Leadership and the Project Manager-Critical Skills for Success and a New e-Book
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Project Management
I’ve worked around new product development projects my entire career and I’ve served as an executive sponsor for many development and strategic projects, but not until I began teaching project management to graduate students, did I fully understood the very distinct leadership challenges of these professionals.
Not dissimilar to the plight of the product manager, the project manager is an informal leader charged with a remarkable amount of responsibility, most often with very little of the authority conferred by title or position in the organization’s hierarchy.
The complexities of this high-responsibility, low-authority position are increased when you consider the realities of most project environments. In essence, the project manager must bring together disparate resources—often borrowed or assigned and priority-conflicted individuals, and motivate those individuals to develop as a cohesive team and to deliver high quality results. No small task on a good day.
Last and not least, the challenges of leading projects are highlighted very clearly in the fact that project failure rates are extraordinarily high. While it’s never safe to generalize, there are many sources that indicate the high percentage of project failures (versus original cost, schedule or quality estimates) in new product development, IT infrastructure implementation and certainly in execution around strategic objectives (projects). A report by the consulting firm, Ernst & Young offered survey results that indicated that 80% of the most common reasons cited for project failure are people issues.
Where do I sign up for this job?!
As I’ve become more enlightened to the challenges and nuances of the project manager, I’ve developed a great regard for the best of these professionals that I’ve worked around and interacted with during my career.
Great project managers are also great leaders. The best of the project managers are senior contributors that understand their role is more about helping the group succeed than it is about conducting status meetings and revising and distributing reports. And while these great project managers understand and employ the tools of project management effectively, they are smart enough to understand that they are much more effective when they combine the “art of leadership” with the “science of project management.”
Developing as a Senior Contributor in Project Management:
My focus in my post-corporate life is on supporting the development of senior contributors, and it was serendipitous that I was given the opportunity to conduct a deep dive into the world of project management during the past few years. It seemed fitting to capture my thoughts on developing as a senior contributor in project management in my first e-Book.
The Interactive e-Book:
Leadership and the Project Manager—Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance, was written to serve as a “Quick-Start” to developing as a senior contributor for anyone (certified or not) that is charged with leading and managing projects.
Key topics include:
- Why developing leadership skills is critical to your success
- Identifying and avoiding the common pitfalls of project managers as leaders
- Growing your leadership credibility
- Why feeding people PMBOK dogma in a hurricane is a bad career move
- Improving your communication skills
- Understanding where to focus to develop as a senior contributor
- Developing and managing great sponsors
- Dealing with feedback
- Creating the high performance project team
…and many others.
A Social Networking Component to the e-Book:
The e-book is free, no registration required, and in a bow to my passion for the power of our social networking world, I’ve included links in every chapter to the corresponding content on this website where you can interact with each other, add your comments and even tell me the errors of my thinking! I’ve actually not seen this done before, so perhaps we in the project management world can add our own little footnote in the emerging social networking world, while helping each other grow and develop.
Your Input Will Drive Version 2.0
I am not making a secret of the fact that this version is part of my learning process on what it takes to develop and deliver practical, high-impact content in a “Quick Start” format via an e-book.
I’ve received some great feedback already from early reviewers, including the need for me to invest in professional graphics. I have no qualms promising content and graphics improvements in version 2.0! Most importantly however, I’m interested in your feedback on the ideas and your suggestions for strengthening the content. Who knows, perhaps this merits a print book in the near future. You decide and I’ll do the work.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The work of organizations is increasingly conducted in projects. The growth in certified project management professionals continues at a hefty clip and increasingly, non-certified business professionals are learning and utilizing the tools of professional project management. This is all good.
However, as the most experienced and successful project managers will tell you, your mastery of the people and communication issues are ultimately what will help you improve your batting average for project successes.
Jump in, read the e-book, put the suggestions and ideas into play and share with us how it’s working and where you are running into challenges. Hey, this would be easy if it were not for the people. Fortunately, people are all that we have.
Nine Power Techniques for Building Your Leadership Credibility
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Decision-Making, Leadership, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management
Whether you are a first-time leader, an experienced manager taking over a new team or an informal leader such as a project or product manager, you will be as successful as you are credible. Your credibility is your professional bedrock. Build on it carefully and constantly.
In my book as co-author with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership, I compare credibility to a bank account. Credibility deposits are hard earned and the balance builds slowly over time as you prove yourself to be an effective, honest leader focused on developing and supporting your team and organization.
Most leaders (including informal leaders) are unaware of the fact that they are being watched and judged constantly. People naturally look for clues to a leader’s character. They compare words and actions and if those two don’t match, the verdict is fast and fair: not credible. They look for signs of hidden agendas, favoritism and gamesmanship.
For even the craftiest of politicians, people are perceptive and will base their commitment and support based on “blink” assessments.
You are on trial every day. Don’t forget it.
