Leadership: Do You Want to Work That Hard?

We talk of leadership in glowing scenes of roaring crowds. Huge ones. Rippling banners and uplifting trumpets. Adulation. No rejection. No resistance. No nasty sniping.

That’s why we see so little of it.

If you’re actually going to do leadership, be ready. Leadership, real leadership, is mostly grubby, grinding, endlessly demanding of time, patience and effort. Then, in the midst of long stretches of unnoticed, unrewarded labor, unexpectedly there arises the moment at which great success is achieved . . . or great disgrace is earned.

Basically, your extraordinary personal investment is taken for granted.

You can’t be sufficiently disciplined, adequately tolerant, to invest all that time in supporting, guiding, educating, persuading . . . it takes to build a strong constituency of appreciative followers. You can’t – at the same time -- be sufficiently gifted and smart enough, properly alert and sensitive enough, politically attuned at the necessary level, to know when your moment has come.

Unless you’re a leader.

If you love authority, you’re out. They'll hate you. If you enjoy the limelight, you’re a performer, a lightweight. They may love to watch you, but they won’t follow you. If you declare yourself a leader, you’re a joke. It’s not up to you. If you expect appreciation, you’re really missing the point. When and if appreciation comes you didn’t anticipate it, because it never was part of your motivation.

You lead because you outwork expectations, beginning in the most mundane ways. Wherever your project, your organization, your people are, that’s where you are. You attend an awful lot of meetings. You tell people, early on and all along, what they need to know. You have, and you demonstrate, respect. You ask real questions, and you really listen when people talk. You reward significant input, and you ignore distraction and misdirection.

Man, does all this take time. Most of that time is low-octane investment of your presence and attention. It is draining. You don’t need to have all the answers, but you need to be a steadying, reinforcing backbone of the process. Alert, believing and always on message.

You need to do your homework, answer the questions and dissolve the objections. You must offer ideas and solutions – while empowering people to think and act in ways that get them to consciously engage their own initiative.

Oh, and this job requires what Peter Drucker called “the ‘C’ word – courage.” No really meaningful decision, he said, is easy. When it truly matters, there is going to be pain and a price is to be paid, no matter which way you go. People are going to be hurt. They're going to be angry. At you.

Probably no one will blame you if you dodge the firestorm.

But, if you do, they will never ever think of you as a leader.

OK, so you buy all that, and you’re ready to be a leader. How do you do it?

Derelict Projects

The mythology of the sea is ripe with mysterious and scary stuff. Why was the Mary Celeste discovered cruising along, relatively undamaged but totally without captain and crew? Is the Flying Dutchman really still fulfilling his vow to battle Antarctic gales in a ghost ship until doomsday?

The Mary Celeste case was examined by a court of inquiry at Gibraltar, but the provable facts were too skimpy to settle it, and the rich flow of supposition and speculation has kept the story rolling vigorously since the 1870s. No, there was not a half-eaten meal on the table, nor was there a cat asleep on a berth when the ship was boarded.

The Flying Dutchman tale is even more fun, since no one is quite sure what, if any, actual event in the 1600s seeded the endless versions of the cursed shipmaster’s challenge to God (or maybe the Devil) that condemned him to suffer the worst of every subsequent storm off the tip of Africa. To this day, or at least to the last reported sighting of the ghost ship in 1959.

For sure, there really were, and are, derelicts – abandoned ships and boats – in the modern world, plenty of them. Mysterious disappearances from vessels, too. In April 2007, a good-sized vessel was discovered off Australia with its engines running, an open laptop computer on board and – yes – food on the table. There was no sign of the three men who were supposed to be there.

For the big-tragedy-oriented, the Bermuda Triangle provides updated mythology that includes the unexplained vanishing of jet planes as well as ships. Scary.

There is a bottomless human appetite for mystery, and we have no problem finding it in the most unromantic places. Project Management, for instance.

Derelict projects loom in the workplace, drifting aimlessly, sometimes for years, their hopeless crew members staring out at the passing world from haunted eyes. Actual disappearance of projects occurs, too, but ghostly reappearances are thankfully rare.

