Learning Leader

Wanted: a Different Kind of Project Leader

It suddenly dawned on me... here was yet another instance of project managers being expected to lead in a way that traditional training ignores.

It was last month. I was leading the ever stimulating Change Management Practitioner course in London to a small group of intelligent delegates from various backgrounds.

As we discussed various people's ideas on leadership we came to those of Peter Senge, as presented in such famous works as the Fifth Dimension and the Dance of Change. Senge says that the traditional ways we categorise leaders in deficient. We think of executive leaders (those towards the top of organisations) and line leaders, the leutenants.  This borrows from the traditional hierarchic view of organisations where leaders perfectly nest groups under them.

However, he proposes a third class of leader: network leaders. These people work in the interfaces between departments, in the 'cracks' or gaps within the organisation's hierarchy.

So where, I asked myself, do project managers place themselves. Those leading internal projects usually have to call upon others in different parts of the organisation to help and work with them. Because of this, projects have an irritating way of messing with the hierarchy. Project managers are - or should be - Network Leaders. Some of the best in the field I have observed have strong networking and influencing skills, skills marginalised by the orthodox obession with task, process and document management. Good project managers, break down tribal barriers within organisatons and and get unlike groups to work fluently together.

Maybe we need to revist the sort of skills mix we need from project managers.

The most important thing you must work on

I'm indebted to the writings of Michael Gerber ('The E-Myth Manager' and other associated titles) for explaining the common error that many of us who lead growing businesses can fall into: we get seduced into working mostly in the business rather than working on it. I find that this time of year is particularly good to stand back and reflect more broadly on how it ought to develop.

However, I find even this perpsective is becoming a little limited for me. For example, time and again, I hear experienced venture capitalists remark that the pitch is often not the thing that swings it for them in deciding to invest in this company or that; they find that they do not so much invest in a business plan or a business model as in the leaders themselves. They invest in the people; people who strike them as so remarkable and invigorating that they will back them with their own money, all in order to become part of their story.

So I find myself standing back from working in the business, even from working on the business, and working on me. This becomes a different take on the tradition of New Year's resolutions. The question I ask myself is, 'How can I develop in 2012 in four areas of my life?'

1. Physical.
   For me, this primarily affects matters of diet and exercise. How can I so eat and exercise that the energy I bring to leading my company goes up? I've come to value regular exercise in my struggle to gain energy. Often I will get ideas - such as the one for this post, for example - during or at the end of a workout; presumably because there is more oxygen coursing through my brain. So it becomes stupid for me not to exercise.
2. Mental.
   How am I stretching myself with my own reading and study? Major influences in my life are the other blogs to which I subscribe, the books I read (more history, agile management, and human psychology these days), and the Scripture my vicar occasionally asks me to preach on. Keeping a regular journal and writing this blog also help me keep sharp.
3. Emotional.
   As someone with a tendency to the melancholic, I find I must work consciously on this one. One of my favourite quotes from C.S. Lewis is, 'Joy is the serious business of heaven.' I aim to be more thankful, to smile rather more, to sing more, to play more. I find being around my grandchildren helps enormously.
4. Spiritual.
   As a Christian I practice the traditional disciplines, but privately as directed by my Rabbi (see Matthew 6:1) so I'm cautious about going into more detail here. I find these habits have helped keep me grounded as a businessman as to what 'success' really means, and they bring me back regularly to focus on what really matters.

Of course, all these areas affect each other, so I must attend to them all.

If you, dear reader, think I have missed anything, I'd value hearing from you.

As we all enter 2012, may I wish you and your loved ones well, a year in which we all grow. Remember the most important thing any of us can work on is ourselves.

Rear view mirror management

We've been doing research around what people in programmes and projects actually think and do. One of the really disturbing phenomena we have uncovered is that most project managers spend a lot of time reading and writing reports about what has happened.

Consider this for a moment. The focus appears to be in the past. The past is past. It has happened. It's history. So it is immutable. (... unless you are a journalist or a politician.)

Only the future is malleable. As leaders we can only affect future outcomes.

Some of our subjects claim to spend over 40% of their week working on reports against achievement. This is equivalent to driving by the rear-view mirror, an accident waiting to happen.

So why do we have this obsession with status reports that are out of date soon after they are written? The answers are dreary and deceptive. I'll leave that for another article.

Meantime, think about 'when' you focus your attention as you lead your organisation through change. Is it in the past, now or in the future?

Finally: What's the difference between an accountant and a leader? It's 'when' they focus their attention.

The extreme dysfunctions of directing a project

How much time does a busy executive give to directing a project?  Too much and you will find the project sucks you in. Too little and you are not doing your job. But what are 'too much' and 'too little'? 

There are two extreme dysfunctions in directing a project:

1. micromanagement; and
2. absenteeism.

Micromanagement is interfering with the delegated role of the project manager. This behaviour basically shows an inability to delegate, or an absence of trust. Here the Executive requires every twist and turn of the project to be brought to his or her attention. As a consequence, the project manager is likely to do less useful work in order to serve this obsession with excessive reporting and planning.