Nine Power Techniques to Help Build Leadership Credibility:
1. Serve & Support. While it sounds like the logo on the side of a police cruiser, the effective leader understands that he/she is working for his/her team and constantly reinforces this philosophy in both words and actions.
2. Create a Positive Working Environment. This includes working with team members to set behavioral expectations for performance, accountability, decision-making and resolving problems and then reinforcing those values and behaviors with consistent actions.
3. Teach. The best leaders are aware that their ultimate goal is to help develop others. They are teachers that use developmental opportunities and feedback as their primary educational tools.
4. Insulate & Showcase. These seemingly conflicting actions are part of the leader’s balancing act. The leader must learn how to insulate the team members from destructive interference while ensuring that they receive the visibility and support that they require. In particular, ensuring the right visibility for teams and members is a powerful motivational tool.
5. Facilitate & Make Decisions. More conflicting issues. As a teacher, the leader must learn to facilitate solution development and idea generation. However, when conditions require, he/she has no qualms about making and communicating decisions.
6. Communicate at Just the Right Volume. It’s easy to whiff on this one. Bombard your team with low-value communiques and you are a distraction. Offer too little and you’ll be accused of everything including the Lindbergh kidnapping. The best leaders work with teams and members to define needs and evaluate and improve communications effectiveness.
7. Anchor Communications in Goals. Just like a CEO works to constantly integrate strategies and actions in pursuit of creating value for customers, the leader ensures that team and individual goals are front and center and linked to the firm’s goals.
8. Dispense Accountability Fairly. Play favorites or let under-performers slide and not only will you destroy the team environment, you’ll eviscerate your own credibility as a leader. Remember, everyone is watching.
9. Live by the Coach’s Credo. If the team succeeds, it is because of the team. If it fails, it is because of the coach. Seriously, effective leaders don’t look for scapegoats.
Without credibility, your effectiveness is nil. Most people and most leaders are woefully ignorant of their perceived credibility. Walk in the door everyday with the goal of strengthening yours. Remember, you are being watched. Closely.
Develop Culture Sensing Skills and Take the Blinders Off Of Your Career
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management
Note from Art: at least part of this post was prompted by some truly brilliant product managers interacting on twitter. The true-life career horror story is all my own!
One of my greatest career misfires was accepting a role in a firm where I had failed to properly assess the culture. I was blinded by the allure of this successful and global firm and by the sharp people that I met during the interview process.
Had I interviewed from the perspective of assessing the firm’s culture, I suspect that I would have realized that this was a highly political environment with a command and control leadership style that was counter to my own style and preference.
It took 18 months to unwind that mistake.
Fast forward a few years to where I am active as an educator, trainer, consultant and coach, and I rarely miss an opportunity in a program on leadership, product or project management to describe the importance of developing effective culture-sensing skills.
Top Sales Professionals Get Culture Sensing!
Interestingly, some of the best pros at sensing an organization’s culture are top sales performers and lateral leaders like product and project managers will be well-served to learn from their sales counterparts. Yeah, I know. product and project managers learning from salespeople?! It’s like cats and dogs living together. However, it can happen!
Think about it. Great salespeople are expert at quickly assessing a prospect’s business issues as well as understanding an organization’s approach to decision-making. A sales pro wants to know who makes the final decision, who owns the budget, who the stakeholders are and what the dynamics are that will allow an opportunity to move from interest to close. The faster that he/she can understand how things happen inside an organization, the easier it is to plot a strategy.
Pay Attention: Your Culture-Sensing Skills Will Serve You Well!
I can think of few skills more important for product and project managers and other lateral leaders to develop than culture sensing. All of the expertise in the world in the science of project management or in the understanding of a proper product management framework is for naught if the individual fails to take into account and leverage cultural idiosyncrasies to achieve results and drive improvements.
While the topic of organizational culture is big and broad, my emphasis is on the practical aspects of understanding a culture. From the perspective of someone new joining an organization, here’s just a few of the key cultural attributes or dimensions that they need to understand:
15 (or so) Powerful Culture-Sensing Questions You Need to Ask and Answer:
- What is the organization proud of? Who are the heroes and what are the heroic stories?
- How do people feel about the teams that they are part of?
- How does work get done?
- How are decisions made?
- Is individualism rewarded and encouraged or is the team, silo or unit at the top of the food chain?
- Am I working in a culture rich in values or bereft of any?
- How does innovation take place?
- How do people talk about the leadership?
- Is the spirit one of “can-do” or can’t do because”?
- What is the fighting style? Can people disagree vehemently on an issue and then go to lunch, or are grudges long and deep?
- Is there dissonance between stated goals and priorities and where the focus is placed?
- What’s the accountability culture like?
- What type of individuals prosper and what type struggle?
- What role do customers and what power does Voice of Customer play in the working environment?
- Can people talk about tough topics openly, up and down the ladder?