The word “abandonment” shows up often in definitions of “derelict,” and there’s a lot of that in the world of projects.

The reasons generally are neither romantic nor mysterious.

Project Communication: When It Ain't Broke, It Can Fix Whatever Is

We talk about communication all the time, but we rarely communicate about it.

Communication. It’s one of those everyday pervasive things we notice only when it trips us up – and even then we pause only long enough to cuss a bit. Then we move on, busily sowing new communication pratfalls pretty much like the last one.

Wait a minute! Back there, I said we talk but don’t communicate. What does that mean? We’re seeming to claim that talking is not the same as communicating.

Good question. Now we can get into the subject in a meaningful way, and examine how it lurks in just about every problem among people. And therefore in every solution. Especially in project management.

Communication does indeed occur when we talk, but the talking itself isn’t the whole thing, and often isn’t even the main thing. Other factors can be better carriers of useful information between the conversational parties than the words are. It’s a lot harder to understand and be understood when, for example, you can’t see the person(s) you’re talking to. It’s even harder when you can’t hear or be heard, such as when the exchange is through writing rather than speech.

Whatever the situation or vehicle, it’s difficult to communicate meaningfully when the subject matter is complex, dynamic and unfamiliar – say, when you’re managing a serious project. Doing it remotely, and/or across cultures, multiplies the barriers. And it’s infinitely worse when there is ignorance, misunderstanding, hostility or conflict. Open, latent or disguised.

Just sticking with regular project management, among culturally homogeneous, co-located people, you have to conclude that most projects don’t meet reasonable expectations for schedule, cost and outcome. Ideal project outcomes are just not that frequent, because ideal project situations are just not that frequent.

Why is it so tough to manage projects to happy endings? Not surprisingly, my endless string of project manager surveys about the worst project failings nearly always places communication right up in the top three, often first. The other top flaws are essentially caused by or are dependent upon communication.

When communication fails, everything fails. When something else goes wrong, communication always is essential to the repair. How?

Project Management and the Pursuit of Assurance

“Will this make me less risk-averse?”

The question, in a roomful of managers, startled me. I was a newly minted trainer, and we were gathered for a project management workshop. I hadn’t quite thought of the matter in terms of overcoming the jitters – but my views have radically changed since that long-ago day.

My previous experience with projects had been informal – in fact, I had never heard of something identifiable as “Project Management” until I got into consulting.

When, as a manager in the news business, I was responsible for getting something done, I rolled up my sleeves and went into combat mode. People knew that the poor devil stuck with the effort – special edition, process change, behind-the-news series, whatever – was in for a tough time.

They also knew that that person was going to disrupt their busy lives with demands for additional effort, generally unpaid and unrewarded. The thing rarely went well. Besides the reluctance of project “team” members and others whose help the leader needed, there were all the uncertainties of the work itself. The likelihood was that this was going to take a lot more time, blood, sweat, etc., than predicted. In all likelihood, more than it was worth.

So, with perfect logic, everyone stayed as far away as possible as long as possible. “Leadership” basically involved tracking people down and strongarming them for the desired output. All of this caused serious damage to relationships and left institutional scars that ensured a lousy start for any future initiative. It produced consistently poor results.

The essential problem with that familiar approach is its failure to properly engage and manage the one factor that makes all the difference: People. In the best of projects and the worst of projects, people are the most volatile variable. When this part is right, amazing things become possible. When it's not right, nothing will work.

And, in a typical organization, experience has inoculated potential participants against enthusiasm for participation.

When the manager mentioned above raised the unexpected question, it wasn’t just risk she was thinking of. She really was referring to the array of negatives, certainly including risk, that often surround the management of projects. Every one of them is based on – or heavily influenced by – people, their intentions, behavior and relationships.

This poor functioning of the human factor makes sound project management nigh impossible in many organizations, but it doesn’t have to be that way. For one thing, project managers have to stop supporting the negatives that bedevil them. WHAT?

When Is It a Project?

If you’re human, you’ve done it. You’ve slipped sideways into a project without realizing it, and your routine practices didn’t work. This can be messy and difficult.

Some people you know have been doing it all their lives. Some never catch on – even when they are acutely aware that things just aren’t working right. They assume that’s the way the world is and nothing can be done about it.

Well, when IS it a project? And what CAN be done about it?

The answer to the first question is not as simple as it might seem, and the implications are extremely important. Project management calls for relatively time-consuming and uncomfortable actions up front. You have to get key stakeholders to sit still for the necessary research, decision-making, planning, communication and commitment. That’s a challenge.

When you’re looking for ways to identify when you’re into a project, you’re not going to get a lot of help from the scripture of the industry. Here are some examples:

The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (the PMBOK Guide of the Project Management Institute) – “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.”

Harold Kerzner’s Project Management -- “A project can be considered to be any series of activities and tasks that:
Have a specific objective to be completed within certain specifications
Have defined start and end dates
Have funding limits (if applicable)
Consume human and nonhuman resources (i.e., money, people,
equipment)
Are multifunctional (i.e., cut across several functional lines).”

Garold Oberlender’s Project Management for Engineering and Construction –
“A project is an endeavor that is undertaken to produce the results that are expected from the requesting party. . . . A project consists of three components: scope, budget and schedule.”

All three are correct, as are many of the various other definitions of “project” out there in the field. But many people who wake up in project situations could use some finer tuning. How do I know whether what I’m doing, or what I’m facing, is a project? What do I do about it?

Making It in Project Management

How do you find a job as a project manager?
Here’s a simple how-to system:
1. Get a job.
2. Act like a project manager.

See? Nothing to it.

Well, actually the process does require more than just showing up and appointing yourself. But prospective project managers must understand that this is an environment unlike education, accounting, bartending or any other relatively defined field of endeavor.

My experience is that true project managers do not always come clearly labeled, and some people who do carry the title aren’t really doing the full project manager job. In fact, the job title has always been inadequate in specifying just exactly what the holder was doing.

The information technology and construction industries have, for decades, listed “project manager” as a distinct position. The jobs often are defined so narrowly, though, that their occupants really don’t manage projects. In fact, they sometimes don’t manage anything of consequence at all – they simply tend technical slices of predetermined processes. Necessary work, sometimes quite important work, but not project management.

Other people identified as project managers do indeed handle key responsibilities in originating and conducting significant project work. You just never know until you look into it.

In the current world, organizational decision-makers are becoming more aware of project management as a way to handle complexity, rapid change, growing risk and all the consequences of globalization. Conventional management is neither agile enough nor comprehensive enough for the job.

When that perception results in action, the organization consults some source in the project management profession to obtain a job description that more than likely demands extensive, specific experience in the work. Then they may add their own wish list and create a fictional silver bullet of a position.

Where does this leave the person who is looking to have a project management career, and is wondering where to start?

Same Old Wheel

History is the how-to manual for the future – but only if it lasts that long.

People are studying project success rates all the time, and they find that well over half of all projects fail to some significant degree, even when the standards of measurement are relatively forgiving.

Why are things this way? Well, there are the people, generally very good people. Then there’s the process, often not a very good process.

First, the people. Project managers, when they’re successful, are action people. They typically are not contemplative types. They thrive on engaging the multiple simultaneous challenges of complex innovation. Their days are consumed by the trials, errors and revisions that keep projects moving through the fog of uncertainty. If something works, great. If it doesn’t, let’s move right on and try something else.

This is the way to go, as far as it goes. When it doesn’t go far enough, the project manager’s workstyle, combined with other typical factors, does not encourage a cult of preparation and documentation. If they’re not careful, project managers are tempted to shortcut planning and tracking.

That can limit the formal planning/operating process to combining adoption of some old paperwork with finger-crossing for what’s new this time. There is no history. Individual memories tend to be selective and incomplete, and of course the memories leave when their owners do. The institution doesn’t develop and retain knowledge for use the next time.

When that happens, it results from a false choice: Either we get going and tackle this challenge, or we sit around and waste time attempting to plan the unplannable.

Don’t be tempted. Professional project management methodology, thoughtfully employed, works. It engages the unfamiliarity, the complexity and the risks – while actually taking less time and hassle.