EQ4PM

Quick Update - Speaking, Podcast and EQ4PM 2.0 Coming Soon

Just a quick update on a few things that might be of interest to you.  I am speaking at a professional development event for PMI Rochester on May 24.  I'm giving two different presenations on emotional intelligence and how project managers can leverage interpersonal skills to be more effective.  If you are in the Rochester NY area, please stop by!

On a related note, one of the other speakers at the PMI Rochester event is Craig Price.  Craig has a very successful and widely followed podcast called, Reality Check with Craig Price. Craig interviewed me in advance of the book and the podcast from the event can be found here:  Anthony Mersino - Soft Skills

Finally, I am working with AMACOM on the second edition of my Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers book, to be due out in early 2013.  If you have any personal stories related to emotional intellince, tips, or recommended topics that you think I should include, please post them as comments here or email them to me at:  Anthony@ProjectAdvisorsGroup.com 

Cheers!

Anthony

 

Commiting to a Year of Risk-Taking and Failure

I am committed to changing my relationship with failure.  Failure was something I was deathly afraid of for most of my early life.  I think I was 30 years old before I took any serious risks at all and that included leaving a secure job at IBM, moving to Chicago, and getting divorced.  That year of risk-taking was one of the most important and formative years of my entire life.  But before we go further into failure and risk taking, I have a small confession.

I think that I love Seth Godin.  Yes it is true.  I don't mean that I am in love with Seth Godin, just that I love what he writes and find myself inspired by it.  Every day I find myself excited to find something from his blog in my inbox.

Lately I've been struck how often Seth writes about failing.  Maybe I even love him more when he talks about failing.  It may be that I have been thinking about failure more or that my mentor Rich Blue has been talking more about failure, and all of a sudden I am  seeing it everywhere.  In any case, I noticed what seemed like a trend so I went back through Seth's blog posts to see what he had actually written about failure.  Here is a somewhat random dozen of my favorites snippets from his blogs on failure:

1/17/2008: Is it worthy?
Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.

1/18/2010: Unrealized projects
[writing about director Tim Burton] One key element of a successful artist: ship. Get it out the door. Make things happen...The other: fail. Fail often. Dream big and don't make it. Not every time, anyway.

2/27/2010: Genius is misunderstood as a bolt of lightning
Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing.

7/16/2010: A hierarchy of failure worth following
Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.
FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.
FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.
FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.
FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

1/17/2011: Cashing the check
The opportunity to step up and to fail (and then to fail again, and to fail again) and to continue failing until we succeed is greater now than it has ever been.

4/14/2011: How to fail
All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.

5/3/2011: Hard work vs. Long work
Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can't fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don't make an emotional connection, or when you don't solve the problem or when you hesitate.

10/5/2011: Failures and the dip
In the Dip, I'm arguing that big successes happen when people with good taste see the failures, evolve and keep pushing anyway. The good taste comes when you know the difference between failures that are better off forgotten and failures that are merely successes that haven't grow up yet.

12/18/2011: The difference between a failure and a mistake
A failure is a project that doesn't work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn't move you directly closer to your goal. A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding. We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don't kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won't work, while opening the door to things that might. School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.

1/9/2012: Out on a limb
That's where artists do their work. Not in the safe places, but out there, in a place where they might fail, where it might end badly, where connections might be lost, sensibilities might be offended, jokes might not be gotten.

1/29/2012: Prepared to fail
"We're hoping to succeed; we're okay with failure. We just don't want to land in between."
--David Chang
He's serious. Lots of people say this, but few are willing to put themselves at risk, which destroys the likelihood of success and dramatically increases the chance of in between.

Which brings me back to my mentor Rich Blue and his recent failure kick.  He keeps encouraging me to live a big life by saying, "if you aren't failing then you are not taking enough risks".  (I would also mention that I love Rich Blue but I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me!)  It was Rich that introduced me to the Mindset book by Carol Dweck.  

In this book, Dr. Dweck thoroughly explores our beliefs about our abilities, our growth, and about learning new things.   These beliefs form the 'mindset' that we carry about ourselves and others.  There is a fixed mindset that says that people are born with certain traits and abilities and that defines the full extent of their capabilities.  Then there is a growth mindset which believes that people will continue to grow and develop through their own efforts.

Individuals with a fixed mindset tend to avoid failure at all costs.  To fail means to define yourself as a failure.  So as you can imagine, taking risks or trying something new isn't practiced by those with a fixed mindset.  I think this pretty well describes the first 30 years of my life.

Individuals with a growth mindset tend to value taking risks and being willing to fail.  They see failure as an opportunity to learn about what is not working or to adjust their approach.

The concept of failure is also pretty big in agile development, an area that I have been exploring a lot lately.  In fact, a key saying from agile is "fail fast".  This is often used to justify pulling the plug on risky projects sooner rather than before a major investment has been sunk.  (Note:  I think we have to be cautious about this application because it could also lead to pulling the plug too early, or not fully throwing yourself into a project or initiative, just because it is risky.)  I think the description from James Shore in the Art of Agile Development is the one that I like the best:

Failing fast applies to all aspects of your work, to examples as small as buying a bag of a new type of coffee bean rather than a crate. It frees you from worrying excessively about whether a decision is good or bad. If you’re not sure, structure your work so that you expose errors as soon as they occur. If it fails, let it fail quickly, rather than lingering in limbo. Either way, invest only as much time and as many resources as you need to be sure of your results.

With these principles guiding your decisions, you’ll fear failure less. If failure doesn’t hurt, then it’s OK to fail. You’ll be free to experiment and take risks. Capitalize on this freedom: if you have an idea, don’t speculate about whether it’s a good idea—try it! Create an experiment that will fail fast, and see what happens.

I just spent the previous 3.5 years doing so-so consulting work for a great client. Unfortunately, I became quite complacent during this time and I took very few risks. I wrote less than previously, spoke less, and read less. I CREATED LESS!  I was not challenging myself, I was not taking risks, and I was not failing fast. When a colleague mentioned to me last year that he was reading one business book a week, I was incredulous. "It can't be done" I thought as I silently reflected on my own 1-book-every-2-months pace. (Since the beginning of this year, I have put myself to the task and found I could actually complete 2 or even 3 books in a week when I applied myself.) 

I am committed to changing my relationship with failure.  2012 is going to be a year of ramping up the risks and the failure rate.  I am going to live like it is 1993 again (sans the painful divorce!).  I am going to fail fast.  I started last month with a new certification and partnering with two different consulting firms.  I am reading, and writing.  (If you are an agile enthusiast, please note that I have launched a new blog specifically about agile and program management at: www.agilepgm.com. It might fail, but I am going to learn a lot in the process.)

Stay tuned here for more.  And do please let me know what risks you are taking this year.  I hope they are big ones!

Cheers!
Anthony

What is the Worst that Could Happen?

This is a post about the importance of optimism. I recently came to appreciate the role that optimism, or lack of it, plays in my life.  

