Eric Shinseki, Project Manager

     Eric Shinseki, a truly noble soldier and leader, became Secretary of Veterans Affairs for the United States in 2009.

     He was handed a project of immense scope and intractability. It was bulging with problems and pulsating with explosive risk. The VA mess went back decades, and that was well known. The agency also had been honored for the quality of care that it often provided for at least most of the people who made it into the VA facilities.

     But hundreds of thousands of additional candidates for VA care were produced by the wars of our last two decades, and Vietnam veterans are into their care-intensive age. Studies and commissions have shown that the VA is buried under demands it simply cannot meet.

     Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, including in his promised programs the solution to the VA mess. Eric Shinseki was qualified as a superb executive. He had risen to the very top of the military hierarchy of the United States, serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had demonstrated great courage in opposing the Bush administration’s Iraq War, a stand that cost him his career.

Pal, Parent, Partner, Project Manager

      A few months into my first real job, Anna Marie and I tied the knot. Because of my zero seniority, the system grudgingly allowed a long weekend off to honor the occasion.

    Then, two days before the wedding, my boss the managing editor had an epiphany right there in the middle of the newsroom. He announced that such an important occasion certainly called for more than an extra day off or two. On the spot, I was granted a full week for a honeymoon . . . too late to do much planning for use of the generous gift.

     A little later, a similar act of largesse marked the birth of our first child: I got a raise. Nothing to do with the value of my work. Just the man showing kindness to the kid who now would need a few more bucks.

     It may or may not come as a surprise, but a somewhat bumpy tenure at that place ended very badly for me after a few years.

     That manager was acting on a philosophy that was flawed and destructive. Days off and pay increases are not acts of generosity.

A Project: Rating Managers

     The best manager I ever had came in at 33 on a 60-point scale of excellence. Twenty others straggled down from there.

     But then, this evaluation was done many years ago, shortly after I went into consulting. I was in recovery from a quarter-century-plus career as an editor and manager in the newspaper business. In the words of wise man Bob Dylan, “Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”

     During those decades in the managerial trenches, it had never occurred to me to analyze just what I was supposed to do and how I was faring in doing it. I, along with everybody else, was just slugging away in a task-driven struggle to get things done – hoping that sometimes, somehow, quality would transpire.

Project Management Certainty

      It seems pretty unfair, when you think about it. Project Management demands certainty, but it doesn’t give you any.  You have to bring your own.

     My earliest experiences with project managers in a large corporation, decades ago, included listening to a raft of complaints about this. Those project managers often were the target of what really were attempted cons, by their own managers.

     Boss: “When will the project be finished?”

     Project Manager: “It’s ‘way too early to tell. We have to get a lot of quotes and estimates before we have any idea of how long it will take.”

     Boss: “Well, how about just a rough idea? I won’t hold you to it.”

     Baloney. If the project manager should mistakenly breathe anything, however circumscribed and conditional, that could be interpreted as a number or a date, it instantly became carved in granite.

     At least, that’s how the story went, and I have heard it countless times. Still do, now and then.

Leadership Is Customized

     “You’re being unfair. You let her do X or Y, but you won’t let me do it.”    

     That particular personnel problem confronted me early in my first managerial job, as a daily newspaper city editor. A basically fairminded person, at least in my own opinion, I was buffaloed.

     It took a while (never mind how long) for me to understand how to deal with the issue. Fairness is essential to effective leadership, but, it turns out, fairness to people does not mean identical treatment.

     Over the years, I have added to my management consulting the concept of customization of leadership. The good leader accounts for all the circumstances in relationships. Fundamental circumstances are the ability and commitment of the particular staff member.

     Back in the day, my leadership behavior would be to issue instructions (relative to my opinion of the ability of the staff member involved). Sometimes that would be quite a brief conversation. That’s it. I’d just wait for what might happen.

    

Little-Things Leadership

Leader? Me? You’ve got the wrong person, buddy. I don’t do leadership. That’s for that gifted, articulate person up there on the stage. I just do my part and leave the leadership to the leaders. . . .

Stop right there. You may already be providing leadership, or you may be just a couple of words away from doing so.

Here’s an example. This woman saw on Facebook that a person she had known years before was now a prominent psychologist.

The woman remembered what a fine young person the psychologist had been back then. Doing just a clerk’s job in a store, but always dependable, always pleasant, always volunteering to take care of this or that little thing, or to help out.

First Project, First Success

     This was an orphan project, wandering aimlessly back and forth among four stakeholding corporate partners. It didn’t meet the budgetary threshold for the sponsoring organization’s formal project management, and it didn’t fall into any other practical slot.

     Still, it was important for other reasons, not least the company’s reputation with the other partners.

     A restless sales manager in that organization was just completing project management training he had undertaken to support a possible career change. Well, his boss said, how about seeing how you can do on this project?

     Here’s how it went, in his words: