EQ4PM

Working With Difficult People #01

One of the biggest workplace challenges for many of us is our relationships with others.  When I ask my workshop participants what are their biggest emotional intelligence challenges, most responses relate to dealing with difficult people.  Consider these common examples:

• Team members criticize each others performance to the PM
• Uppper management openly criticizes individuals in meetings
• An individual sends a flaming email that results in unnecessary swirl of activity
• A peer goes over your head to senior management without talking to you
• A team lead inflates their own value and devalues work of others

As project managers, we need the ability to effectively deal with lots of different types of people in order to be successful.  Whether or not we’ll find them difficult or not is a function of two factors.  The first is our skill level as project managers at dealing with different people.  The second factor is the style, personality, and manageability of the other person we are dealing with.

 

If we were to plot these two factors against each other, it might look something like the drawing below that shows project manager skill level vs. the difficulty level of the other.  We are at greatest risk (the red zone) when our own skill level is low and we are dealing with people who are very difficult.  The lowest risk is when we are skilled and the other person is not very difficult. 

It is important to appreciate the contribution of both of these factors.  By looking at and improving our own skill level, we empower ourselves to deal with others effectively.  If we ignore our own power and focus only on the other person, we will sound like a victim who is entirely at the mercy of others. 

But we aren't responsible for all the problems of working with difficult people of course.  There are some people who are hurt, broken, mean, manipulative, psychotic, and flawed.  The fact is that there are some people that are hard to manage for anyone.  To ignore that and assume we are so good at leading that it doesn’t matter would be both a denial of reality and a confidence bordering on narcissism. It is also unrealistic and impractical to think about changing others.  Instead, we will look at ways of managing others that is most likely to give us the result we want and need.

So in these posts on working with difficult people, we will focus on building our skills at influencing and leading all people.  We will also strive to understand the various ways that people may be difficult so that we can be prepared to recognize and deal with them.  It is quite similar to managing risks; we need to be aware of what can happen to our projects and prepare plans to deal with them. 

Some specific things we will be looking at include:

• What are the nuances of the different groups of people we need to manage (e.g. managers, technical people, sponsors, other PMs, vendors, other team members)?
• What are effective leadership strategies for managing or leading those different groups of people?
• How do we recognize different types of difficult people?
• How can we remain unruffled and graceful when dealing with people who are difficult?
• How do we choose effective responses to difficult people to move toward our goals?

Are you challenged by difficult people in the workplace?  I'd like to hear your comments and feedback.

Carnival of Project Management #13

Welcome to the 13th Carnival of Project Management!  I am excited to be the guest host for the Carnival this month for Elizabeth Harrin this month as she "moves house" as they say in the UK. 

I received numerous great posts for the carnival on a variety of topics.  When I reviewed them, I found several interesting themes emerging.  The first theme related to learning from what can go wrong with projects.  The second theme that emerged was on improving project communications which of course is a important skill for all project managers.  The third and my favorite theme was related to emotional intelligence (no surprise I guess, coming from me) and that sort of soft stuff.  So without further delay, here are the posts for this months Carnival of Project Management.

Learning from What Can Go Wrong

Sue Massey presents 7 Lessons From A Bad Manager posted at Business Management Life.  I like Sue's practical advice for learning what you can when you find yourself working for a bad manager, something we all may do at some point in our careers.  (BTW, if you like reading about bad bosses, you might also like my own Bad Bosses, Worst Bosses, and Dumb Bosses).

Scott Sehlhorst presents two posts from Tyner Blain.  First is Perpetually Almost Finished Projects which talks about the challenges of getting realistic estimates-to-complete. Scott also provided Why Your Project Plan Will Fail which provides lessons from various project management gurus about developing plans that represent realistic models for how projects will perform.  Scott even resurrected PERT for this post and that is a tool that not many people talk about these days.

Improving Communications

Edith Yeung presents How to Read People and Get Your Point Across? posted at Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act.  Edith makes the point that we all have different learning styles- visual, auditory, and kinesthetic - and when we understand the learning styles of others we can better communicate to them.

Michael presents Speak their language - Tailor your message! posted at Data Governance Blog.  I like Michael's very straightforward method for determining the part of your message that is relevant to each stakeholder.  Simple but effective!

Emotional Intelligence and the Soft Stuff

Ivan Rios presents How To Make Your Team Happy posted at artofleading.net.  Ivan presents seven very practical approaches to take when delegating tasks in order to energize your project team.  I don't know if doing these seven things will make your team happy, but if you are not doing them, I would almost guarantee that your team will be unhappy.

