Patience & Tolerance. And Confidence

     For most of us, the towering challenge in building management competence is at the very beginning. There is a fundamental contradiction imprinted on our workplace behavior by our beginner experience.  It makes Square One so difficult that some people never fully get through it. And, for those who do, applying its lessons can block further growth.

     This is how it works: 

     We first must learn the skills and practices of personal productivity. That means we work on how to order our days through time and priority management while we're learning how to do the job. If you don't get this right, you can never do anything well -- especially    leadership. 

     But, at the same time we must learn as managers when and how to suspend certain of the personal skills in order to handle responsibility for the output and skills development of others. That requires concentrating our attention outwards, working to understand and influence others. For example, building effective working relationships is not at base a matter of efficiency.

     So, we must focus intensely on identifying, defining and perfecting our own personal activities at the same time as we're doing the same for others. Contradictory activities.

     The first step, personal productivity, is very difficult to even understand, then to learn. It requires a lot of practice, and trial and error. 

Belief, Focus, Creativity

     

      “I’m not creative.”

     “I don’t have musical talent.”

     “I’m always late.”

     “I can’t do math.”

     Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense and nonsense.

     You can generate brand-new ideas. You can play instruments, make pictures, discipline your schedule, manage intricate formulas. You just have to want to, enough so you’ll invest the time and attention you need to make it all happen.

     You can do what you put your mind to. You can’t do something you’ve decided not to try.

     That summarizes this business of talents and skills.

Personal Productivity

Tom, Discipline and the Rest of Us

 

     Tom played clarinet in the marching band, skirmished regularly – and competently – in pickup basketball games and enjoyed active friendships with a variety of fellow students at Holy Cross.

     He also studied three hours a night, every night, and was assigned to the elite section of his class. He was a math major at a level where they were generating concepts so original that they had to invent their own names for the stuff.

    He did everything with assured confidence.

    Tom was the first member of our college class to marry, which he did a few days before graduation.  

     He went on to earn a doctorate and spent a long career teaching university-level math. He wrote textbooks that were popular enough over the years to keep him busy producing revisions.

     And he fathered children who grew into successful adulthood.

     I had the mixed fortune of rooming with Tom for our last two years at Holy Cross. Occasionally I would try to match Tom’s disciplined evening study hours. Invariably, after a day or two, though, I would revert to my accustomed life of bull sessions and coffee breaks leavened by modest doses of class prep.

     I gained a lot personally from the college experience and did well enough academically. Tom did somewhat better: He was the summa cum laude in a class of 500.

Failure, Success & New Year's Resolutions

     “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life.

     “And that is why I succeed.”                                                     – Michael Jordan

     When a person catalogues his/her screw-ups as specifically as Michael Jordan did, you’re generally looking at a case of really low self-esteem. “Oh, what a loser I am. Just look at my record.”

     Well, that’s hardly Michael Jordan. His record also includes leadership of six NBA Championship teams, each time earning the honor of Most Valuable Player. He also was the league’s MVP five times. He is a Hall of Famer. And don’t believe he doesn’t remember all that, too.

     Jordan had talent aplenty, but so do the most spectacular washouts you’ve ever seen or heard of. The difference is that Jordan never took failure as the final answer, and he acted from conviction that persistence in doing the hard work would pay off.

Project Outcome Slicing

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret

of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks

into small manageable tasks, then starting on the first one.”

                                                     -- Mark Twain

     Good for you, Mark. The essence of process management is identifying the pieces, putting them in order and getting under way. So simple and logical to talk about . . . but often so hard to do. Or not the right thing to do first. Here’s why.

     Small, simple things generally are not intimidating, and they’re easier to take care of than large, tangled things. So we do lots of small, simple things – sometimes even when we really should be taking on the big, scary challenge instead.

     But there is a way to tame heavyweight challenges, and Mark Twain has put his finger on it . . . but a little lightly.

     You can waste a lot of time and effort, in little doses, by doing small things and hoping they’ll eventually accumulate into solutions for the big things. They won’t. Hoping, like wishing, is a favored preoccupation of those who don’t get much of anywhere.

     Mark Twain may well be the greatest American writer of all time, but he did not rank as high in process management. His formula gives us the how of success, but it omits the what. Without clarity about the desired outcome, an efficient production process can hustle you all the more quickly to failure.