Absenteeism is the opposite. Here the executive is not engaging with the project primarily as a decision-maker, but when present, if at all, is there to be briefed. There is no conception in the mind of such an executive that at key moments in the project the project manager needs to be empowered by decisions, decisions to proceed as planned, decisions to adjust scope or requirements, decisions to stop work, decisions to provide resources. Without this decision-making role the project manager is again disempowered.

Sometimes I've seen both behaviours exhibited by the same individuals: they take an 'arms length' approach to direction. Then when a crisis is drawn to their attention, they panic and throw themselves into the project; in doing so, they disempower the project manager and her team.

But there is a cure for these two extremes, and a very sensible use of the executive's scarce time. We coach executives on this in our briefings. This better approach save everyone a lot of time and waste.

The great project planning sinkhole

Following on from my last post, I seem to be coming across a number of writers who are flying in the face of convention as questioning our obsession with project planning. Here's a quote from Seth Kahan in Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out:

Inappropriate emphasis on project planning can kill a good idea. Don't fall into this resource sinkhole early on. Instead, get out and talk to people.

It reminds me of the time, early on in my career, when I got my hands on my first project planning tool - MacProject(!) - running on a stand-alone Mac Classic. I remember getting totally absorbed in this tool, rather like a computer games addict ... until I became dimly aware of my team banging on my door pleading to see me. My first response was, "Don't interrupt me. Can't you see I'm planning here!" Shame on me. These good people needed leading and I needed their conversations to help me shape the project in the real world.

On reflection there was another great piece of software on my Mac that was rather more useful to me in the long term: MacDraw. With this I was able to build soft systems diagrams that key clients found so useful that one of them kept a copy pinned on their wall to track progress toward the target capability. Now, that was a tool that helped purposeful conversations around the project.

The point is, that whilst a measure of planning may be necessary, talking with people intentionally always trumps planning.

No time for change?

From strategy to implementing it, we bring programmes and projects into play. PPM (programme and project management) is the expertise about building new or changed stuff, delivering good change, right?

However, there are a still number of obstacles to achieving the prize, some of which lie with managers of operations.

One objection from operational managers is "We don't have time to lead change. The impact on the business must be minimal."

What's wrong with this response? What's behind it?

Apart from the obvious error of abdicating responsibility for leading the new operational change into a successful outcome to the PPM community, there are a couple of other systemic problems with this:

1. Lack of the big picture: such managers appear to be striving to minimise impact on the business, but the longer term impact is likely to be worse, but such managers do not see it. They are thinking and acting in a short-term perspective. There needs to be clear ways of showing them the big picture, such as OBASHI.
2. Lack of time: often these managers allow themselves to be fully assigned to other urgent matters of a more familiar, operational nature. It demands a conscious effort to push such matters back and spend priority time on matters that have a strategic priority.

Now, what is interesting about these two problems is that they lie at the opposite ends of the scale; the first is strategic, the second tactical. And yet they are related. "Think strategic and act tactically" is similar to "think globally and act locally". This will stretch people's abilities to the limit. They need help, but unless the first problem is addressed - seeing a compelling strategy and their own personal contribution in the strategic mix - they never not be ready to take on unfamiliar, risky work that could make them look incompetent.

What makes us tick: more lessons from the dark side

This week I've posted articles on Viktor Frankl, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Virginia Satir, all of whom have brought us valuable insights into how we deal with change from observing people in very bad situations - in a Death Camp and when told they are dying.

Forgive this rather morbid streak of posts this week, but it reminded me of what I wrote a while back about observations of patients who had critical cardiovascular disease. This was pulled together in Alan Deutschman's book Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life . In this instance these patients could do something about it. By lifestyle changes - more exercise, eating more healthily, giving up smoking, etc - they could either avoid costly invasive heart surgery or prevent the same thing happening again.

The remarkable evidence is that so few of them seemed to have the will power to sustain these life-giving habits longer than about six weeks! One in nine, in fact. And the same seems to be true of all of us.

However, Dr Dean Ornish, in remarkable research with a group of patients with acute heart disease, was able to buck this trend with a combination of:

  1. making the change radical. It seems we can engage with more radical change than keep with minor changes of habit. Others have pointed out that people are rallied to BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) or WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) that connect with emotions;
  2. repeat: positive visualization through meditation, etc., help establish new habits drawn by a positive vision rather than a negative threat; and
  3. relate: working in small support groups and communities where there is mutual accountability and encouragement.

Put these three things in place and it seems that 80% stuck with the changes some two years after, thus avoiding heart bypass surgery. Quite a reversal from the statistic of 9 to 1 against prevailing with a change, wouldn't you say?

There are vital lessons here for embedded transformational change in our organisations. Are these three things in place to help people form new habits and stick with them?

Lazy delegation

Lazy delegation is where work is given, but the reason for it is not. Lazy delegation is common and it is damaging.

I was briefing some fellow trainers recently to deliver a tailored Change Management course to one of our clients. In this course we had included some material on Viktor Frankl. I was not surprised at all that most of the trainers had not heard of Frankl; he had the misfortune to die in the same week as Mother Teresa and Diana Princess of Wales, so his passing and his life's work did not gain the attention it deserved at the time.

