Charisma, or Whatever

          We owe the concept of sincerity a debt of gratitude for the grim humor it has inspired.

          Here’s a sample:

“It is dangerous to be sincere unless you also are stupid.”

That was among George Bernard Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists, back in 1903. Didn’t realize they were quite that vinegary back then, did we?

          And my favorite:

          “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

The genius this time was Jean Giraudoux, a gifted French variant of Shaw who also seems a bit more cynical than we might have expected, this time in the 1930s.

          Check out your own vision of the sincere person. While you chuckle at the cynical side, you do know some decent people who are like this: Serious, humble, humorless, mildly simplistic? Or believable, trustworthy, admirable, perhaps awesome?

You look down on them or you look up to them, but you trust them. You know sincerity when you see it. Or do you?

That summons up the vision of the con man. Or woman. “Con” is short for “confidence.” These are people whose manner and apparent professional success and personal history inspire confidence in their listeners, a mistaken conviction that they should be trusted. You give them a lot of money, or you commit to them in some other serious way.

And you lose everything. Whether they skip town or go to jail, you’re out whatever you invested. And you’ve suffered permanent scars. If sincerity couldn’t be faked, this wouldn’t happen – but it does happen. A lot.

Charisma operates in the same arena of human relationships, but it easily trumps sincerity. You can know someone is unreliable, or even a phony – but if he/she creates that irresistible attraction, you don’t care. You want to be around the person.

There may be a biological component in the phenomenon along with the psychological, and we guess this particular characteristic isn’t an acquired thing. If you have it, you didn’t earn it. If you don’t have it, you just plain don’t.

The question is irrelevant to the rest of us. We want to please whoever it is who emanates the magic pheromone. Remember the unquestioned leaders of the high school “cliques.”?

Believe it or not, this is a problem for the favored one. As a matter of fact, it may be hard for the charismatic person to remain sincere and empathetic over time, however much so that person might have been to start with. When you have charisma, you face a sea of adoring faces wherever you turn. It’s hard to concentrate on doing things well when doing things well patently matters not a fig to everyone around you. They just want to be in your presence.

This precious gift, which I think is random and not even genetic, provides a huge opportunity for leadership. Our personal experience proves this out. Many of the people we admire and have been willing to follow arouse personal affection in us that causes us to want to do what those people want.

Some of them have turned out to justify our commitment. They produced outstanding successes. Others haven’t, and we may or not blame them for the shortfall. But we probably recall them with some affection no matter what.

Anyone required to lead needs to understand this matter.

If you are gifted with the indefinable attraction that gathers people to you, weigh your responsibility carefully. Do your homework. Know how easily you can become a fondly-remembered failure. Fight arrogance.

Before you become really successful, you’ll have to become good. Many of you do. Takes work, and you commit to it. What wonders you can achieve!

The rest of us, the vast majority nakedly dependent upon our ordinary personalities and our efforts, should waste no time envying the lucky ones. They have their own burdens to bear, and while they are working their way through that we can surge into leadership. We do so as we look to our homework, devote ourselves to the tasks at hand and persistently turn out permanent, tangible results.

In the end, the common currency of leadership is trust, that belief you inspire in people that you will indeed get them where they want to go, if they will give you what you ask of them.

You’ve got to be as convincing as the con man and the honest charismatic, but as hardworking as it takes. There is nothing more powerful than an earned history to inspire sustained confidence and longtime  followership.

On a level playing field, confident competence has the hammer, however it came about. Can’t be more sincere than that.

The Project Managers

          How do I get to be a project manager? That question is more pervasive now as the profession becomes better known and the treasured “PMP” adorns ever-more job postings.

          One sure way to determine the route to a project management career is to take a look at who’s there already. Who are the project managers? How did they get where they are?

          As a consultant and trainer in project management, I’ve worked with hundreds of project managers. My project management workshops at the University of Southern Maine and elsewhere are designed for working people at all levels of responsibility and experience, but the vast majority are veterans of years in their fields.

          What are those fields? Here is an unscientific sampling from the past few months:

          Hospitals and healthcare organizations (nurses, administrators, IT managers, analysts and programmers). Banks, large and small. High-tech and communications manufacturing and service. L.L. Bean employees (numerous) in marketing and production as well as IT.

