Learning Leader

Mental Crib Sheet Part 4: Making Margins

This is the fourth part in our series in which John Edmonds and I present our findings on this research over our two blogs. For the last post see: Mental Crib Sheet Part 3: A Bias Towards Relationships.

 

Making Margins

One pattern that Crowe identifies in his study of Alpha project managers is their tendency to triage unplanned issues - pre-assess them, qualify them - before committing them to a formal, collaborative process, one that usually involves some sort of Issue Log accessible by other members of the team.

We found this too. One programme manager in a logistics company told us:

"I don't put issues immediately onto the Log ... [this practice] evolved with experience. I found myself spending too much time administering controls and not actually managing ... It may not be what the books say, but it just works for me."

Now this troubles us as authors and trainers of best management approaches such as MSP and PRINCE2. For example, PRINCE2 makes it clear that the first point of control of an unplanned issue is to capture it (CS3), that is, to record it onto the Issues Log.

Our higher performers seem to be going against this. They talk about a 'cooling off period' and how many apparently serious issues just evaporate over a day or two; how the simple act of formally recording an issue seems sometimes to add quite unnecessary weight, emphasis or urgency to an issue; and how a burgeoning log ends up mastering the management team, demanding constant attention, to be regularly tilled over and reported upon.

To be quite candid, I think those of us in best practice community needs to reassess what it is advising people on this matter.

Personal Float

In fact, the higher performers, seemed to build into their working schedules what we have come to call personal float, that goes beyond the handling of Issues. Here's another quote from one of our volunteer subjects, a programme manager in a rail company:

"Unplanned events were manageable as I had allocated approximately 6 hours [this week] for various forms of unplanned activity - this was sufficient to cover what came along."

Now, on one level this is simple common sense. Yet why did the higher performers, the alpha-trait managers, have the discipline to do this and the others in our study didn't? The knowing -doing gap seems to involve some mental frame of self-awareness, confidence, and self-actualisation that seemed to be a constant grid against which they assess their working schedule and behaviours.

This appears to relate very closely to Daniel Goleman's constructs of emotional intelligence. We didn't set out to validate Goleman's model, but we seem to be drawn back to it.

So then, personal margin seems to be a priority in the modus operandi of all the higher performers we observed. No doubt there is a link here to their better performance, but undergirding this expression of personal margin is some kind of constant care in the minds of these managers to build in margin and a confidence to assert this in the pressured workplace.

Mental Crib Sheet - Introduction

Part 1: Emergent Findings

Part 2: Self-Awareness

Part 3: A Bias Towards Relationships

Mental Crib Sheet Part 2: Self-Awareness

As promised in my previous post, John Edmonds and I have began to publish our interim findings on this research over our two blogs. On Tuesday, John opened the report here Mental Crib Sheet - Emergent Findings (1).

The First Emergent Pattern: Self-Awareness

It quickly became obvious that the people more highly regarded in the independent senior manager assessments (people we dubbed our 'alpha trait managers') had a clearer sense of what they did, and why they did it, and were able to articulate consistent personal rules for decision-making. When we asked them to 'think about your thinking', they seemed to have no difficulty in doing this; in fact, they demonstrated a relative ease in describing their thinking compared to others in the survey.

This attribute is an ability to stand back from their regular apparently-habitual thinking and behaviours, to describe their thinking and to commit to adjusting it as necessary. I'm reminded how neuroscientists now describe the functioning of the human brain as 'plastic'. I would say that these people showed a definite plasticity of thinking.

For example, one respondent recorded in one week's journal:

I’ve always been a lists person. I learned this from a boss I had at the time, who had a scoring mechanism... I identify a short, separate list of ‘Quick Wins’. Ticking these off helps me motivate myself. Then I work through the important tasks.

This quote illustrates why it might be a mistake to describe this merely as the ability to reflect. To be sure, reflection is at the core of it, but it is intensely practical in orientation, and activistic in expression. The think-act link just seems to be stronger for these people.

