The Hard-Nosed Project Manager

Remembrance Day 2011

Lest we forget.

Marcinkoism

I was watching a documentary on the formation of Seal Team Six and at one point they show the gate to Richard Marcinko’s compound.  There is a sign at the gate that says:

Trespassers will be shot

Survivors will be shot again.

I love it!  As a project manager you can mitigate problems but they might come back to haunt you.  It is much better to eliminate problems entirely…

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Risk management quote

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Leadership AND Management

Trust but verify

- Ronald Reagan

This quote embodies both the spirit of leadership and the scope of management.  Leadership is based on mutual trust while management requires verification.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Quotes worth NOT living by

Every organization is perfectly aligned to get the results it gets.

 - Stephen Covey

94% of the problems in organizations are due to bad systems and structures – not bad people.

 - W. Edwards Deming

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again & expecting different results. 

- Albert Einstein

Any of these ring a bell?  If you end up with a result you did not want or expect you have to seriously question your approach:

• Did you set yourself up for that result?
• Do you blame the person or the process/method that was employed?
• Are you repeatedly getting less than stellar results?

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Oh so true quote about leadership

I landed on this quote while reading the paper at lunch time.

Being a first follower is an underappreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire.

-  Derek Sivers

That is so, so true.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Kick yourself out of your position...

Get promoted, or at least train people with whom you can share the workload. 

One of my main interests in business is the topic of leadership.  Actually this dates back from my days in the military where I was fortunate enough to be selected to identify and train new leaders. 

One thing the military does very well is train future leaders.  It has to because of the need to mitigate attrition; most soldiers leave fairly fast (3-5 years after enrolment) and the others get promoted up the hierarchy.  One of the important things a leader does is prepare his succession by training his replacements.

I was reading this article in the Globe and Mail that basically states that companies are struggling with training future leaders.  What struck me is how most of the effort appears to be concentrated at the top.  Couple this with the fairly flat structure of most companies and you end up with significant weaknesses:

• There are few leaders at the top and few leaders to delegate to lower in the hierarchy. As JFK said “Things do not just happen; things are made to happen.”. Leaders make things happen; with few leaders, few things happen.

• Leader selection and training efforts become expensive and force picking from a small group. Jack Welch stated in one of his podcasts that he considered himself lucky if he was right 50% of the time while hand-picking VP level people. We are talking Jack Welch, from GE, expect worse than 50% right.

• The risk of losing good, unidentified leaders, to the completion out of shear neglect. Helping your competition is doubly expensive.

• The risk of importing a leader from the outside; this may cause a clash with the organization’s culture. There are many stories of leaders moving from companies like GE and trying to convert their new organization with the stroke of a magic wand but failing in a very bad way.

The military approach benefits from having a long standing culture of building leaders from within.  Here are some military leadership training best practices:

• Starts early and never stops; the course leader position rotates between every member of the course. This is true for all courses, technical or leadership.  This is true even for a recruit course. Each course leader is assessed every day. You can do the same; have a leader for each work package.

• Conduct formal leadership courses all the time. High attrition rates (50%+) are expected. You can do the same; test new project managers or technical leaders on each new project.

• Conduct formal leadership courses at many levels. You can do the same; test new program managers from your pool of established project managers.

• Select future leaders instead of relying on people volunteering for the job. Beware of those who ask for power, reluctant leaders may well be better. You can do the same; push people onto their next challenge, stretch their limits a little at a time to build their confidence.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.  I am a LinkeIn Open Networker (LION); you can use “Friend” to add me to your network, please mention the blog in your request.

A great leadership quote

Things do not just happen; things are made to happen.

- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

This is one of the greatest leadership quotes I've read to date; simple and very much to the point.  

Too often we see cases of team members or even whole teams left to their own devices when it comes to creating deliverables and completing projects.  This is a clear failure in leadership.  It is easy to feel that we, as Project Managers, are also entitled to be aloof when department heads, company leadership, or even clients do not show obvious interest in the project but we must not.

Let’s face it; no one likes to admit that they are lost or overwhelmed and that they don’t know how to proceed.  If everyone always knew what needs to happen, “things would just happen” and we would never have cases of analysis-paralysis, deliverables that drag along forever, end up incomplete, or are plain forgotten.  We could also do without a WBS, schedule, and all other project artefacts.

My project management spin on John F. Kennedy’s quote is that the Project Manager should be the one that “makes things happen”.  Walk around asking seemingly silly questions and be on the lookout for signs that the team members have lost their way.  Ask leading questions that help prod the team back onto the path.  

Just remember that the rest of the team does the real work and that you just make things happen.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.  I am a LinkeIn Open Networker (LION); you can use “Friend” to add me to your network, please mention the blog in your request.