          Human resources, state and local government, insurance (numerous), social service, healthcare products manufacturing (numerous), construction, operations management, education management and administration, utilities, nonprofit, funding, student exchange, publishing, quality assurance, payroll administration.

          The old standard that project management was just for information technology and construction is no longer true, if it ever was. Two of the dozens of recent workshop participants were in construction, and no more than eight or 10 were in IT.

          Over the past few years, there has been a noticeable influx of experienced people who have been laid off, sometimes because their jobs have been eliminated, processes have changed or their companies have run into trouble. These “in-transition” professionals want to be equipped for the new jobs of today and tomorrow.

         

          In short, project managers are everywhere. Typically, these folks have been doing projects informally – sometimes very big and complex projects. They and their managers realize it’s time they stopped re-inventing the wheel and got some systematic understanding on how to do this work more effectively.

          They rarely have actually been called “project manager,” but the growing awareness of the profession out in the world has encouraged their organizations to get serious about doing the work properly. Therefore, the training. Pulling off projects is not easy, and saving time and money has value – as does reducing the wear and tear on valuable employees.

          While the fields represented by the participants are endless in variety, there is a broad sharing of characteristics among the people themselves.

          They are the go-to people in their workplaces. They’re problem solvers, and patient – they don’t give up. They feel responsible, often too responsible, for getting things done. They have trouble delegating, because they have found few people as conscientious as they are. They have high standards of quality, also frequently unrealistically high.

          They are the ones managers and co-workers turn to when something unfamiliar, complicated and difficult is to be done. Everyone is very happy to have them around.

          Sadly, they are very vulnerable to burnout, that condition of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion that robs its victims of quality of life both at work and in their private lives.

          They can, of course, learn the new skills of managing their performance at a high level, so can live happily ever after. Andy Crowe describes such people in his excellent study “Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know that Everyone Else Does Not.”

          Who are the project managers?” They’re the ones who get things done. The title comes later.

Productivity: The Cliff

          I have this vision of the elite employee, the perfect co-worker – always prepared, totally dependable,right there to lend a hand . . . and headed straight for a cliff.

          This person is committed to the organization, loyal to employer and colleagues, devoted to excellence, unerringly competent, eager to take on any and all problems.

          The cliff part comes in because this wonder-worker is incapable of saying “No.” He/she can’t refuse to help, is unable to resist jumping in when something needs to be done. The person is a perfectionist.

          There is a huge, enthusiastic market for such people. Their managers and fellow employees love them. Ol’ Joe just never says “No.” Long hours, working nights at home, coming in on weekends.

While it lasts. No one can keep that up forever. There’s no end and no limit. Sooner or later, Joe runs down or runs out.

If you’re not Joe, you know him from your workplace. If you are Joe, don’t try to tough it out. Can’t be done. You’re going to have to make some changes.

First of all, vow to retain the habits of focus and discipline that got you here. They will serve you well no matter what you do in life. You need to adjust your activities, not your attitudes.

Secondly, devote some time to an accounting, an analysis of how you spend your days. What are you doing, and how long does it take? Why are you doing these things? Each of them?

Don’t have time to do this examination? That, my friend, is a strong sign that you’re closer to the cliff than you thought. However uncomfortable it makes you, step back and take stock.

There are simple tracking formats that take little time – although they do reveal the frightening volume of work you are asking yourself to handle.

Third, take a good look at your relationships. What goes on between you and other people? Who does what for whom? Are there sensible ways to re-order responsibilities? Should you work on your communication and negotiation skills?

Finally, set up more productive ways to use your time. Make collaboration just as important as individual effort.

For example, if you don’t have time to train others in activities you could delegate, look for what you can do less of – or stop doing.

Of course, no one else can do things as well as you can – but the hard truth is that many of them really don’t need to be done that well. Your devotion to perfection wastes time. Learn and live a more advanced workstyle. Think relationships and results, not familiar old processes.

This is called mastering multiple projects, priorities and demands. It helps you become a teamwork devotee more than a task doer. You train yourself to derive deep satisfaction from collegial rather than individual results. It is a more ordered, less driven way of working.

You don’t go over a cliff. And there’s a bonus: You get a life. 

Magic Isn't. Politics Is.

     We all thought getting folks to do some challenging thing was  impossible, but someone pulled it off anyway. That wasn't magic. It wasn't just luck, either, although luck always is a component of success. It was politics.
     Politics, like project management, often is described as a variable blend of science and art. There's a reason for that common description, because the two professions are essentially identical.
     Politics, when it works, is the process of assembling and advancing reasons for disparate parties to act in each other's behalf to achieve an outcome that is valued by all. Usually, a person or a number of people explore and communicate interests among the various parties, searching for patches of common ground that encourage movement away from adverse positions.
     Opposing actors begin to see advantage in such movement, and they develop a willingness to sacrifice some less-desired benefits in the interest of gaining others of greater value. They re-examine convictions and suppositions in search of bargaining chips. As open discussion progresses, they improve their understanding of other positions, and see previously unnoticed value in offerings from different protagonists.
      There is nothing simple about such negotiations, particularly since all the parties typically have connections and obligations to other interests not at the table.
     Leading the effort takes sensitivity and tolerance, and an alert sense of real and potential motivations. It takes talent, skill and vision to negotiate the pitfalls, and to take advantage of the unobtrusive or unexpected opportunities that arise. You have to b both patient and intimately involved.
   
     All of that applies to the reality of projects, properly understood. You cannot simplify the management burden  to make it less daunting and more controllable. If you try to do that, you must then create some shrug-off to account for the resultant diminished results. You know. Projects never meet requirements, come in on budget, hit the schedule.
     It would be much like politicians blaming the opposition for intransigence when in truth they themselves failed to show leadership in convincing their constituents of hard truths and dealing honestly with their opponents.
     Project managers can't limit their work to operating the technology, reporting the processes and inventing the excuses. They must commit to hard outcomes and influence human behavior, often in circumstances of great difficulty and resistance.
     That's politics.
     The science of project management is visible on the surface, captured in the documentation and managed through organized, disciplined performance. It is PMI's 42 processes as outlined in the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. It is an absolutely essential base for good project management -- and it can be manipulated as the refuge of mediocre managers. It is nowhere near all there is to this business, and it is an easy cop-out to pretend that it is.
     The art of politics, and of project management, is the nuanced work that goes on in convincing people -- including those who are powerful, convinced and antagonistic -- to see payoffs in doing what they originally may have had no intention of doing. It is the patient development of trust and candor through countless conversations and decisions, making collaboration possible. It combines empathy with decisiveness, example with engagement.
     It is your in-process assistance to people and guidance of ongoing events.
     This latter skill set is painfully learned and not always appreciated. It is at the core of quality project management. When you hate politics, you're thinking of the lazy, mean-spirited or dishonest corruption of a marvelous set of skills.
     When politics is done well, the results can seem magical. Close examination reveals that it's not magical at all -- just marvelous and admirable.

Project Politics: Good Thing. Bad Name.

          Politics has a bad name – so bad even politicians sneer at it. Pretty much every other day, some leader of a national party dismisses the opposing position in the healthcare debate as “politics.”  Bad stuff, he/she is saying. Dishonest and exploitive.

          It’s almost astounding to realize that politics once was considered a noble calling. Nowadays, the polls rate this – dare we call it a “profession?” – incredibly low in public esteem. Somewhere in that six-mile-deep Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Lower than whale droppings. It gets no respect. None.

          So you’re up against it when you remind everyone that politics is an essential function of civilization, to say nothing of democracy. It is equally at the core of project management. It is the art and science of accomplishing a mutually-valued outcome among disparate parties.

          The unsatisfactory alternatives are dictatorship, war or surrender to unsolved problems.

          Project managers actually have a much more favorable reputation than politicians – or should that be “a much-less-unfavorable” reputation? (Did you hear the one about the cannibals who lived happily within a large organization until they were exposed? One of them carelessly ate a janitor instead of the customary project manager. The janitor was missed instantly.)

          In fact, politics, like project management, can be practiced very well or very poorly. Or somewhere in the vast range of quality between the extremes.

