Archives for 2005

To make a difference in your current position, think about how your next employer would view your accomplishments.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

You have a challenging job. You have a lot of responsibility. You work hard—often longer hours than you would like. There’s a lot riding on your leadership to make things happen. At the end of the day, when the dust has settled and you reflect on your decisions, actions and their impacts, ask yourself these questions: What have I achieved—or am I achieving—that is truly noteworthy? What is my impact to the project, organization or company? In other words, do your actions foreshadow a great resume? Are you making the difference you want to make or need to make?

I have reviewed countless resumes over the years. Most of these resumes had one thing in common: They were void of truly noteworthy accomplishments. They did not inspire or make my jaw drop in awe. They begged the question: How can a person work so hard for so many years, yet have achieved so little that is truly noteworthy? But it happens to most people, to most “leaders.”

Leadership is not about the ability of those around you to lead; it’s about your ability to lead despite what is happening around you. Your resume should show how you consistently have a major positive impact on your projects and organizations.

Answer this list of questions to find tangible accomplishments to build a really jaw-dropping resume:

• Do you make your clients look good?
• Do you make your organization money or boost profit margins?
• Do you mentor others to achieve noteworthy accomplishments?
• Do you make your bosses look good?
• Do you accomplish the near impossible?
• Are you consistently reliable in achieving the challenging objectives handed to you?
• Do you change the landscape for those who follow after you?
• Do you save or create jobs?
• Do you go after and secure new opportunities?
• Do you win awards for saving your organization’s proverbial butt?
• Have you established processes that are now standard operating procedures?
• Would your absence be seen as a notable loss to the organization or company?
• How has your presence and involvement made a difference to the bottom line?

Now take your answers, step back and ask yourself, would I be eager to hire this person? If not, why not? In other words, what’s wrong with this picture that you would like to change?

This exercise can be quite telling and perhaps not necessarily a story you want to hear or confront. But your reaction to this reality check can have a profound impact on the rest of your career. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re looking for a job or even a promotion. You need to decide whether you want to really make a difference.

There are two major groups of people in an organization or company. There are the sustainers—the 95 percent of people who maintain the current momentum. And there are the trailblazers—the remaining 5 percent who are moving the organization forward, pushing needed change and making a difference on a larger scale. These scouts arrive first and clear a path for others to follow.

Sustainers are not bad for a company, quite the opposite. They represent the foundation, the core, for implementing the products, services and results that sustain the company. But without the trailblazers—the visionary risk takers—the sustainers could find themselves out of a job.

Your new resume should show which group you belong to. It should enable you to see what you’re leading and how well you’re leading it.

Leadership means acknowledging a job well done by thanking the project team that accomplished it.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

When was the last time you celebrated a noteworthy accomplishment by your team?

If it was within the past three months, you are to be commended. From my experience, most leaders—whether project managers, sponsors or senior managers—fail to celebrate major milestones or noteworthy events that their teams have worked hard to achieve.

Special milestones or events should be planned to occur at least every three months and should be challenging, but achievable. Teams need these noteworthy goals as a means to productively pace themselves. Moreover, as a team approaches a major milestone, it may need to work harder and smarter—just as you did in college when you were heading into final exams and the end of the school term. When the milestone is finally achieved, you should celebrate in recognition of all those who pulled together to make it happen.

Celebrating the successful completion of the milestone is motivating, exciting and helps the team to bond; it feels good. It doesn’t have to be a big or costly celebration—lunch, an afternoon off, tickets to a movie, an after-work get together. Just the act of pausing to celebrate—to recognize and thank the team—can go a long way.

If there is no time to pause for celebration—whether a half hour or a half-day—then the integrity of the goal is highly suspect. If months and months pass and there seems never to be much to celebrate, then you have far bigger problems: leadership.

Either you are not setting the bar high enough to make the effort noteworthy or you are not successfully leading your staff to worthwhile outcomes. In either case, results worth celebrating are really the only results worth having.

My experience shows that the number one reason that employees leave a company is that they don’t feel appreciated. They feel like objects or commodities that are moved from one project to another, from one crisis to another. As people, we are high maintenance; we need to be routinely and positively stroked. Obviously, a project, organization or company cannot be successful without people performing successfully. Promoting a culture that encourages the best from people—that shows its appreciation for their contributions—will give back great returns on that investment.

When we feel appreciated, our morale rises and our workday goes faster. Our dedication and loyalty also increase. I know many, many very bright and talented people who could make more money working elsewhere but they feel so appreciated in their current work environments that they have no interest in pursuing other opportunities.

If you subscribe to the school of thought that people should not need to celebrate or be told “thank you” for simply doing their job, end your subscription. We all need to feel wanted, needed and appreciated.

What are your celebratory plans for your team’s next major accomplishment? People will never forget how you made them feel.

Do You Demonstrate the Courage to Lead?

Courage is only a thought away.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
—Anais Nin, French-born U.S. writer

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

The number-one reason that leaders fail is that they are too soft; they have weak backbones. They lack the courage to be as effective as they should be and need to be. As examples, they often:

• Place a higher value on being liked than on being effective
• Embrace consensus management rather than take personal accountability
• Take great care to not “rock the boat”
• Sacrifice integrity for approval
• Deflect tough decisions to others or wait until the last possible moment so they make only safe decisions
• Work on the easy things at the expense of the most important things
• Avoid necessary and timely confrontation
• Allow the behavior of others to shape them, rather than taking the initiative to shape the behavior of others.