An exercise we asked them to do was to list the top five pieces of information they would want to hand at that particular point in their project or programme - their personal dashboard. There was no real pattern the overall results, but we did see a difference in two things:

1. the relative ease the alpha trait managers went through sharing their lists with us and
2. the number of salient features (granularity) they were able to 'home in on' as part of their lists.

We concluded that:

1. There is some evidence that everyone in our survey referenced their own list or personal dashboard - everybody has one;
2. People's dashboards are not the same. (Could this indicate something deeper than formal methodologies at work here?)
3. The clarity people had about their own dashboard - even allowing for the fact that this would change, perhaps in different contexts and different points in the lifecycle - the clarity varied markedly in our interviews. The alpha trait managers were clearer and more articulate about what they would refer to first.

Another way that self-awareness seemed to express itself was the perception of their own time. This seemed a litmus of whether someone regarded themselves as driven or a driver. Here's a non-alpha quote, this time from a Portfolio Manager:

The study made me think how reactionary I am for most of the time.

In this respondent's case they recorded as little as 15% of their time is spent pro-actively. The rest of the time they tended to be reacting to and solving problems.

Compare this to someone who scored highly on their senior manager's assessment, an interim programme manager:

I made it my business when I arrived here to immerse myself in the business community, to understand who was who, and how they functioned.

Do you see the way this person uses the language of a pro-active shaper? "I made it my business ..."

Next post in this report will be from.John's Blog describing the next pattern we have recognised emerging from this research.

Mental Crib Sheet

Well, on Tuesday at  the Best Practice Showcase in Westminster, London, my colleague John Edmonds and I presented our interim findings on our research.

In fact, we had three bites at this: first a 'Birds of a Feather' workshop for about 15 people before lunch and a similar one after lunch, followed by our main presentation towards the end of the afternoon. Our main question was around the idea of the 'Mental Crib Sheet' - do we all have one, and if so, is it the same for everyone?

John and I share a growing dis-ease about the sufficiency of best practice methods that we have both been involved in writing - me with the latest edition of MSP, and John in the refresh of PRINCE2 coming out later next year- and in coaching people in how to use them practically. Whilst we are strong advocates of 'best practice', something is missing in application. John writes:

there is something that is not getting the attention it deserves. Does the way that portfolio, programme and project managers think have an impact on the way that they manage? Do they have this 'Mental Crib Sheet' that shapes the way they allocate their time, make decisions and ultimately deliver?

So we began this initial round of research, getting a small population of programme, project and portfolio managers to track with us by journals over about five weeks, and following this up with telephone interviews both with them and with their senior managers.

We owe our volunteer subjects a huge debt of thanks, and we will be publishing our emergent findings, what we presented on Tuesday, in a series of articles across our two blogs over the next few weeks.

As to the buzz from our presentation, well I've never known anything like it. We seem to have articulated concerns that resonate with people, yet give all of us some way forward. Since Tuesday we have  both received a steady trickle of warm and enthusiastic emails from members of the audience. I quote one person here:

A few of your insights rang bells with me (for example, the margins and networking) and a few were new (for example the large effort towards communication).

So check out John's Blog for the first instalment very soon.

Hurry, Hurry, BPS Places Filling Up!

Yesterday I posted about the forthcoming Best Practice Showcase on 24th June in London ('What's in the Mind of a Great Project Manager?').

Well this morning, the event organisers told me that the two pearcemayfield workshops are already fully booked and 53 people are already booked on the main session. This is not scarcity hype: I am concerned that some readers will be disappointed if they do not book soon.

Anyway, it seems like the buzz is going to be every bit as good as last year.

Facebook? No, thanks.

The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity.
--Robert Stuberg

This feels like I'm about to go public on something bordering on blog heresy and family treason.

Facebook is the current social networking phenomenon that appears to be sweeping all before it. Only today on BBC News, mention was made of the number of hits a Wolverhampton tramp had received on his site. It seems a physical home is optional, but a Facebook syber-home is a 'must have'. Personal evidence for this is that, from what I can gather, all my children are on Facebook and I've just received another invitation from a friend to join.

Yes, the sad truth about me is that I'm not yet on Facebook.