Warren Wong presents How To Overcome Fear And The Obstacles It Creates posted at INTJ Personal Development.  As a person who lived most of their life in fear, I really appreciated this post.  I could not agree more with the recommendation about the importance of recognizing our fears and then dealing with the uncertainty behind the fear. 

John Wesley presents 21 Proven Tactics for Self and Employee Motivation posted at Pick the Brain.  As project managers, we all need to get work done through others and this post provides plenty of tips for getting people motivated.

And if all that wasn't enough great reading, I have my own contribution from EQ4PM:  Do You Have What it Takes to Manage Your Projects? This is about the emotional competencies that research has shown are needed by project managers.

I hope you enjoy the Carnival of Project Management!  Thank you Elizabeth for inviting me to be the guest host!  Cheers!  Anthony

Do You Have What it Takes to Manage Your Projects?

Do you have the personal characteristics that are relevant to successfully manage the types of projects you manage?  What's that, you say you didn't know that personal characteristics mattered to the success of specific types of projects?  Recent research in this area reveals that the personal characteristics of the PM, in particular their leadership style, is directly related to the success of the project.  Further, the important competencies vary by the type of project being managed.

Research on Project Success

Early this year I wrote about an article by J. Rodney Turner and Ralf Mueller about what made projects successful.  I was thrilled to receive an email from Ralf Mueller and to receive their book on the topic called Choosing Appropriate Project Managers.  I have had the book for a couple of months now and have been digesting it slowly.  It is rich reading for those interested in what makes projects successful, for those who are interested in excelling at particular types of projects, and for those whose job it is to assign project managers to projects.  (FYI this post isn't meant to be a review of the book.  For an excellent review of the book, see Ken Rose's Cover to Cover article in the March 2007 Project Management Journal.)

In the book, the authors set out to dispel two myths:

1. That PM competence is not a project success factor.
2. That any PM can manage any type of project

The research model is shown below in a diagram taken from Turner and Mueller's presentation at the Project Management Challenge 2007.  They tested 15 independent variables representing intellectual competence (IQ), managerial competence (MQ), and emotional competence (EQ).  They measured the contribution of those independent variables to project sucess as measured by 10 dependent variables.  They also had a series of 19 moderating variables based on different types of projects (application, strategic importance, lifecycle stage, complexity, and culture).

By conducting 14 personal interviews and a web survey of 400 project managers, the mythbusters were able to handily dispel the two myths.  It turns out that the project manager's personal competence is indeed very much linked to the success of the project.  In particular, emotional intelligence is a key competency. 

"Project managers must be emotionally intelligent."
     - J. Rodney Turner and Ralf Mueller

What They Found

Here is a summary of the findings of the study:

1. The personal characteristics of the project manager do matter. 
2. Of those personal characteristics, emotional competency (EQ) dominates over IQ and managerial competence.
3. Different personal characteristics are important for different types of projects and even different phases of the same project.
4. Organizations need to understand and build the capabilities of the PMs for the types of projects they perform.

What does all of this mean to you as a project manager?  Well, it seems that it would pay to understand the competencies you have, compare that to the competencies for the types of projects you manage, and close any gaps that exist.

For all project types, the PM competencies that correlated with success were conscientiousness, sensitivity, and communication.  Strategic perspective was negatively correlated, that is, PMs with strategic perspective would be more likely to fail.

For three common types of projects, here are the competencies that were statistically correlated with successful projects:

• Information Technology Projects - Important competencies for successful IT projects include:  self-awareness, engaging communication, and developing.  Having vision was negatively correlated with success (that is, PMs with vision failed).
• Engineering Projects - Important competencies for successful Engineering Projects include conscientiousness and sensitivity.  Again, having vision was a negative.
• Organizational Change Projects - Important competencies for successful Organizational Change Projects include motivation and engaging communications.  Again vision was negative.

What You Need to do Next

What do you need to do with this information as a project manager?  I think the relevant question is how do you stack up as a PM?  Do you have emotional intelligence?  If you lead IT projects, do you have self-awareness, communications and developing as competencies?  (Note:  developing is defined as "Encouraging others to take on ever more-demanding tasks, roles, and accountabilities.  Develops others's competencies and invests time and effort in coaching them.")

