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Absence Shaped My Project Management Approach

Best practice

Career reentry

What a career break clarified about leading people — and what it taught me about the cost of ignoring them.

I took a career break. Not a sabbatical with a return date circled on a calendar — a real, unplanned, figure-it-out-as-you-go career break. And when I came back, I didn’t slot back into the same version of the work I’d left. I came back with something I hadn’t expected: a clearer sense of what good project management actually requires, and a sharper eye for what gets quietly ignored when everyone is too busy to notice.

The return wasn’t smooth. There were starts and stops, moments of doubt, and a period of realignment that took longer than I’d have liked. But at some point in that process, I stopped treating the break as a gap to explain away and started seeing it for what it was — an assignment I was picking back up, with a new perspective on why some projects succeed, and others quietly fall apart. I approached the reentry the way I approach every project: review what worked, identify what didn’t, define a clear goal, and move forward with intention.

What I found, looking back with that kind of honesty, surprised me. The technical side was never really the problem.

Career ReEntry is difficult, represented by confusing road signs.

What the career break showed me about how projects actually fail

Distance is a gift that’s hard to give yourself when you’re deep in the work. Daily stand-ups, status reports, stakeholder updates — the rhythm of project management keeps you moving, but it doesn’t always give you room to see clearly. The career break gave me that room, and what I saw when I stepped back was uncomfortable.

Projects don’t usually fail because of a missed deadline or a budget overrun. Those are symptoms. The real causes are quieter — a team that stopped speaking up weeks ago, a stakeholder who was never properly brought into the conversation, a process that everyone follows because that’s the way it’s always been done, even when it stopped working. I had been so focused on delivery that I had missed the signals that were there the whole time.

The career break also forced a harder reckoning: I had been measuring my own success by the wrong things. On-time delivery looked good in a report. But if the team was exhausted, if key people had been left out of decisions, if we shipped something that didn’t actually solve the problem — that wasn’t a successful project. It was a completed one. Those are not the same thing, and I had been treating them as if they were.

Delivery is measurable. Sustainability is harder to track — but it’s the one that determines whether the team shows up the same way on the next project.

How I lead projects now

I ask the questions that usually get skipped

Before any project begins, I slow down long enough to ask the things that tend to get rushed past in the push to get started. Not because I’m being cautious — because the answers almost always change how the work needs to be approached:

What does success actually look like for you — not the deliverable, the outcome?

What’s worked on similar projects before? What quietly didn’t?

Who needs to be in this conversation from the start, and who has been left out in the past?

Where are the pressure points — for the team, for the stakeholders, for you?

Every team carries its own history. Every stakeholder has context that isn’t in the brief. My job is to surface that before the project is underway, not after something breaks and everyone is trying to figure out why.

I keep the people visible, not just the process

When a project becomes too process-heavy, the people contributing to it start to disappear into the workflow. Updates get sent to check a box. Meetings happen because they’re scheduled, not because they’re useful. And somewhere in there, the team stops raising concerns because it doesn’t feel like anything will change.

I check in on how people are doing — not just what they’re doing. I pay attention to the moments when someone goes quiet, when the energy in a room shifts, when a question gets deflected instead of answered. Those moments matter. They are almost always telling you something the status report isn’t.

I build structures with room to move

Clear roles, defined goals, open lines of communication — that’s the foundation every project needs. But a plan that can’t flex isn’t a plan, it’s a liability. The projects that go sideways are often the ones where everyone could see something wasn’t working and nobody felt empowered to say so. I create space for that conversation deliberately, not as an afterthought. The project plan is a roadmap. Sometimes the route needs to change — and being willing to adjust is part of the work, not a failure of it.

When the process is fine but the people aren’t

There’s a version of a well-run project that looks good from the outside — milestones hit, budget intact, documentation in order — while the team running it is quietly burning out. It happens more than most project managers will admit, and it almost always traces back to the same root causes: too much pressure absorbed without acknowledgment, too little visibility into how people are actually holding up, and a culture where raising a concern feels riskier than pushing through.

The mental and emotional weight that teams carry through complex projects is real, and it has a direct impact on the quality of the work, the decisions being made, and whether the people involved want to show up the same way next time. A project manager who only manages the process will miss this entirely. By the time it shows up in the metrics, it’s already cost something.

The question worth asking isn’t just whether the project is on track. It’s whether the people running it are.

Take away

A career break doesn’t erase what you know — it can sharpen how you see things. And you can return with a clarity that means bringing your experience back on your own terms, with a clearer eye for what actually makes projects — and the people on them — succeed.

Wonder if your team is feeling it too? Let’s talk →

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