My outlook on life is largely shaped by the last few things that have happened to me.  I tend to take my most recent experience, and extrapolate a continuation of that into the future.  If a couple of good things have happened to me in that last day or two, I tend to think that trend will continue and I am very positive about the future. And that is great because when I feel positive and optimistic, I also tend to be more confident, I assert myself more clearly, and I take more risks.  These traits help me to perform better at work and at home.

 

The opposite of this also occurs.  When I have a couple of negative things happen in a row, I tend to extrapolate that and feel very negative and pessimistic about the future.  I find that I am in a 'bad mood' and I tend to do things which are unproductive.  I take fewer risks, I act more cautiously, and I tend to try to be more politically correct.  I also project negative feelings and intent on others and I isolate from them.

 

Most of the things that influence my mood are external to me, and that is a problem.  For example, I have noticed lately how much the ups and downs of the US stock market affect my mood and outlook.  The market has wild swings of 3-4 % in a day and +/- 10% in a week.  When the market goes up, I feel positive about the future.  When it goes down, I feel pessimistic about the future.  The irony is that while the change in stock market may affect my meager retirement savings, it has absolutely no impact on my life today.  Right now, it makes no difference if it goes up or down.

 

The real challenge for me is that I tend to put more emphasis on the negative than the positive.  This is especially acute when there are a couple of negative events in combination.  For example, consider the hat trick when the stock market goes down, I get into an argument with someone, and I learn that my job may be at risk.  This is when I cannot see anything but negativity far into the future.  I see myself isolated, out of work, unable to meet my financial commitments, and ultimately going bankrupt.  And though the consequences are improbable and far into the future, I feel them today in the here and now.

 

The irony is, my feelings of pessimism in the here and now cause me to act in ways that are not only counter-productive, they have the potential to be self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, my negative thought patterns cause me to behave in ways that ensure the negative things that I fear actually happen in the future.  If I think negative, I make negative things happen.

 

By the way, there is actually a name for this behavior and it is called catastrophizing.  Catastrophizingis a form of cognitive disorder, also called stinking thinking, defined in Wikipedia as:

 

Catastrophizing – Inability to foresee anything other than the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.

 

So what do I need to do to overcome catastrophizing?  Here are some of the things that I need to do that you might also find helpful.

1. Get in touch.  One of the most important emotional intelligence skills is to be aware of our feelings.  This catastrophizing behavior is one way for me to dodge my feelings.  Some feelings are painful and on some subconscious level, I want to protect myself from feeling them.  By focusing on the stock market or other external events, I can avoid feeling scared or hurt or angry right now.
2. Recognize what I get out of the behavior.  By focusing on external events and potential negative events in the future, I get to avoid feeling my feelings in the here and now.  On some level, I am also lowering my expectations.  When I think that failure is imminent, I give myself permission to stop trying.  I give up on my goals and on myself.
3. Cut it out!  My mentor will often say to me, "stop indulging yourself".  He's right - sometimes I need to just recognize what I am doing and stop it right then and there.  I need to give myself a shake and get over it.
4. Laugh at myself.  I find that laughter tends to help me feel better pretty much any time.  It is especially helpful when I can look at myself and see how ridiculous I am.
5. Orient to the truth of my life and feel grateful.  For me this is about reminding myself of the successes I have had over the years and feeling grateful for them.  Some people use a gratitude list for this.  I have never experienced anyof the various negative or catastrophic events that I fear up to this point.  In fact, I have actually had many successes and positive experiences.  When I stop and focus on the positive things that I am grateful for, it is easy to ignore or push the negative events out of my mind.
6. Learn from everything.  One of the great lessons for me from the Mindset book by Carol Dweck is that we can continually learn and grow, even from negative events in our lives.  When I see life as an extended learning process, I let go of success and failure and tend to be more grounded in the here and now.

As always, I am interested in your reactions and comments.  If you are interested in learning more about stinking thinking, I've written about the following cognitive disorders in my book:

• All or nothing thinking
• Always and Never
• Being Negative
• Filling in the Blanks
• Should Statements
• Personalization and Blame

Cheers,

Anthony

Forget Proactivity, Try Using Reactivity Instead

My mentor Rich said something last week that really got me thinking.  He was talking about our own self-awareness and how that can serve us as leaders.  In particular, he spoke about monitoring our reactions to those around us. 

Our reactions to others help inform us about ourselves and areas we need to grow. Our reactions may be positive, but more frequently they are negative.  By that I mean that we find ourselves feeling ticked off or angry.  A common example of that for me is when someone tells me to do something.  I was recently asked to send a reminder about a meeting that occurs every two weeks.  My first reaction was annoyance - I don't like to be told what to do, it feels controlling.  And if I think about it, these are the types of things that happen to me all the time.  I probably would not even notice this particular annoyance if I hadn't been looking for it.

When I reflected on it, I realized that I was annoyed by this request for two reasons. First, I don’t like to be controlled. I also realized that in this case, I was not clear with this particular individual who asked me to send the reminder.  There was a previous issue between us.  They had not done something else that I had expected and I was feeling hurt about it.  So the question about the meeting bugged me, because it was a painful reminder of the state of our relationship.

What else can our reactivity tell us?  It can help us to reveal our faulty thought processes.  After tracking my reactivity for over a week, I found that many or most of my reactions are about being a victim. I feel that people are out to hurt me, or that I am not responsible for what happens to me. Ouch!

Our awareness of our reactivity can move us to action, help us to get clear, and it can also show us ways to improve our relationships. Or our reactivity may reveal a desire, a need, or a hunger in us that is not being met.  An area that I am very reactive around is when people act entitled or when they ask to have things their way.  This happened to me just yesterday.  I was in a meeting of about 30 people - some that I knew and some that I did not.  A man that I did not know entered the conference room and walked over to the thermostat and set it on 70 degrees. He did not consult anyone, poll the room, or make any sort of announcement.  He just decided to set the thermometer at 70 because HE wanted it at 70. I was outraged, but only because I wouldn’t take care of myself this way.  I don't (yet) feel entitled enough to have things the way I want them.

So my challenge for you is this - begin to track your reactivity. Do it for a week and see what you learn about yourself.  It may sound easy or dumb but I want to encourage you to simply try it for a week or so.  It is really simple to do - just record the person and event that made you reactive. I started this about a week ago and I have 28 items already. It is easy when you are as reactive as I am!  Let's compare notes at the end of the week.

Cheers!

Anthony

Leading By Example - Part of the Team Wow?

This post continues the discussion on how Leaders can create the Wow Factor that helps to attract and retain the best possible resources for their teams.

I recently posted on the WOW Factor and how to attract and retain resources for our project teams.  The idea is that we need to be intentional about how we market our teams so that we get the best possible resources on them.  Since then, I've been thinking about the various ways that we as leaders can create that WOW that makes being on our teams attractive. 

I was reminded of what I wrote in my first book about this under a section called "How PMs set the tone and direction for the project".  There were some pretty good ideas that were explained in this section:

1. Establish Team Values
2. Enforce the Rules
3. Stand up to Management
4. Hold Others Accountable
5. Recognize Individuals

Just this week I was reminded of another way that leaders create Wow and that is they lead by example.  My current team is made up of upwards of 100 people.  Many of them are from the US and Canada but there are others including offshore development teams in Eastern Europe and a shared services team in the Philippines.  The leader of the team lives in Paris.

We were moving quickly in the direction of adopting agile development techniques and we scheduled a training course in Chicago.  Initially the team lead was not going to attend that training because he had been traveling to the US for 3 weeks in a row. So I was a little surprised on the first day of the training class to find that he turned up live and in person.

This was his way of leading by personal example.  This leader sacrificed to be with the team in the training because it was the right thing to do.  Not only was he leading by making the sacrifice, he also led by showing that he was not above getting in and getting his hands dirty.  He will expect the rest of the leadership team to likewise go through this training course when the time is appropriate.  And because he has done it, they are more likely to follow his example. 

Does this one occurrence of leading by example create Wow for the team?  I don't know know.  I do know that small examples like this over time create a sense of predictability and trust.  Based on instances like this, I have come to believe that I can count on this team lead to follow through even when it requires significant personal sacrifice.  And that makes me want to do the same, and to be loyal to him and to the team.

Bottom line:  Leading by Example should be included in the list of ways that leaders create the Wow Factor for their teams.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Cheers,

Anthony

The Wow Factor - How to Attract and Retain Resources to the Teams you Lead

Project and Program Managers need to attract resources to do the work; the quality of those resources determines the quality of the project outcomes.  This post is about attracting and retaining the best possible resources.

I was talking last week with one of my colleagues about the best way to recruit resources to work on our business re-engineering program.  We are entering new phase and we need to bring on a large number of internal and external resources.  My colleague said we needed to determine the 'Wow Factor' and use that for recruiting and retaining program resources. 

At the time, I didn't think much of it.  "It's a great program, who wouldn't want to work on it?", I thought to myself.  I learned later that one project manager that had previously worked on the team said that he thought we needed a new branding campaign because people would not want to be associated with our program.  Ouch!  That hurt.  And that comment came from someone who had actually worked on the program!

So I guess we do need a Wow Factor for our program.  We do need a marketing campaign to recruit and retain resources to work on our program. We need to figure out ways for people to get excited about the mission of the program and want to join and do their very best work.  The question is, how exactly do you do that?

The question is very important.  The resources on your teams determine the speed, quality, and ultimately the success of your program.  Project management is getting work done through others.  In my first book I included this quote from Robb, one of my long time project management mentors.

“As a project manager, you live or die by your resources."

The topic of how to create a Wow Factor for our projects and programs is one I would like to explore over the next few posts.  I have some ideas about how to do this based on my own experience, but I am very interested in hearing thoughts from others.  What do you do to create Wow for your programs and projects?  How do you go about attracting and retaining the best resources?  Please let me know your thoughts.

Cheers!

Anthony

How Happiness affects High Performing Teams

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune discussed the topic of happiness.  Based on research by Jack Bauer, associate professor at the University of Dayton, the article provided some interesting tips for those interested in happiness.  In this post, we look at those tips for pursuing happiness and we apply those to leading high-performing teams.

Happiness is an elusive emotion. How do we go about being happy?  Is that a choice, that is, can we simply choose to be happy instead of feeling sad or angry?  If so, the question for many of us is this "why can't we just be happy?".

Which is a great question.  Why can't we just be happy?  The research by Jack Bauer and others indicates that happiness is not something that we seek directly, but that we achieve indirectly through other things.  Here are some of the key findings from the research:

• Happiness flows from engaging in activities in which we are totally immersed; when we lose ourselves.
• Happiness is rising to a challenge that we have the capacity to meet.  When we tackle something difficult and our skills are up to the challenge, happiness tends to flow.  It is when we are working toward personal mastery, rather than performance.
• Happiness is more likely to to be experienced in community with others, rather then when we are alone and isolated.  This was an overarching theme of the research.
• Happiness was more likely when people were doing things that were personally meaningful or for the greater human good, rather than for our own personal goals or for material goods.
• The research also showed something that many of have heard before, having more money doesn't necessarily increase happiness.  Interestingly enough, the opposite is generally true.  Happy people tend to make more money for a variety of reasons including because others like them and their work, they are more creative and optimistic. (There is actually a book that has been around for a while called, Do What You Love and the Money will Follow, which is based on this premise.)

I looked at these lessons from a personal perspective at first, then began to think from the lens of a project manager or leader.  What can we apply from this research to help our teams perform at the highest possible level?  Here are my conclusions:

#1 Know the strengths and weaknesses of your individual team members and align them to it. 

If we want to align people with the right work, we need to know them inside and out.  That will help us to get people into those positions where they are doing work they like and are good at and where they are stretching themselves to meet a challenge.  Likewise, we need to avoid placing people in roles where they feel overwhelmed or not up to the challenge.  We want to be pushing people to stretch themselves in roles where they feel challenged, but not necessarily overhelmed.

This can be a bit tricky and may require taking some risks.  On a recent program, we put a junior PM into a role leading a large outsourcing effort.  She had little PM experience and no prior experience with outsourcing and she quickly began to feel like she was in over her head.  What she overlooked was that she was very familiar with the teams that were affected, and the tasks and specific products that were being outsourced.  It was because of her unique prior experience in these areas, and her good relationships with the impacted teams that made her capable of rising to the challenge. 

#2 Challenge Team Members at their Growth Edge

When we know the strengths and weaknesses of our team members, we can also push them to perform at high levels.  We can challenge them in those areas where they are up to it but need to be supported to increase their performance.

This is something I have personally experienced and written about here and in my book.  I do some of my best work when I have a mentor or coach who is supporting me, challenging me, and yes sometimes pushing me beyond what I think I can do.  It has been one of the most important things that has fueled me, encouraged me, and has resulted in the most personal growth.  My mentor Rich will often say something like, "my vision for you Anthony is that you are...".  He holds the bar high for me, when I am not able to do it for myself. 

#3 Prevent Individuals from working in Isolation. 

I recognize that it is a natural tendency for many people to want to isolate and work alone.  There is an attraction for many of us to think that if we were just left to work alone, we would be happy.  (Hey, that's exactly why I became a writer!)  In fact, people are more happy and engaged when they are working as part of a team.  So while there is a tendency to isolate, and certainly there are some tasks that naturally need to be performed by a single person, we want to avoid this if possible.  We want people working together.  As leaders, we need to build a sense of community and help team members to stay connected to the greater team.

Building community can help with happiness and actually speed the progress toward the team's goals.  I recently had a virtual team of developers working to create programs to convert material from one format to another.  This team had a consistent track record of missing every deadline and milestone. Working together with the leader of the team, we implemented twice weekly standup calls.  What we discovered during our standup calls was a little shocking - each developer was working in near perfect isolation; they didn't talk to each other!  While there was some level of email between them, they were largely isolated in trying to solve the collective challenges.  Our standup calls quickly became their forum for communication and they started performing as a group and actually hit a few deadlines.

#4 Help people to connect their work to the goals of the larger organization or the company. 