How You Get to Trust

     “You’ve got to trust me on this one.” Confident voice, arm around the shoulders, the whole scene just like in the movies, until the response: “No, I don’t. No way I have to trust you.”
     That flat-out vote of no confidence did not come in a movie – it was a real-life business moment.
     The key word was “trust,” and that was the issue. Trust requires the surrender of your independent judgment to someone else. You’re a fool if you give very much of it without really believing you should. That’s why we rarely place total trust in another person.
     How much trust do you think we exercise every day, and in whom? We do it frequently, but usually in small doses. You couldn’t get through an intersection controlled by a three-phase traffic light if you didn’t think the cross-street drivers would really stop.
     Sometimes they don’t, so we enter intersections with caution. We limit our trust.
  

Projects, Processes & Professionalism

     I’ve been at this project management stuff for less than 30 years, so I probably don’t qualify as an expert. Still, I have built up a few working hypotheses and dark suspicions:
     1. Most people who hold the title “project manager” are not real project managers, and most activities called “projects” are not real projects.
    2.  Nearly all people who manage real projects do not carry the title “project manager,” and many of them – maybe most – don’t even know they’re managing projects.
    3.  Most appointments of true project managers do not result from job postings, which is a good thing because most job postings essentially say “Superman Wanted,” and have very little to do with what the job is really about.
    4. The most fundamental trait of real project managers (designated or not) is that they can’t bring themselves to turn their backs on problems, no matter how hairy and scary the problems might be.
     5. Projects, real projects, require original thinking, flexible leadership, courage, persistence, integrity and strong skills of communication, collaboration and persuasion. And other strengths.
     6. There is one important skill set that most good project managers are lousy at.

Project Attitude

     "You've got an attitude."

     Wait! Wait! Don’t get angry!  I don’t mean to insult you – I’m just describing you. Me, too, as a matter of fact.

     In the United States, we’ve come to interpret that word “attitude” in many contexts as meaning “BAD attitude.” And “bad” is not good.

     So we have an attitude about “attitude.” I have no doubt other cultures have theirs, too.

     The point of that little semantic jaunt is to encourage all of us to be aware of our attitudes. Let’s think about how they work and what they do for us and against us. And, of course, what we should do about all that. If indeed we can do anything about subsurface mechanisms such as these.

     When the slang dictionary says you have an attitude, it means you’re resentful and hostile. That’s the definition addressed in the opening lines above.

How to Get the Boss to Behave

     The boss thought he had fired me, but I got his boss to cram me back down his throat.

     It took a year, but he (the firing guy) got me in the end.
     I brought it on myself. I tried it again -- using the “nuclear alternative” of going over my manager’s head – for a second time.

     Take my advice: Don’t do that. It doesn’t work.

     This second round, the manager lined up the political ducks, they stepped aside . . . and my nine-year career in my first real job was over.

     You’d think I would have learned a real lesson, but I didn’t. Until 30+ years later.

     In Scene II, older but not yet wiser, I have taken a radical turn in my life. I am not a newspaper editor/manager any more. Now I’m a consultant/trainer.

     I’m doing role play with employees of a high-tech company, and we’re working on managing conflict situations. As we’re looking for subject matter, my ancient confrontation pops to mind, and I offer it.

     I describe the scene, with the egotistical senior editor posing behind a large desk and the infuriated young city editor (me) leaning in from the other side. At the back of the office, three compliant older editors are lined up to serve as a silent chorus to witness, disapprovingly, the fate of an insubordinate employee.

Procrastination

     My sister gave me a thin, flat wooden disk about four inches in diameter.

     On it was printed a circular inscription: “ROUND TUIT. You said you would do (whatever) when you got around to it. You wanted to get a Round Tuit.  This is A Round Tuit.  Now you have one. So, go do it.”

     Kind of an antic way to address this most pervasive, maybe most self-punishing, of our unloved habits as human beings.

     Procrastination.

     This is “I was too busy.” I put it off. I never got to it. I haven’t gotten to it yet. I’m working on it (No, I’m not). I’ll get back to you. And so on.

     Well, who doesn’t live this way? Do you feel that you’re fully up to speed on all your intentions for today? For this week? This month? Your life?

     No? Me, neither. I'm working on it.

Big Project: My Career

     The nurse was showing the newborn to the daddy. “It’s a manager!” she was saying, much as we would announce, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”

     It was a cartoon I saw a long time ago, but the effect lingers in the mind. We operate too often on the apparent assumption that our work performance and professional position are not really up to us.

    Whatever came with us at birth, or has been given to us since by the wisdom and goodwill of others, is what we have for a job, seems like. We credit happenstance or lucky chance more than our own conscious effort.

     I’ve known a few people who didn’t buy that concept. All of them have been admirable . . . and successful.

Stuart Smalley, Dilbert & the Project Manager

     “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it people LIKE me!”

