We wanted to improve people skills in project management education by making responsible leadership and team well-being visible, teachable and assessable. The project aimed to analyse current practices through surveys in universities and focus groups in companies, based on these actions we identify best practices and turn them into concrete tools: three Easy Accessible Short (EAS) courses, a gamified e-simulation and a Teacher Guidebook. Ultimately, we sought to help European HEIs embed these resources so future project managers lead ethically and support well-being. As secondary aims, we wanted to position responsible leadership as the reference leadership style in project management courses at the partner universities, and to spread good practices for creating healthy, psychologically safe teams, as an alternative to authoritarian leadership models or purely task-focused teams where people are not considered important.
We applied for RESPRO because project management training in our institutions still focuses primarily on methods and tools, while interpersonal skills, including leadership, are not given sufficient importance. Furthermore, the previous CoiSk21 project confirmed, through its own findings, the lack of concrete and user-friendly learning resources for these topics in higher education. RESPRO was designed to address these needs through the joint development of short learning modules and an e-simulation tool, strengthening our institutions' capacity to integrate responsible leadership and well-being into project management curricula through a European cooperation framework. During the project, a depth study was conducted to define responsible leadership, seeking real-world examples through focus groups and assessing the interest of students and professors through surveys (WP2). Following the findings of WP2, in WP3 we addressed the lack of structured resources for integrating responsible leadership, employee well-being, and task definition into project management training, and we created short courses. To practice the knowledge from the courses, we created an online game in WP4. These three needs are explained in the ebook of the WP5.