This is something that is important but not done very often.  People don't get inspired by working each week for a paycheck.  They might get inspired by being part of a team that is making an impact inside their organization or out.  It is important that team members understand the bigger picture of your team goals and how their task or activity contributes toward that.  When people see the connection, they see it as for the greater good and not something that they have to do for you. 

Back in 2003 I was lucky enough to get involved with a large program that was implementing systems to support education reform in the country of Qatar.  It was fascinating to me how many people wanted to join the team to be part of that work.  We capitalized on it by providing lots of information about the country of Qatar, the state of education, and the people that would be impacted by the program.  People got it, and it helped to fuel their performance.  We had a very high-performing team because everyone understood, and bought into the larger goals of the organization. We worked some incredibly long hours and met some goals that at the time seemed unachievable.  We even adopted the team slogan 'Inconceivable!' 

I am sure there are other takeaways from a leadership perspective.  As always, I am interested in your thoughts.  Cheers!

Anthony

 

Emotional Intelligence and Projects - A Research Study (part 2)

A few weeks ago I posted here about a relatively new research study that sought to detemine the relationship between emotional intelligence and project management competencies and transformational leadership behaviors.  The study is documented in a 2010 book called, "Emotional Intelligence and Projects".  Written by Nicholas Clarke and Ranse Howell, the book describes a research project they carried out on 67 project managers. 

 

 

 

 

The research project was seeking to answer two questions:

1. To identify the relationships between emotional intelligence abilities and specific project manager competencies identified as critical within project contexts.
2. To identify relationships between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership behaviors.

Summary of Results

Since this blog is all about emotional intelligence for project managers, it should come as no surprise to you that the results of this study did show a direct relationships between emotional intelligence and both PM competency and transformational leadership behaviors. More than that, it is just common sense!  Read on for some of the details about the results.

Question #1 - Emotional Intelligence Ability and PM Competencies

Let's first take a look at their first question, which is the relationship between emotional intelligence abilities and specific project manager competencies. The table below show an X for a positive correlation.  For the specific competencies of teamwork and managing conflict, overall emotional intelligence was important, as were the abilities to use emotions to facilitate thinking and understand emotional meanings. 

 
 
Teamwork – Teamwork was positively linked to the emotional competencies of using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotional meanings, and total EI.  Teamwork was also positively correlated with the personality traits of emotional stability and openness.

Communications – No significant correlation was found between emotional intelligence abilities and communications.  This is rather surprising, frankly, and something I need to dig into a little.

Attentiveness – This competency was linked to the emotional competency of empathy. This was the only positive correlation to empathy.

Managing Conflict – This PM competency was linked to using the emotional competencies of using emotions to facilitate thought, understanding emotions, and total EI.  It was also positively correlated with the personality traits of extroversion, emotional stability, and openness,

Question #2 - Emotional Intelligence Ability and Transformational Leadership

For the second question about transformational leadership, similar linkages were seen as shown in the table below.  However, you can also quickly see from the table that the transformational leadership abilities were more highly correlated with the personality traits.

 

Idealized Influence (TL) – This was linked to the emotional intelligence measure of use of emotions to facilitate thinking; it was also linked to the personality measure of extraversion. 

Inspirational Motivation (TL) – Inspirational motivation was not linked to the emotional intelligence measures but was linked to the personality measures of extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. 

Intellectual Stimulation (TL) – This was linked to personality measures of extraversion and openness.

Individualized Consideration (TL) – Linked to the emotional measure of use of emotions to facilitate thinking, and the personality measures of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. 

Overall Transformational Leadership – Linked to the personality measures of extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness. 

Overall Conclusion

Project managers interested in growing in their project management and leadership abilities should invest in emotional intelligence.  Specifically they should develop their abiility to use emotions to facilitate thinking, understand emotional meanings, in empathy, and in their overall level of emotional intelligence.  These were shown to be linked to the PM competencies of teamwork and managing conflict, and attentiveness.  These were also impacted by the personality traits of emotional stability and openness.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions.

Cheers!

Anthony

 

When in Doubt, be Nice!

Last week, a good friend and mentor of mine overheard a conversation I was having with one of the team leads on my program.  I was not satisfied with the leader's performance and I was not nice in my remarks about what I expected.  My friend observed the exchange between me and the team lead and she spoke up and said "When in doubt, be nice".

Her comment stung.  I pride myself on my political correctness and being nice to others.  Being called out for not being nice hurt.  And she was right.

The truth is that I have a hard time balancing being kind and getting the results that I want.  I am not suggesting that these two things are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think that I have placed a higher premium on one than on the other.  I choose to be nice rather than to be satisfied, and this is a real problem for me.

I was recently in a weekend workshop on growing as a leader.  While the workshop helped me to spot several strengths of mine, it also revealed to me a couple of key weaknesses:

1. I don't go for my own personal satisfaction; I am OK with coming up short.
2. I am not honest with myself about my lack of satisfaction.  I am ok with feeling like a victim, rather than getting what I really want.  I don't tell the truth about what I really feel or mean.  (For more about telling the truth, see my previous post Tell the Truth).

Going for Your Own Personal Satisfaction

Let's start with the idea of going for your own personal satisfaction.  The principle of responsibility says that I am responsible for my actions and my outcomes.  If I don't get the results that I want, or if I am not satisfied, that is my responsibility and mine alone. That is all great but the problem for me is this - I am OK with being dissatisfied as it gives me something to complain about, a reason to blame someone else, a way to be a victim, or just a general 'out' about not giving it my all. 

The better approach is to go for 100% satisfaction of what I want.  This requires being clear about what it is that I want and working with others to make sure it happens.  No excuses, no complaints, and no blaming others.  Just going for what I want and not being satisfied with less.

I like what I wrote about personal satisfaction in this post from January 2009:

“Instead of seeking comfort, we should seek our own satisfaction.  In every situation, we should be monitoring our own level of satisfaction and using that as an internal gauge for whether we are doing the right thing.  My mentor Rich Blue calls this going for our 100% satisfaction.  If you seek to get 100% satisfaction out of every meeting, presentation, project assignment, and workshop, you won’t have to worry about feeling comfortable.  Being satisfied is a higher value than being comfortable.”

Let me give you a real life example.  If you are at a restaurant and you order a salad with the dressing on the side, what are the odds that the waiter will remember and bring your salad with the dressing on the side?  I do this often and I think the odds are about 90% - that is, the waiter will correctly put the dressing on the side about 9 out of 10 times.  What happens when they don't, and they bring the salad with the dressing already on it?  What do you do when that happens?

I know what I do - I eat the salad.  I will sometimes mutter under my breath, or make idle threats about reducing the tip, but I rarely draw attention to the fact that I did not get what I ordered and I am not 100% satisfied.  You see, I have been conditioned from an early age to be OK with that, to even expect that I will be disappointed and to minimize the importance of it.  This is not a healthy response for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it builds resentment that can surface later in undesired ways.

I don't tell the Truth about my Satisfaction

The second big idea here is that I don't tell the truth about my level of satisfaction. Just like with the salad, I suck it up.  Quietly.  I tell myself it is not really important, or not worth fighting about. 

I am increasingly aware that I do better or worse with certain people or in certain situations.  With some people and in some situations, I have this large blindspot that I have come to think of as a form of 'corporate denial'.  It is as though with certain people or situations, I completely toss out my expectations the idea that I could be personally satisfied.  I am unable - no, unwilling - to clearly see the truth in what is happening and orient to my own satisfaction.  A good example of this is with authority figures.  

I am learning that this corporate denial has become so ingrained in me that I think of it as normal.  It is like the water in the fish tank that the fish cannot see or appreciate.  

Being Nice

How does all this relate to being nice?  Well, generally I am very nice.  I am often 'nice' at the expense of being effective, as I can be in the restaurant example.  The problem is that while I may be nice on the surface, underneath the surface I am hurt and angry. 

Let's be clear though - being hurt and angry is what I have co-created.  It is also what I expect to happen.  The shift that I need to make is to be crystal clear about what I want and determined to have things the way that I want them.  I need to go for 100% satisfaction for myself.  This needs to be a top priority. 

Initially, my need to go for 100% satisfaction may come at the expense of being nice.  Because I have been off balance for so long, the pendulum needs to swing the other way.  I need to have an extreme focus on my 100% satisfaction.

So for me to speak up that day and in an unkind way challenge my team lead to do their job better, was actually a grow for me and a step in the right direction.  It wasn't pretty, and I know that I can improve on that.  But I need to continue to get in there and be willing to be messy but insist that things be done the way that I want them done.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts and reactions, in particular if you pride yourself on being a nice guy or nice girl.

Cheers,

Anthony

 

 

 

Emotional Intelligence and Projects - A Research Study

My writing has taken a back seat for the last year or two while I have focused on delivering a couple of large-scale client programs and exploring troubled project recovery.  Those are both topics of interest to me and I plan to write more on those shortly.  For now, I am excited to continue to explore emotional intelligence and how that plays out in teams.  I've taught a course titled Leading Teams with Emotional Intelligence and I am in the process of finalizing a distance learning coursebook for Prodevia Learning.  I will be sharing some of the material from that book here including this post. 

We are going to start with a look at some recent research on emotional intelligence and project management as documented in the book, "Emotional Intelligence and Projects".  This 2010 book was written by Nicholas Clarke and Ranse Howell and documents a research project they carried out on 67 project managers.  The research project was seeking:

1. To identify the relationships between emotional intelligence abilities and specific project manager competencies identified as critical within project contexts.
2. To identify relationships between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership behaviors.

I have posted in the past on another study of project management and emotional intelligence by Ralph Mueller and J. Rodney Turner.  The research by Clarke and Howell followed on that research but took a decidely different approach.  The following table is a summary of some of the key differences in the two studies:

Aspects of the Research	Clarke and Howell	Turner and Mueller
Instruments Used	MCSEIT, Empathy (Mehrabian and Epstein)	Leadership Dimensions Questionaire
Underlying EQ Model	Mayer and Salovey	Proprietary Model, loosely linked to Daniel Goleman’s
Study Size	67 Project Managers	400 Project Managers
Dependent Variable	PM Competencies, Transformational Leadership	Project Success

As noted, Clarke and Howell based their work on the MCSEIT which was derived from the Salovey and Mayer four-branch model of Emotional Intelligence:
a) accurately perceive emotions in oneself and others
b) use emotions to facilitate thinking
c) understand emotional meanings, and
d) manage emotions

The MCSEIT is an ability based test of emotional intelligence as compared to the self-reported competency model used by Turner and Mueller.  Clarke and Howell also measured empathy using an instrument from Mehrabian and Epstein.  

They studied the relationship of those emotional intelligence measures to competencies that previous research has shown to be important to success as a project manager:  communications, teamwork, attentiveness, and managing conflict. 

Another important aspect of this study was that the researchers attempted to control for personality, general intelligence level, and PM certification.  I was a little puzzled at first by the control for personality – I mean, is it like the difference between a Rodney Dangerfield and a George Clooney?  If my personality turns out to be ineffective, does this mean I cannot be a project manager?  Not to worry – the control for personality is to try to isolate any characteristics that may be inherent and unchangeable from those characteristics, like EQ, that can be trained.

The Bottom Line

Are you interested in what Clark and Howell found in their study?  Well then stay tuned to my next post where we will look at the results and the implications of the study. 

Cheers,

Anthony 

 

Writing Two Books

Friends and colleagues, it has been a while since I last posted and I wanted to let you know I am alive and well. In fact, I have two very interesting writing projects so starting next week you are going to be seeing more from me. I hope your teams are cooking and your projects are progressing ahead of schedule. More importantly, I hope you are learning as an individual and growing your skills. There is no better investment.

Why We Are Afraid to Tell the Truth about Project Failures

I've been doing a lot of research lately on project failure and I have noticed some interesting patterns regarding denial and the fear of admitting failure or mistakes.

Since 1994, the Standish Group has been conducting bi-annual studies of IT projects and the success and failure rates for those projects.  Dubbed the Chaos Studies, the research is widely quoted as the industry standard (though recently there is some criticism of the data). Since the inception of these Chaos Studies, the reported statistics for projects that fail, are challenged, or succeed have been roughly the same (see summary below).  The cost of these failed projects and the amount of waste represented is staggering but that is not the point of this post.

 
The point of this post is not project failures (we'll tackle that later), it is fear and denial. I have been out talking to people about troubled projects and referencing these Chaos Studies.  I have found that very few IT Leaders, CIOs, and IT project managers are even aware of these studies and failure statistics.  When asked they do acknowledge that there are a high rate of failures but don't pay attention to industry studies on it nor do they think of it as a call to action as I do.  To me this seems the rough equivalent of a pitching coach not knowing the ERA for any of his pitchers or a life insurance salesperson not being aware of actuarial tables.

But it also seems to me that there is another factor at work and that is a professional disdain for telling the truth (aka denial).  As a program manager, I have seen many resumes for project managers.  The vast majority of those resumes state that all the projects were delivered "on time on budget" as if it were a mantra.  If only roughly 1 in 3 projects are considered successful, there must be someone responsible for the other 2 in 3 projects that were not successful.  Somebody is not quite owning up to those problem projects.

A recent LinkedIn discussion post touched on a closely related topic - "Do we really think someone will declare their project is in trouble".  The spirited discussion revealed some interesting attitudes about fessing up to a problem project situation.  Some of the opinions stated were that it's a professional/ethical responsibility to declare you are in trouble; it is a sign of a good project manager to own up and ask for help; we learn the most from our failures; anyone who doesn't own up should be tarred and feathered, etc.  One common thread in many of the responses was a need for an external QA function to provide an external view on the health of the project.  That is, we need someone other than the PM to tell us what is really going on.

Here are my personal opinions on why people don't admit their failures or reach out when in they are in trouble.  I believe that they are afraid; afraid that people will think less of them or that they are incompetent.  I also think that some people, project managers in particular, are afraid to ask for help because it makes them look weak.

While the Chaos Studies may be skewed in their reporting of failure, I think most of us would readily admit that there is a relatively high rate of failure on IT projects.  We need to have less denial about the start of our industry, more honesty about the state of our own projects, and turn this around so that we see failure as part of the learning process.  We need to not only acknowledge our own failed initiatives, but harvest them for the lessons they can provide. 

Tina Seelig wrote about failure as a learning opportunity in her 2009 post, You can't spell failure or success without U.  She talks about how she requires students in her class to write a failure resume showcasing all the mistakes they have made.  She sees this as a valuable reminder to extract all the lessons from failure and to see failure as a key part of the learning process.  As she has noted, if you want more successes, you have to tolerate more failures.

Here are what I see as the lessons for project managers:

1. The truth always comes out and so it is best for you to share it. You will be more favorably regarded by telling the truth rather than denying problems or reaching out for help. It may take a while, but the truth eventually comes out.
2. Reach out for help when you need it.  Asking for help is not only responsible, it is also good and appropriate communications and expectations management.  Besides, you stand a much better chance of heading off major problems before they grow if you are willing to admit you need help and seek it.
3. When hiring project managers, watch out for those with a spotless record.  Be suspicious of those who say 'on time on budget' as if it were a mantra or a secret pass phrase. Ask people about their failures and see what they are willing to share.
4. Harvest every project for the lessons to be learned.  A project post-mortem should be conducted for every project, especially those projects that are canceled mid-stream. Also, PMs should maintain a journal of every success, failure, and lesson learned through the execution of the project. Ideally this is something that is done using a few minutes each day or once a week. 
5. Expect failure as a requirement for success.  If you and the people around you are not failing with regularity, you are not trying hard enough or taking enough risks.

IT Project success rates aren't going to improve until we start telling the truth about where we are and what is causing the failures.  We need to extract the lessons from our failed projects and use them to continually improve our project success rates.

Cheers!

Anthony

Forrester Research Puts Emotional Intelligence At Top Of List of PM Capabilities

A recent article in CIO magazine emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence to IT project managers.  The article refers to a recent report from Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush titled, "Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers".  As a result of her research, Analyst Gerush published a list of the top 10 Capabilities of Next Generation Project Managers.   

I am not sure exactly what Ms. Gerush meant by "Next Generation Project Managers" or how helpful I find that distinction.  In my experience, these key capabilties apply to all project managers, current and Next Generation. 

Strikingly, emotional intelligence dominates the list of 10 capabilities needed by these Next Generation Project Managers.  Not only was Emotional Intelligence listed as the #1 capability, the next three were all part of the Framework for Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers.  For more background on emotional intelligence for project managers, read these previous posts. 

#1 - Emotional Intelligence: The ability to pick up on events and interactions (both verbal and non-verbal) and to process those inputs in the context of the project plan.  (Note:  These are addressed in the framework in the domains of Self-awareness and Social Awareness.)

#2 - Adaptive Communication: The ability to articulate one's ideas--whether orally or in writing--to a range of individuals, groups and cultures using the most effective communication techniques for each group. (Note:  This is addressed in the framework under the domain of Team Leadership.)

#3 - People Skills: The ability to quickly build and maintain positive relationships with team-members and stakeholders. (Note:  This is addressed in the framework under the domain of Relationship Management.)

#4 - Management Skills: The ability to serve, motivate and focus a team and to foster collaboration among team members.  (Note:  This is addressed in the framework under the domain of Team Leadership.)

If you want to immediately make an impact on your own capabilities in these 4 areas, you can read through the previous posts on this site and boost your understanding of emotional intelligence and how to apply it to project management.

Here are the rest of the 10 capabilities of Next Generation Project Managers as defined in the article at CIO Magazine: 

#5 - Flexibility: The willingness and ability to change one's approach to project management and/or course of action in response to business needs.

#6 - Business Savvy: Knowledge of the organization's business, strategy and industry. Ability to understand a strategy and align tactical work around that strategy.

#7 - Analytical Skills: The ability to think through problems and decisions.

#8 - Customer Focus: The ability to understand the end-user or end customer's needs and the drive to ensure that projects meet those needs.

#9 - Results-Orientation: The ability to get things done efficiently and effectively.

#10 - Character: The project manager should have an appealing personality and a strong moral and ethical character.

You can order a copy of the report from Forrester here:  Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers.  Just be prepared to shell out $499.  As an alternative, you could buy my book (Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers) at Amazon.com for $13.57 and save yourself $485.  That seems pretty intelligent to me.  But then again, I think I might be a Last Generation Project Manager.

Cheers!

Anthony

Use a Game to Motivate

Last year I wrote the short blurb below in my monthly newsletter.  It is about using games to motivate ourselves or our teams.   

One trick we can use to get us fired up about our goals is to make a game of them.  Even better is to find competitors who will spur us on.  Most of us like to compete though many of us are undercover about our competitiveness.  Competition can help us to quickly ramp up our game!  Find someone who is doing something similar and make it your goal to beat them.  Or, create a friendly wager that will spur you both on.

One little-known secret behind my success in qualifying for the 2007 Boston Marathon was that my wife Norma qualified in October 2006.  I felt like she was walking around the house, gloating, with a t-shirt on that said she qualified!  It really got to me when she began making travel arrangements to go to Boston for the race without me.  The thought of her going to Boston without me spurred me on.  I was sad and angry and I didn't want to get left behind and that was the push I needed to qualify.  I ran in Las Vegas in December of 2006 and missed my qualifying time by 12 minutes.  I was ready to give up when I thought about her and that shirt.  I signed up for the New Orleans Marathon and ran that at the end of February 2007, and made my time with only 90 seconds to spare! 

I took my own advice recently when I found myself stuck and I was reminded how powerful this concept is, at least for me.  I had committed to running the 2009 Chicago Marathon to raise money for charity.  The running part was hard – I had an 18 week training plan that built from 15 miles to 40 miles in a week! 

As hard as that sounds, I found that the other part of the commitment was even harder – asking people to contribute money to the cause.  Now my particular cause was an easy one to get behind.  I am raising money for RISE International to build a primary school in rural Angola Africa where none exists today.  However, I still found myself very stuck or scared to reach out to people and ask for help.  With less than 6 weeks to go before the race, I had only raised $250 and that was from my own brother.

So I made a game out of it.  I challenged a good friend and fellow runner Tim to a fund raising competition.   For the last 6 weeks leading up to the race, we would track the donations each of us received.  Each week, the person who raised the least would contribute $20 to the campaign of the other.  We also set up an overall competition where the person who raised the least overall would take the other and his wife out to dinner.

Did it motivate me?  You’d better believe it.  The idea of competing with someone got me moving and willing to push through my fear.  The contest was on my mind and I began to think creatively about who to contact for help and what to say.  I found myself checking where I was versus my competitor multiple times throughout the day (you can check the current results for yourself here). 

The results have been great.  Over the last 4 weeks I went from raising $250 to raising over $6,600.  My friend and competitor Tim raised $8,600.  Together, we raised over $15,000 and I know that is more than either of us expected at the start.  Though it now seems likely I will have to concede the overall contest, I put up a good fight and won two of the weekly competitions. 