From time to time a son or daughter tells me that they are aware of a sibling doing such-and-such or is feeling thus-and-so because of their Facebook. I met a client delegate last week who said she made it her business to get an invitation from her son to become her Facebook 'friend'; it took a while for him to comply while he did the Facebook equivalent of tidying up his room before the invitation was forthcoming!

So am I missing out? Probably. Well, shouldn't I 'get with the revolution'?

No, thanks. This is for reasons not directed at Facebook in particular. I am sure it is a very good piece of technology that brings all kinds of happiness to those who use it. And if I were criticising Facebook per se I would be doing so from a position of some ignorance, wouldn't I?

My reasons are more generic, both negative and positive, and apply equally well to why I don't have a Blackberry or an iPhone either.

Negatively, I fear such technologies will make further inroads into my already too-fragmented life. They will make demands on my time at inconvenient moments. Like adding a cuckoo egg to my nest, in time it will hatch into some growing, voracious monster, demanding more and more from me. I fear it will displace the quality and energy I commit to more conventional but deeply rewarding social networking: the small group of people I meet with weekly, for example. We 'do life deeply' together, and we do it the old-fashioned way by going to meet each other and sharing a real, not virtual, Java.

Positively, I decline Facebook invitations for a pursuit that is more deeply counter-cultural: I want to live more and more by the spiritual discipline of Simplicity. Like other spiritual disciplines, superficially it looks like denying oneself something; but at a deeper level it enriches the life of the disciple. By denying myself otherwise good activities and possessions I find I de-clutter my day and my thinking so that I can pursue and focus upon what Stephen Covey calls, "That which matters most". I've come to value 'thinking time' as crucial to staying focused on the important. Whereas when I react to email, IM or phone calls, I find I am doing just that - reacting. The more I can shift my life onto pro-active, simple focused thought and action, the more the quality and effectiveness of my life improves.

Try it.

So, if you are generous enough to invite me onto Facebook, MySpace or whatever other social network, please don't take offence if my response, sad as it may appear, is, "Thanks, but no thanks."

 

Technorati Tags: Facebook, simplicity, spiritual discipline, MySpace, Blackberry

Bird by Bird

Technorati tags: writing, creativity

Last week my son Robin and his wife Nikki gave me a couple of books for my birthday, one of which I took with me on holiday to Florence and which I have just finished reading.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott gave me a lot of pleasure. I can tell you that I found a warm and open-hearted book that made me feel like one of her students in her creative writing class. Where this book adds so much value to others I have read on writing is not so much in the cold description of techniques but in the emotional intelligence that is required to be true yet vulnerable as a writer.

Moreover, it was one of those rare books that caught me laughing out loud at several points, typically where she turns some ironic corner into delicious irreverance and self-deprecation.

If you sense a calling to write and you are struggling, read this book. It's like being taken out by an understanding friend for a really good evening.

Servant Training

I heard of a very interesting study recently. Psychologists believe we have something call a self-serving bias…. for example, among the lecturers in one faculty, 93% of the fellows felt that they were above average (i.e. top 50%) in their own teaching ability.

How do we as teachers come to believe we are better than we really are? The obvious answer is ego.

It reminded me of a story a colleague told me recently about his experience on a 3–day ITIL course. He found the trainer so ego-centric that by the end of the first morning my friend knew more about the credentials and achievements of the trainer, and how great he was than he did of the subject of the course.

One of the ways of achieving true greatness in training is by the paradox of becoming a servant trainer. In our company we have been greatly influenced by a small book by Tim Andrews called Where's Your Spotlight, which I’ve mentioned before in Useful Reads. He takes his title from one of the central themes of the book where the focus of the training – the spotlight – moves away from the trainer onto the delegates. ‘From the sage on the stage, to a guide on the side.’

When I first set up this blog, I chose the title ‘Lessons of a Learning Leader’ to be deliberately ambiguous. I am a leader. I lead an organisation providing learning and consultancy services, but I also try to live one of our core operating values: life-long learning. One of the side-effects I have noticed of my intent in engaging with life as if I am a learner is that my ego has to take a back seat. I’ve come to appreciate another paradox, though: if you think you are humble then you aren’t. So I don’t want to focus on me, but on on my clients.