As a young man, Frankl was interned into a Death Camp during World War II. When he arrived, he asked himself the question: "What sort of people will survive this?"  [I remember Jim Collins saying at a leadership conference I attended a few years ago that all good research starts with a great question.]

In short he discovered, that among those who were given the chance - that is, those who were not just taken away and executed -  the survivors were all people who had something to live for beyond the camp, whereas those who gave up the will to go on in that dreadful place usually grounded their hope and their meaning within the circumstances of the camp.

In fact, the guards seem to know this. They devised a special form of torture whereby they took a random detail of prisoners and made them move a pile of rubbish from one end of the camp to the other. It was back-breaking work. The next day the guards would select the same group and get them to move that mound of rubbish back to exactly the same spot it was before. By taking any rational meaning out of the prisoners' work, the guards sought to take away their will to live, to grind them down.

After the War, Frankl went on to found a branch of psychotherapy called Logotherapy (from the Greek word 'logos' meaning 'Word' or 'Meaning'). He devised a cognitive therapy strategy whereby he helped patients to mental health by helping them to connect with what was most important in their lives, to connect with meaning. He set out his discovery and some of his experiences in an amazing book called Man's Search For Meaning.

I tell delegates this story sometimes on our change management courses and I ask: how often do we do the equivalent of getting people to move around the rubbish? By decanting work of any meaning for people, we do just that; and we lose health and motivation from our organisations in the process.

And we do that in projects that start without clear business cases.

And we do that in inflicting change on people without explaining the benefits.

And we can do that with lazy delegation: not taking the care to explain 'why' when we ask somebody to do a piece of work for us.

Learning in the Cloud

Last week I was leading our Change Management Practitioner course (which I love to do). We had a great group of people and I made a little experiment: I created for the delegates a shared notebook on Evernote, one of the free storage systems. Delegates were able to set up a free account, if they didn't already have one, and access notes that I posted there during the week.

Evernote's mission is to store the world's memory, and I must say it does a pretty good job.

Delegates were invited by me before the course to access the free notebook (pictured). As we went through the week, I captured photos from the course of flipcharts, table and floor layouts, and added notes on relevant resources, including an updated Change Management further reading list.

It was easy to set up and operate. Now we are considering creating streams for our graduates by topic on our Facebook page.

I suppose this is what people mean in part by 'Learning 2.0': use Web 2.0 technologies, cloud services like Evernote, to gather and share learning materials.

Right now, I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not sure we've yet landed on the best tool and process. I'd be interested in any views or advice on this, particular from people in management training.

pearcemayfield first to gain ISO9001 through APM Group

News finally came through yesterday that we had gained the ISO9001 Quality Certification ('ISO') through APM Group: a first for us and a first for APMG. So we are all quietly quite proud here.

The journey over the last few months has been an interesting one. My concern has been that the ISO process did not become self-serving but actually did add value.

My colleague, Andrew Rock, is our Quality Manager and he did a superb job. Unlike me, Andrew is a completer-finisher, and is strong on consistency. I am more of a maverick, valuing innovation, ideas and agility. Andrew urged me first to grapple with a thing called Quality Policy, which he said needed to be owned by senior management. (That would be me.)

As I studied what was meant by 'Quality Policy' I began to appreciate that this was where we could set out our stall as to how we, as a company would apply ISO. We could not, as many other organisations have done, take a passive approach to applying the international standard; we hear that many that have done this have found, as a consequence, that ISO then took them places they did not want to go. In some cases, writing it became like boiling the ocean and observing it became excessively bureaucratic.

So, in little over a page, I set out our stance:

• Values-based. Our Values would continue to be paramount and non-negotiable. We've learned what our customer love about us has actually emerged out of our being consistent in living our values.
• Simplicity. 'Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler.' (Einstein) This became our design approach.
• Outcomes-oriented. Process always needs to serve the outcomes it intends to achieve.
• Value-adding. Only change where there is clear added value in doing so.
• Document on exception. Evidence is not required where the system is being followed, only where deviances have been found. We cannot become a paper-factory documenting the 'normal' to the nth degree.
• Always use best judgement. I borrowed this from Nordstoms in the USA. We live in an emergent business reality. We need to be humble enough to realise that what we codify today as our practice may be ill-suited for the demands of tomorrow. So if we encounter a novel challenge or opportunity, and the procedures are inadequate, guess what? We permit ourselves to decide as best we know how.

What I realised was that without doing this, external advisors and assessors might well bring in a culture of ISO that would be mechanistic and legalistic. In turn this could lead to some unintended consequences that would compete against what we needed to be and achieve, and potentially be disastrous.

Richard Rose, our internal auditor, and Andy Taylor, our external consultant, also deserve special mentions here for helping me bridge my intent into the strange language and constructs of ISO.

Now I am certainly not a quality expert. We are working out our salvation as we go along. If you, dear reader, feel this approach of ours is flawed I'd really appreciate hearing from you.

Meanwhile we are popping the champagne to celebrate being the first to gain this through APM Group.