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All of these and the many more that I could keep listing speak to various cultural dimensions that a lateral leader such as a product or project manager must understand to effectively execute on their roles.
Common misfires occur when individuals attempt to impose their own vocational dogma on a group that could care less what the PMBOK says or whether best practices in product management support the idea. The effective lateral leader doesn’t compromise his/her knowledge or best practices, but rather, learns to play and operate within the cultural dimensions to achieve the right outcomes.
As an executive, I never appreciated it when we were in project meltdown and I was confronted with a project manager highlighting how mucked up our processes were and how if only the team had listened to her guidance we would not be in this situation.
The same goes for Product Managers that I’ve known that would regale me with tales of tragedy and travesty at the hands of evil developers or manipulative salespeople as their excuses for why an offering had flopped or a customer had rejected the latest release.
While those examples underscore a number of shortcomings of the individuals, they also tell me that there was little understanding on their part of how to work within or to subtly and diligently help the culture evolve.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
My Product Manager friends have quite a bit more to say about what they are describing as the “anthropology of product management” and the importance of culture sensing. I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic, and suspect I’ll be back with more.
For now, my suggested take-away is for you to think consciously about understanding the environment you are working and operating in and leverage this knowledge to help drive performance improvement.
And for the large number of job seekers in the market, remember to apply these same questions to the firms that you are evaluating as part of your next step. A job is good, but 18 months was a long-time to reflect on my need to do a better job culture-sensing.
Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy
I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.
In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project.
Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:
- The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.
- Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.
- Tools are misapplied.
- The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.
- Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings.
- Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.
- Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned
- A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.
- The Voice of the Customer is never heard.
And so on…
Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success. I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.
Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:
- Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.
- Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.
- Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.
- Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.
- Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.
- On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.
- Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.
- Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.
The Bottom-line for Now
The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs.
While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives. Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders.
Decision-Making and The Three Rules of Risk Management
Your decision-making style says a lot about you as a leader. Some people make a lot of decisions with little more than a gut hunch to guide them and others spend a lot of time gathering insights and information to support their decision. Others struggle to make decisions on anything and might still be considering what to order for breakfast when it’s time for dinner. And still others avoid making decisions because taking a stand increases the odds that they will be held accountable for results.
Our decision-making style is driven in large part by our tolerance of risk, something that can change based on many personal and professional circumstances. An executive guiding a turn-around might operate with a high-degree of risk tolerance, while a project manager leading a construction project might have a much lower risk tolerance. First-time leaders might not have formed a solid decision-making style and might process risk at a slightly more conservative level than how they perceive their direct manager dealing with it.
A participant in a recent leadership workshop that I conducted offered up the Three Rules of Risk Management that she learned from her father (an engineer). I am grateful that she shared and appreciative of the wisdom her father passed along in these simple but powerful rules.
The Three Rules of Risk Management
1. Don’t risk more than you can afford to lose.
Good advice for corporate leaders, mid-level managers and everyone in their personal lives. Determining what you can “afford to lose” is of course the key issue here, and sometimes not so easy to calculate. A patient requiring a heart-transplant to live has one definition and a single parent that needs a paycheck to feed his family has another. It’s OK to agonize over this one a bit…it is the foundational data point of the Three Rules.
2. Never risk a lot for a little.
Common sense, yes, but I see this one violated everyday. People risk their credibility arguing over who’s right and who’s wrong on small issues. Boards and executive teams pursue ill-conceived acquisitions based on questionable assumptions. Marketing and development teams invest heavily in new products without a good understanding of the problem they are trying to solve for their prospective buyers. The operative issue here is defining whether the perceived end game or outcome is worth a lot (usually the assumption) or some fraction of a lot (usually reality). Align risk with the true definition of the outcome.
3. In general, take the risk if you can affect the outcome.
In my opinion, this is the most profound of the three rules, and another point worth agonizing over as you formulate your decision. Hoping that the dice roll your way is what helped build all of those grand palaces in Las Vegas. You cannot control the dice…they have a mind of their own, and in a business environment, hoping for the market to move your way is a guarantee that you will make your better-prepared competitor rich. You cannot affect the outcome of most situations at 100 percent, so once again, you are left to sort what you can control and what is beyond your control. This rule guides you to accept risk if you can control a significant portion of the outcome.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Learning to think through your risk-environment can help you make the right calls on the tough issues. The Three Rules are not a silver-bullet, but they do offer a simple framework for mentally processing the implications of a decision.
In general, I’ve found that most people prefer working for leaders that make a lot of decisions and that make decisions quickly. Certainly, a leader that is slow to make up her mind or that will never make a decision has an adverse impact on her team and her organization. Alternatively, a leader that is too fast to decide or that decides more on a hunch than a good understanding of the facts, issues and risks, is prone to making significant mistakes as well. The trick is finding the right balance, and balance is about understanding and measuring your risks against possible returns. Use the Three Rules to find the right risk/return balance for your decisions.
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