So where’s your spotlight?

Building the Bridge as You Walk on It

 

One of my finds at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit this year was Robert Quinn's Building the Bridge as You Walk on It: A Guide FOR Leading Change. I've just finished reading it and here's what I think.

 

Among the reviews of the book on the dust cover, Warren Bennis writes, "A gem of a book, as wise and practical guide on individual and organizational transformation as you’ll find anywhere." I humbly agree with him.

 

I think its up there in my top ten business books.

 

I'd read Quinn's earlier book, "Deep Change", where he explores the choice for individuals and organisations between 'Slow Death' and 'Deep Change', and where choosing the latter it is courageous and feels like 'walking naked into the land of uncertainty'. See www.deepchange.com.

 

This new work picks up this theme and explores what Quinn calls 'The Fundamental State of Leadership'. There were several aspects of Quinn's thinking that I found very helpful. He threads his argument throughout with stories, most of which illustrate ordinary people entering this heroic 'Fundamental State of Leadership' in different circumstances. From these stories the author shows how all truly effective change must start within the leader themselves; that this state means putting the good of the organisation before themselves, and how, in some stories, the leader 'loses' but their influence goes on to infect successful transition in the organisation.

 

From this Quinn develops his model of the Fundamental State of Leadership as something that:

1. Has ever-increasing integrity at its core, with its corollary of reducing our hypocrisy - our 'integrity gaps'. (Quinn asserts that we are all hypocrites(!!).)


2. Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership can be through living any one (ultimately all) of eight paradoxes: Grounded Vision, Reflective Action, Responsible Freedom (as opposed to Foolish or selfish Freedom), Detached Interdependence, Appreciative Inquiry, Authentic Engagement, Tough Love and Adaptive Confidence.

 

For me, this all has the ring of truth about it. Quinn argues that one cannot distil leadership to a superficial list of behaviours, tools and techniques, as so many of us have tried to do. Ultimately it is about the inner struggle of courage and honesty that so often communicates itself non-verbally to those we are seeking to influence.

 

I will be recommending this to all in Change Leadership, particularly to those in MSP programme management and to those taking up the role of Business Change Managers.

The Leadership Summit

It’s been a few days since I returned from Chicago, and I’m aware since my last post all has gone quiet. I’ve been making this annual trip to the Leadership Summit in South Barrington for several years now. Why?

Well, I was looking over an entry I made in my journal after last year’s conference and I can affirm that the same reasons apply:

• World-class presentations. I’m a professional communicator, so I am always scrutinising public speakers for an insight into effective communications. At the Summit, delegates receive a range of different styles – from the coldly cerebral to this year’s black gospel tour-de-force from Kenneth Ulmer. Some of these speakers provide me with insights into good communication skills, simply by observing them engage a large audience (7,000 in the new Willow Creek Auditorium, plus another 50,000 simul-casted to 70 other sites around North America).
  
• Applications to Business. I am an entrepreneur. I love being about building a great organisation. Willow Creek has a reputation for breaking the mould, introducing the world of business to the world of church, and in my case vice versa. A fascinating example of this this year was when the Senior Pastor of Willow Creek, Bill Hybels, interviewed Ken Blanchard (author of numerous popular management books from The One Minute Manager onwards) and John Maxwell (21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership) together on stage. Blanchard was introduced as moving towards Christian spirituality in his later years, discovering Jesus Christ as ‘the greatest leader’, whilst Maxwell has transitioned the opposite way, from a career as a pastor into providing compelling leadership seminars to business.
  
  Whatever one’s views of Christian spirituality, business people generally can accept that developing churches in a post-Christian culture is probably one of the hardest things to do. Also, I find that churchey people are far less defensive about accepting lessons from business these days.
  
  In previous years at the Summit I have encountered Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Sample, Warren Bennis, Marcus Buckingham and other great commentators on leadership in the business world. It is also at Willow that I have across great writers such as Doug Hall, Roger van Oeck, William Bridges and Robert Quinn.
  
  And all that in the context of a conference aimed primarily to help church leaders grow. This environment is so stimulating because it is mould-breaking.It challenges one’s prejudices and preconceptions.
  