Is this anyone you know? Do you demonstrate this behavior? It’s not easy standing up to those that surround and consume your day, be they executives, clients, vendors, contractors, peers or team members. But if you expect to be consistently successful as a leader, you must demonstrate the courage to lead yourself and your team to success. It’s not about effort or lofty intentions; it’s about results.

To help you muster the courage to lead, we must talk about understanding your:

• Job
• Domain of responsibility
• Duty to lead despite that which is happening around you.

Having the courage to lead first requires that you understand your job: your roles and responsibilities. If you are uncertain about them, define them at a high level as bullets on a single sheet of paper and present them to your boss. Don’t ask your boss what your job is; tell your boss what you perceive your job to be and seek agreement and support. This approach demonstrates initiative and leadership and shows that you care about your success and your boss’ success.

Once you understand your job, you are now in a position to “mark your territory.” Your domain of responsibility is defined as all responsibilities and commitments that fall within the scope of your job: your assignments. You are entrusted to demonstrate the leadership required to execute everything within your domain successfully.

A project manager’s domain of responsibility includes the performance of everyone on the project team and the dozens of others whom you need to perform some service to ensure the project executes and ends successfully.

One’s domain of responsibility is almost always broader than most people first think. One of my clients recently had a project completed significantly late and over budget. The project manager said that it wasn’t her fault primarily because the vendor’s deliverables were late and sub-quality. She continued that there was nothing she could do about a vendor who was halfway around the world.

The project sponsor said, “I don’t recall you coming to me during the project and requesting funds to travel to the vendor’s location to do whatever was necessary to help the vendor deliver on time and with the expected quality.” Had the project manager fully understood her job and the domain of responsibility that came with it, she might have been able to lead this project to a more successful conclusion.

Everywhere I travel, I encounter leaders who become voluntary victims. They might not always readily admit that their predicament is of their own doing, but it almost always is. In my experience, at least 90 percent of leaders who are micromanaged by higher-ups caused themselves to be micromanaged by their own actions—or I should say by their inactions: their lack of consistent demonstration of courage to make things happen.

Being consistently successful as a leader requires courage. How can you acquire the courage—the backbone—to consistently lead effectively? It’s not always easy, but with the right mindset, you can turn around weak and ineffective behavior. Most times you know the right thing to do. Why would you want to go through your job—your life—being too soft, fearing failure, afraid to assert yourself, taking abuse from others, playing the victim, not pursuing your dreams, not believing in yourself, not demonstrating the courage to make things happen? This is your moment. It is a duty. It is an adventure. It is yours to seize!

One last thought: Many people wish they could muster the courage that they respect so much in others. If this applies to you, fake it! As insincere as that may sound, fake it! Why? Because no one can tell the difference. And after a while, you will believe it yourself. You become what you think about all day long. Courage is only a thought away.

You are a leader. Everyone is waiting for you to demonstrate the courage to lead. You can do it!

Thinking for yourself—a trait of the best leaders.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

Do you think for yourself? Or do you allow yourself to be lead by the maze that surrounds you?

The most important lesson to learn on projects and within organizations—even in life—is to think for yourself, to challenge tradition, authority and the status quo professionally and maturely and routinely question your own behaviors and actions. Otherwise, you become enslaved by the past and its outdated or ineffective ideas, a willing victim of indifference, mediocrity, narrow-mindedness and unimaginative thinking. Then, you are stuck inside the proverbial box, doomed to repeat past mistakes. Eventually, you and that which you lead become grossly ineffective.

Many—perhaps most—so-called leaders do not consistently think for themselves.
Do you:

• Blindly follow processes and procedures regardless of their effectiveness?
• Retreat from confronting problems that negatively affect your performance?
• Consistently allow others to dictate and manage the use of your time?
• Consciously do things wrong the first time?
• Accept substandard work from others?
• Follow “group think” regardless of its effectiveness?
• Consistently ignore your instincts?
• Demonstrate little or no initiative in challenging authority on questionable issues and proposing a better way?
• Trade popularity for integrity?
• Routinely repeat past mistakes?
• Think you cannot make a difference?

Many of us have not been sufficiently trained or convinced to think for ourselves. We are “encouraged” to conform even if conforming is harmful to our well-being or the well-being of our project, organization or company.

For example, consider an organization with a project office that has defined, documented processes and procedures. I commonly hear members of such organizations complain of the rigidity and bureaucracy imposed on them. When I ask for specific examples, many cannot articulate a problem. Most of those who can identify a legitimate problem or annoyance still follow the processes and procedures blindly. They don’t think for themselves. They allow processes and procedures to “think” for them instead of professionally seeking to tailor the system to better suit their business needs.

From a different perspective: Your company lacks good processes and procedures and never seems to learn from its mistakes so you leave for a company that has its “act” together. But when you get to the new company, you find the same conditions. Why? Because you are the problem and you bring the problems with you wherever you go. If you were unwilling to dig your heels in at your last company to fix the problems, you probably won’t be motivated to fix them at your new company. Again, you wait for someone else to solve them and resist thinking for yourself.

One more example: Ask yourself what you would do during a “hiring freeze” when you need to hire someone with unique, hard-to-find skills, without which, you cannot meet the delivery or revenue commitments of your project. You assume that no hiring can occur even for the perfect candidate. However, if you have, first, an approved and funded project, and, second, no out-of-control problems, most executives would support such a hire in order to protect business commitments.

One of the most important traits of a consistently successful leader is thinking for himself or herself. Practice the mindset that it’s not about the ability of those around you to lead; it’s about your ability to lead, regardless of what is happening around you. There is no substitute for thinking for yourself.