I challenge you to give it some thought to how to use competition to motivate yourself or others.  When people are stuck or scared, how can you make it a game?  Where would a friendly competition bring out the best in you? 

 

Cheers! 

Anthony

Running the 2009 Chicago Marathon

As many of you know, I have been a runner for a number of years now and I have run a number of marathons.  I even qualified and ran the coveted Boston Marathon 2 years ago.  This fall I am running for a purpose beyond just trying to keep my weight under control. 

On October 11, I will be running the Chicago Marathon to raise money for a charity.  The particular charity I’ve chosen is RISE International which helps the children of Angola by building schools.  Education has made such a big difference in my own life that I cannot imagine that there are 3.5 million children in Angola Africa who do not have any school to attend.  Our Rise Running team is committed to raising $80,000 to build one school in Angola.  We recognize that we cannot individually solve all the problems, but we can each do a little bit to help. 

My own goal is to raise $3,000 toward that school which is just over $115 for each of the 26 miles I will run.  I am inviting people like you to donate to this cause.  If each person donates $2 or $3 per mile (or one person donates $3,000!), we will easily meet or exceed that goal. 

You learn more about this opportunity by visiting my fund-raising page at http://www.firstgiving.com/anthonymersino.  If you chose to help, you can safely donate online with a credit card.  All donations are secure and sent directly to RISE International, NFP by Firstgiving, who will email you a printable record of your donation.  You can also mail me a check made out to RISE International if you’d prefer.

Please forward this on to anyone who might like to be a part of the team.

Thank you in advance.

Anthony

A Bad Day at the Lake is Better Than a Good Day at Work

I was out running the other morning about 6:00am and I noticed some guys out fishing in the lagoons near my house.  Out of nowhere, I remembered a beer can huggie that I used to have about 20 years ago.  It said, "A bad day at the lake is better than a good day at work".

Wow, I guess you could say that things have changed for me in the last 20 years.  I used to believe in that approach.  Work was not necessarily fun or rewarding, it was something you did in order to be able to pay for the things that you really enjoyed.  In the early Eighties there was even a popular Loverboy song that captured the thinking, "Everybody is Working for the Weekend".  What a waste of our valuable life energy.

My current philosophy is that work should be fun.  Your work should be something you are passionate about, something that brings you energy and aliveness.  I feel lucky in my role as a recovery project manager because it plays to my strengths and it great fun.  I am working with people I like and respect and the work is challenging yet very rewarding.  I am happy and excited to head into work each day.

If your work isn't fun and energizing, then you probably aren't enjoying it much.  And you probably are transmitting that message indirectly through your emotions and body language as well as directly through your comments.  You are certainly attracting other like-minded individuals and creating an image or brand for yourself which is very negative.

If your best days are somewhere other than work, I strongly recommend that you find new work.  Perhaps you need to be on the lake - as the captain or hired hand on a boat charter.  Perhaps you need to be teaching children or painting pictures or growing organic tomatoes.  Figure out what makes you alive, energized, and hopping out of bed in the morning and go do it with passion.

Cheers,

Anthony

Living the Dream

I have a bunch of friends who founded a consulting company called Junction Solutions about 6 years ago.  They worked hard and the company has grown exponentially.  As a result, they are all very successful and likely quite wealthy. 

One of the founders is named Jeff.  I talked with Jeff several times about the possibility of joining the company (a decision I sometimes question) and I'll never forget his signature line - "I'm living the dream".  These guys were all working like crazy and sacrificing a lot to make their company successful but they viewed it as fun and as living out their dream. 

I get a little jealous when I hear that they are living the dream.  As I think about my own life and career, more often than not I look like I am in the battle for my life.  I usually look more like I am struggling and fighting for survival than looking like I am thriving and at ease.

This is a lot like my running.  When I run I am generally pushing myself, tired, out of breath, and looking like I need a long nap.  Take a look at this picture below taken moments after finishing the Las Vegas Marathon in December of 2006.  Do I look to you like I am living the dream?

 

In short, no.  I look spent, completely used up, and nearly dead.  Which is exactly how I felt that day in that moment.  I was trying to get a 3:30 marathon time to qualify for the Boston Marathon and on this day, I came up short.  I was utterly exhausted and dehydrated as well.  I had my wife Norma, my brother Scott, and my friend Tim all there to support me and I felt like I let them down because I did not do what I came there to do.  I went all out and I did not achieve my goal.

The thing is, I often work like this as well.  I go all out and wind up looking like I am spent, used up, and just hanging on by a thread.  I don't imagine it is attractive to others and I don't believe it conveys an image of success.  It does not look like I am living the dream.

Or does it?  Is it possible to be spending yourself entirely, to be going all out, to go after your goals with abandon AND to be living the dream at the same time?  Is it possible that this look of exhaustion is also a look of living the dream?

What would living the dream look like for you?  Would it be a smile of contentment as you sit back and relax in a lawn chair sipping a cold drink?  Or would it be the look of near exhaustion as you strive for your goals - whatever they are - without looking backwards or to the side?  Can we be 'in the fight' and 'leaving it all on the field' and living the dream at the same time?

I have come to the conclusion that I am indeed living the dream and I want to be more comfortable telling people that.  After all, I am doing work that is satisfying and rewarding to me.  Like Winston Wolf, I have a reputation for fixing problems.  I am building relationships with people all the time and helping organizations to reach their goals.  I am using the unique gifts and talents that God has given me.  It is a wild ride that often leaves me drained, exhausted, yet somehow satisfied.  If that isn't living the dream, I don't know what is. 

Cheers!

Anthony

Build Effective Relationships...with Everyone

This post is part of my series called "Soft Skills for Hard Time; How to be Your Best When the Economy is a Mess".  My goal is to get you to appreciate that your security comes from within and you can increase your security and value to the marketplace by investing in your soft skills.

In the movie the Godfather II, Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, says that his father taught him to "keep his friends close and his enemies closer".

 

I think the point he was trying to make is that we need to build effective relationships with others.  In particular, we need to be attentive to building relationships with those we don't consider our friends, who don't like us or we don't like, those who are different from us, or those who intimidate us. 

Think about the spectrum of people that you interact with on a regular basis.  At the highest level, you have the ones that you like and the ones you don't like.  Of that second group, you have people that you don't know very well, people that you are sure don't like you, people that are too busy too spend time with you, people that are self-focused and disinterested in you and your success, and the people who for any reason seem to send out a signal that says "please go away and stay away".  (BTW, I used to send those signals myself.) 

It is natural for us to spend the majority of our time with people we DO LIKE and that LIKE US and to avoid or spend no time with people that we DON'T LIKE or DON'T LIKE US.  While it might be natural, this may be the exact opposite of how we should approach relationships.

In the past year, I worked for 3 different companies and led 2 different projects and 3 programs.  With the exception of two people, every resource on those 5 teams was a brand new relationship for me.  I am probably unique in terms of project managers.  But I think I know something about building stakeholder relationships and doing it quickly and effectively.  I make relationship-building a priority because it is critical to my success.  

I still struggle though when it comes to building relationships with certain people.  I put them last on my list when returning calls. I dread my next interaction with them.  I grind my teeth when they speak up at meetings.  My stomach turns when I see their caller id on my phone.   

The Godfather knew what he was talking about when he said to 'keep your enemies closer'.  I admit that I struggle with this but I do know the way out - we need to invest in those relationships that are difficult.  This means to invest in getting to know the people that are tough instead of avoiding them.

There are a couple of tools that I use to help with this - a strengths and weakness assessment and a stakeholder matrix.  I will talk about strengths and weaknesses in an upcoming post.  Read on for more information about using a stakeholder matrix.

The stakeholder matrix is a helpful way to collect and organize information about our team, sponsor, key contributors and any other stakeholders involved in our projects and programs.  Some of the key pieces of information I recommend collecting includes:

• Stakeholder Priority 
• Position toward you (positive, neutral, negative) 
• Role on the Project 
• Stakeholder Objectives 
• Facts, Passion, and Areas of Interest 
• Communications Style

The key benefit that I see in the use of the matrix is to keep us honest.  By putting it together in one place, we can get a clear view of the state of our relationships.  When we begin to look across our projects and programs and compare our relationships, we can see the patterns where we have inconsistencies in relationships.  Sometimes we think we do a good job with all our relationships, however, without some sort of tracking mechanism, we don’t really know. 

I often have workshop participants complete the stakeholder matrix as an exercise.  Inevitably, they are surprised at how little they know about specific team members or other stakeholders. 

 

You can download a blank stakeholder analysis template from my website here.  Use it to catalog your current relationships and identify those that are in the most trouble or are the most challenging to build.  Then, one relationship at a time, take steps to address those relationships that are hardest for you or in the worst shape. 

Action Steps:

1. Download the stakeholder analysis tool and complete it for your current project or team.
2. Identify those relationships that are difficult for you and what it is that makes them difficult.  It is because people don't like you, they avoid you, you are intimidated, or they are too busy?  Try to be as specific as possible.  Rank order the relationships from best to worst.
3. Pick just one of those relationships to start with and make an investment.  There are plenty of posts on relationship building here on this blog to give you ideas.  But the simplest way to build the relationship is to spend some time with the other person.
4. Treat your relationship building efforts as a game.  Give yourself points every day when you do well and deduct points when you don't.  Have fun with it.

Please stop back and post a comment about your relationship building struggles and successes.   

Cheers!

Anthony

 

Tell the Truth - Part 1

This post is part of a new series that I call "Soft Skills for Hard Time; How to be Your Best When the Economy is a Mess".  My goal is to get you to appreciate that your security comes from within and you can increase your security and value to the marketplace by investing in your soft skills.

People laugh when I say that we should tell the truth.  They say that of course you need to tell the truth.  I am not necessarily talking about telling the truth in big ways like, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.  What I am talking about is truthfulness and integrity across all of our communications.  It also means being able to tell the truth in a way that is responsible and not mean-spirited.  And it means not leaving things out or telling only part of the truth.

I find that I really appreciate people that tell the truth.  In the movie Liar Liar, Jim Carey plays an attorney.  For a short period of time, he cannot tell a lie.  As a result, he finds that both his personal and professional life becomes untenable.  My favorite part of the movie is when he is asked to say something about each of his co-workers gathered together in a conference room.  Since he must tell the truth, he tends to say the things that everyone knows about each other but no one else is willing to say.  Everyone finds it hilarious as he goes around the large conference table saying what everyone has thought about but never said out loud. 

Unless you are ready to make a job change, I suggest that you think twice before you go into work and try to do the same.  But I would contend that people that can tell the truth in a direct and responsible way are valued.  Think about your close friends and co-workers.  Do you value the ones who "tell it like it is" or always let you know where they stand?  I know I do. 

Telling the truth is a key part of the emotional intelligence competence of relationship management.  Truth is critical to effective relationships. 

The challenge for many of us is that we have been taught that telling the truth is not a good idea when it comes to others.  Each of us were taught some rules about what is OK to say and what is not.  Take a look at the following spoken and unspoken rules from my childhood and see if you can predict the impact that the rule had on my ability to tell the truth as an adult.

1. If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.
2. Children should be seen and not heard.
3. Respect your elders
4. We don't talk about things outside of our family

Look at each of these rules from a “truthfulness” point of view - do you think that these rules would tend to shape children into truth tellers?  Well, no.  In fact, my tendency in the past would have been to say nothing so that I didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.  Or, I would leak out my "truth" in a very sarcastic or mean-spirted way. 

If I want to be a strong leader and project manager, I need to be able to tell the truth as directly and responsibly as possible.  Tellling the truth makes me trustworthy, it attracts followers, and helps me to build strong relationships with others.  I know all that but I still find it challenging some times due to my early childhood training. 

Not long ago, I was responsible for a critical IT program and I reported directly to the executive sponsor.  One day prior to a large program review, I received an email from my sponsor's manager "Gary", who was also a critical stakeholder.  Gary said he wanted a program update directly from me.  He said he wanted the unfiltered truth about the state of the program.   

I was flattered and excited.  He wants to hear from me!  Wow, I must be important.  We had the call on a Friday morning, before a broader program review with my sponsor and other key stakeholders.   I was pretty blunt and straightforward when I shared my thoughts and recommendations with Gary.  I think I may even have quietly congratulated myself on what a good truth-teller I had become.  I did not, however, tell my sponsor about the call.

Later that day, in the middle of the broader program review, Gary dropped a bomb.  Out of nowhere he said something like "this was one of the things that I asked Anthony about when we spoke this morning".  Ouch!  I did not see that coming.  My sponsor didn't say anything (out loud), but his body language spoke volumes!  In fact, he did not say another word to me that day. 

It was clear that he didn't like being blindsided.  Duh!  I should have let him know I was going to talk with his boss about the program.  I went from feeling like someone important to feeling like a snitch.  I felt like a total schmuck for not telling the complete truth to my sponsor.  

Later that day, I caught up with my sponsor and I apologized for not telling him about the call.  I told him that I would always let him know whenever I had any type of conversation with his boss.  He said that it was OK and I think that I repaired some of the damage, but I know that my actions that day cost me big time in terms of his trust.

So do you think you are good at telling the truth or in need of some help?  Here are some action steps to help you improve in this area.

1. What are the spoken and unspoken messages you learned about telling the truth as you were growing up?  If you don't remember, call your siblings and see if they do.  Dig in to see how those rules affect you and your relationships now as an adult.  
2. What are those areas where you are challenged to be entirely truthful?  What can you do to be more truthful?

Opportunity for Those Impacted by Economic Turndown

In my last newsletter, I announced that I would offer free participation at my next Emotional Intelligence Workshop for any project managers who had lost their job in the current economic turndown.  The workshop will help individuals boost their soft skills and build relationships with project team members and other key stakesholders.  The location is Schaumburg IL and it provides 14 PDUs and is a $700 value - I only ask that the participants pay a nominal fee for materials. 

That workshop is coming up in less than 3 weeks (April 13 and 14) so I just want to remind everyone that if you want to take advantage of this offer, please contact me for registration information. 

Cheers!

Anthony