• Spiritual Insight and Renewal. I am a follower of Christ … or at least I try to be, with less success at times. This reason is more personal, but still vital.
  It was interesting at this conference that one of the speakers, Jack Groppel, spoke on the Fully Engaged™ method from a sports and business perspective, yet sitting at the top of his personal energy pyramid – above the Physical, Emotional, Mental – sat Spiritual. In this model’s view of personal performance – about managing one’s energy rather than time – I didn’t feel Dr Groppel was merely playing to the gallery, throwing a sop to these church leaders, but that managing one’s spiritual wellbeing was seen as vital.
  
  And so it is.
  
• Time Away to Reflect Privately. My Myers-Briggs colleague, Bill Patterson, tells me I’m an introvert. I suppose I am. (I always tell him I’ll have to go away on my own and think about that..) I find going away like this and having more discretionary protected time very energising.
  
  I suppose I could have hacked it as a monk.
  
  One of the big advances in my own self-awareness is something pretty obvious when I write about it: thinking takes time. I like the writer’s life, the reflective life.
  
• Processing all these experiences with my friend. My friend Mike is similarly a Leadership Summit ‘junkie’. We are engaged in leading in very different spheres, so that is probably why we sharpen each other up. As in previous years, we have stayed at the Marriott Schaumburg. So most evenings we would share a quiet Miller Lite in the ‘Bobby London’ bar (I think it’s supposed to be like a British pub – keep trying, Marriott) and mull over what particularly provoked us, or what connections we were making within our own business contexts.
  
  Mike’s a strategic thinker, and “get’s” the vision thing. The Bible says, “Iron sharpens iron”; I don’t think the text was just referring to metal-working. I always come away stimulated and somehow enlarged by my conversations with Mike.
  
• Church Application. I have a small non-professional role in my church. My leader, Tim was not able to come this year because of family circumstances, but I need to ‘de-brief’ him … soon.
  
• Combating Cultural Myopia. Tony Robbins first articulated this for me. Basically, we all have cultural blind spots in our thinking and in our commerce with each other. By travelling to another culture – and Chicagoland is another culture for us Brits – we can learn much about ourselves and the things we take for granted.
  
  For example, I think we British do have an unhealthily high level of cynicism. I suspect this a post-colonial thing: we are trying to be at ease with being a small player on the world stage, where most of the world map is no longer in pink.
  
  So it was kind of sad to see some of the Brits in our party purveying their cynicism in their little Church of England huddle, with all of their prejudices intact as they left O’Hare at the end of the week. It reminded me of the dwarves at the end of the CS Lewis’s The Last Battle. We all need to get out more. We Brits do. God knows, the Americans do. Arabs do.
  
  (Anyway, I’ll stop there as I can feel myself getting into an unhealthy rant… I need to go and have a little lie down ….)

I may post more on individual learnings from this year’s conference in other posts.

Stakeholder Management & Governance Issues are at the Top

Probably the two most commonly raised areas of concern among our clients when they use management methods such as PRINCE2 project management or MSP programme management are:

1. Stakeholder management: identifying them (i.e. not forgetting important ones), analysing their needs and attitudes, and influencing them. And
2. Governance: how to so involve empowered executives in an appropriate and timely manner, and how to get them to rightly ‘own’ the change.

I suspect these issues surface so frequently because of what the methods are and are not. PRINCE2 and MSP are rational explanations of how we as managers should work together in seeing through effective change.

The problem is that we don’t work on the Planet Vulcan.

What these methods are agnostic about are the very real and present realms of:

• emotions; and
• politics.

Hence the topics of stakeholder management and governance are hot ones. These come back to us again and again in the classroom from the real world of human passion and power.

So it was interesting today in a meeting with a colleague who works a lot as an external auditor of public sector projects in the UK, when he said that there is recent and fresh emphasis in the guidelines for such major reviews in these same two areas. In Gateway Reviews there are now two additional questions to be asked by the external reviewers:

• Are the stakeholders on board?
• Is the Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) engaged?

And how do you measure SRO engagement? And how do you verify that the stakeholders are ‘on board’?

Well, there’s the trick.