. Thank you for spending this time with me on People Process. process progress. If today's episode helped you, share it with someone who could use it too. For more, check out my two books, the stability equation, seven pillars for a more balanced life, and the people process and progress of project management. Both are available now on Amazon and Kindle, paperback, and hardcover formats. You can also find more conversations,

lessons, and short videos on the People Process Progress YouTube channel, and follow me on X and Instagram at Pinell KG. And of course, keep tuning in here to the People Process Progress podcast where together we keep building balanced lives, stronger teams, and better outcomes. Until next time, own your mind, move your body, anchor your spirit, and God speed you all.