     That’s the mantra “Stuart Smalley” used to intone while staring at himself in a mirror on Saturday Night Live.

     I loved the Al Franken parody, although it mocked a behavior management process I have worked with since I became a personal productivity consultant in the late 1980s. I felt the same about Scott Adams’ skewering of managers and project management in the Dilbert comic.

     In both cases, the genius of the satirists may have popularized their mockery to greater public effect than all the training, speaking and authoring of mere mortals who take those subjects seriously.

Life? Projectize It

     “Well, if you’re such a great project manager, why did you let this happen?”

     Good question, and it is applicable across a very broad swath of our lives.

     Here’s the story:

     The builder had finally finished the new house, two months late and now just a week before Christmas.

     Moving in would take a couple of days of long hours. The owners, empty-nesters, were going well into the first night with the help of an adult daughter who had dropped by. Washing a few dozen windows and scraping off those super-sticky labels they leave on the glass.

You Can't Manage Time

You don’t manage time. You can’t. When you’re inattentive, it manages you.

How often do “to-do lists” produce very much actual doing? They frequently have the opposite effect, documenting our apparently weak will power and underlining our loserhood in personal productivity. The good intention goes on the list . . . and there it stays.

The paper evidence reinforces a general hopelessness that we relieve a bit by blaming it on impossible workloads, or maybe too-short days. But we know better, don’t we? It’s on us – personally.

Take it from me – I’m a poster child for fond hopes, often immortalized in writing on documents both formal and informal, typed and color-coded or just scribbled. Lists upon lists. Once, I think, I actually was able to honestly line out all the items on a day list, maybe a dozen of them. Once.

Project Management: Born Ignorant

Getting Competent Is Conscious

     It’s fun, and somewhat inspiring, to watch a baby progress from flops to the first real sequence of steps, thereby qualifying to be a toddler. It’s less fun to live in the same household with a person learning to play the violin.

     Both are learning processes. Walking may be close to a natural act for a human being, but playing the violin is not. In fact, almost everything we consciously do all day had to be learned, because we weren’t born knowing how to do it. Incompetence is our natural state.

     So we spend our entire lives learning stuff. It’s a lifelong project.

Life Is a Project: How Are You Managing?

Think of a typical day at work. Have you ever tracked your hour-by-hour activities (forget minute-by-minute – that’s too fragmented)?

Did any random occurrence that day advance your progress toward where you want to be in life? Did some person do that for you?

How about your own conscious actions? Did you do work, or conduct conversations, or make decisions, that put you further ahead in life?

How about your days away from the job? Where do they go?

Motivation: The Mule's Tale

There is this mule, see. Stubborn, lazy, selfish. Totally complacent and absorbed with comfort. Devoid of ambition.

One thing, though. When the muleskinner cracks the whip, the mule hops to, gets moving, gets on the ball. It’s magical.

The muleskinner has never actually skinned the mule – or even whacked it much – but you’d never know that. The mule can be the very model of productive effort, but only when the muleskinner gets serious with him/her. The muleskinner issues very clear and specific commands . .  . and never, ever backs off or compromises.

Inoculating against Interruptions

Maybe it’s really an interruption, and maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s your job.

Maybe much or most of what you do every day could be considered interruptions. The general nature of it might be unplanned, but it’s not unintentional. Your job is the way it is because people – including you – decided to make it that way.

That doesn’t mean you sat down and created a helter-skelter strategy for your work. Strategy usually isn’t done that way, however much we may try. Our habitual performance in the workplace is, for each of us, the product of countless decisions about what to do in response to competing priorities.

Interruptions & Disruptions

Visualize this: You’re finally into some complicated and challenging thing, and you’re making headway. Then a co-worker heaves into your cube, urgent with deadline-induced desperation. You care about the person, and you have the necessary answer.

The rescue may take just a few minutes, but you can almost physically feel the momentum being sucked out of your workday. When you wheel around to resume the more-important work, you face more than just reconnecting with the loose pieces. You have to reset this matter as a priority, and you have to patch a hole in your confidence. Can I EVER get anything done?

Screwing Up Is Quicker

          There’s a story about an efficiency study done in a newspaper office. An expert stood behind a sportswriter with a clipboard as the guy was on the phone. The sportswriter finished the call, rattled off a report and was about to shoot it into production.
          “Wait a minute,” the efficiency man interrupted. “How long did that take?”
          The answer: “Ten years and ten minutes.”

           Screwing up and earning success have this in common: They both take time. The difference is that one takes very little time, while the other can take a lot.