If you don't know what your personal competencies are, there are many ways to find out.  The fastet would be to take an online emotional intelligence self-assessment like the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal Me edition from TalentSmart.  If you don't have the $35, you can download a simple and free mini self-assessment from my website to use as a starting point (my simple tool only looks at self-awareness and control).   

It seems clear to me that if 1) PMs need to be emotionally intelligent and 2) Specific project types require specific emotional competencies, THEN PMs should determine their own EQ strengths and weaknesses relative to the job and address any gaps.

What do you think?

Too Much Employee Recognition Leads to High Turnover

My seven year old son recently walked into my home office and said, "Dad, you're pretty smart".  The kid is obviously a genius and a great judge of character.

Turns out he was doing an assignment for school.  He was supposed to give a compliment, then draw a picture of the recipient's face immediately afterward.  I think the idea is for him to draw a connection between how people feel when they are recognized.  (This is part of the PATHs Curriculum I have mentioned here before).

I am so glad that they are teaching emotional intelligence at school that I bought this bumpersticker for my car:

His assignment was a great idea and it really got me thinking about the scarcity of compliments and recognition at home and at work.  I also think that would be a great assignment for all of us to take on today.  Go out and compliment or recognize at least three people, then draw the faces of the recipients immediately after the compliment. 

What is so relevant about this seven year-old's assignment is that we should all be doing it all the time.  As leaders, we all need to do a great job of recognizing the strengths and contributions of others.  Recognition is one of the easiest yet most underutilized tools that project managers and leaders have.  I've said it before, but it bears repeating.  No one ever quit a job because of too much recognition!  Could you imagine if someone actually gave that as a reason for leaving?  It would be unheard of.

"My supervisor was always coming in and telling me what a great job I was doing. It was annoying really because I was just doing my job. Eventually I just got fed up with it and decided to go elsewhere."
     - Disgruntled Employee

In fact, Marcus Buckingham contends that regular recognition is one of the twelve measures of the strength of a workplace.  In First Break All the Rules, he uses the following question to gauge strength of the workplace:

"In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for good work?"

(Disclaimer:  I am a huge fan of Marcus Buckingham especially after hearing him speak live at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit last month.)  In any case, regular recognition is something that we can all work on.  Do you want to improve the emotional mood of your workplace?  Try the exercise.  Recognize somebody you work with and pay attention to the look on their face.  Hopefully it will be a happy face.  If you haven't done much of it in the past, you might also get surprise or shock.

In fact, you might make this an exercise you do for a whole week.  Here is a little tally sheet of faced you can print out and use to track the results.  Just circle or put a little check mark beside the face you get when make a compliment.  I challenge you to do that for the next week and then post a comment back on your results.

Smart People Dumb Mistakes - The Tour

This month I am excited to be launching a series of speaking engagements titled "Smart People Dumb Mistakes".  These presentations will look at how some very intelligent people have had their careers impacted by a lack of emotional intelligence.  This topic is very near and dear to my heart since I struggled with a lack of emotional intelligence myself for most of my career.

The presentations will look at some very public emotional breakdowns that have been career-threatening, like the Michael Richards toxic meltdown and Alec Baldwin's scathing voicemail to his daughter.  We will also look at some less-known examples of minor breakdowns that various leaders have experienced and the toll that a lack of charisma can take on a project manager's career.  Finally, we'll look at five specific steps that inviduals can take to protect themselves agains career threatening breakdowns and improve their charisma.

I am excited to be presenting at the following PMI Chapters over the next 9 months, with more dates and locations being added all the time:

• PMI Madison, WI (Sep '07)
• PMI Central IL (Oct '07)
• PMI Austin (Oct '07)
• PMI Chicagoland (Dec '07) 
• PMI Quad Cities (Jan '08)
• PMI Puget Sound (May '08)
• PMI Minnesota (Jun '08)

I've drafted a white paper on the topic and would love to get your feedback.  The only left to do is print up the T-Shirts.

My Interview with Peter Morris, The Business Shrink

Last month I was interviewed by Peter Morris, The Business Shrink, host of a Chicago-based syndicated radio program.  We talked about the release of my book for project managers and some examples of how people benefit from emotional intelligence.

While not nearly as interesting as, say, David Letterman interviewing Madonna, the interview had it's moments.  You can listen to or download the MP3 recording of the interview here:

http://businessshrinkbiz.nationprotect.net/archives/web/BizShrink07-26-07Mersino.mp3

Enjoy!