          Similarly, the issues of either profession can be vitally important. Healthcare, so obscured by irrelevant and inane argument, really matters. People are dying because they can’t afford care, and people are going broke trying to pay for it. The country can’t continue to afford the way we’re going

This has been on the national agenda, in one form or another, since at least the days of President Theodore Roosevelt. We should all get our heads together and do something about it. You don’t have to take one position or another to think that would be an important thing to do.

It’s a project. A project within the humongous, revolutionary project that is the United States of America. And don’t believe there isn’t plenty of risk in them both, particularly the survival of the way of life we enjoy in this country.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin referred to the newly-formed entity as “a republic, if you can keep it.” He was not at all alone among the founding members in understanding this thing needed careful tending. Thomas Jefferson famously said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It would have been too clumsy for Franklin to have said, “It’s a project, if you can manage it.” Or Jefferson to have warned, “Constant risk management is the price of democracy.”

The entire enterprise, at the time of that years-long “project charter” negotiation, was politics of the highest order. Washington despaired of getting the battling factions to agree on anything – but he kept it together through determination, persuasion and leadership. He was the ultimate political project manager, and without him the whole thing would have come apart.

In our infinitely smaller way, we project managers need a sufficiency of the same characteristics to do our job. It’s not all Gantt charts and work package specifications, however necessary they are.

You don’t have to call it politics if that offends you, but you’d better practice it that way if you’re going to hold your stakeholders together and navigate the political challenges of your projects.

Confidence

          Confidence is optional.

          You’re confident when you are absolutely sure that what you’re doing will work. That’s true of all of us. When we’ve worked out all the kinks and gotten the routine down, we have no doubt that whatever it is will come out exactly as we intended.

          The trick is to have that conviction when none of those factors are present. How can I be sure I’m going to succeed when there are all kinds of problems I don’t know how to solve, when I’ve never done this before – or worse, when I’ve tried it a couple of times and failed?

          Just to add to the description: What if everyone tells me it won’t work, can’t work, will never work?

          What kind of fool just sails ahead, serene in the certainty of success, when everything points to failure? We’ve seen people do that, and suffer painfully public pratfalls.

          Maybe, once in a great while, we’ve seen such carefree people succeed without suffering any apparent pain. Not often, and we might have suspected that they were just as surprised as anyone. Was that confident competence . . . or just dumb luck?

            More directly important to us project managers are those who sweat and claw and fight, staggering and persisting their way to success, no matter what. These are people who get knocked back and knocked down, and just keep coming.

          Is this noble commitment or foolish stubbornness? Who cares? It works.

          People who do this can pay a heavy price, in the exhaustion of their personal stock of emotion, mental balance and even physical strength and endurance. They may not sleep well, eat properly or exercise enough. Their health can suffer significantly. This is not really a good way of life.

          Equally important can be the toll on their relationships, personal and professional.

When you work long hours and focus your attention on overcoming difficult workplace challenges, you don’t have a lot of time for the wife or husband and kids. Or much else for yourself as a person. Where does this go?

Similarly, when you’re stressed and overworked on the job, you simply can’t devote the proper time and attention to listening, explaining and collaborating. Things go downhill.

You can make it in such demanding circumstances, but you tend to become more driven than confident. There’s a difference, and it’s a very obvious one. Not good.

True confidence, on the other hand, is made up of competence in performance combined with contentment in attitude. I believe it is a state that can be consciously sought and gradually built – both the external skills/practices and the internal attitudes/feelings.

          Amazing discoveries can result from the candid and thoughtful consideration of one’s own habits and assumptions. You might find that the barriers are only in your mind, and the possibilities are breathtakingly at hand.

          You thought you just couldn’t deal with conflict. You might discover that you can focus on mutual rewards without distraction from  overblown and uncontrolled emotion. Not only can you arrive at an adult agreement, but you can win the admiration of combatants and onlookers. It depends upon movements of the mind that are fully within your control.

          And you can be persistent in follow-through where you never have been before. You slow it down. You apply your mind, judgment and experience instead of allowing your feelings and unthinking reactions to divert you.

You focus your thinking on the logical steps along the way, making it specific and do-able in your mind, instead of thinking about all the reasons why it’s a pain and/or all the things you’d rather be doing instead.

You can purposefully design and implement a program of logic to command your behavior in situations of demand and stress. You can train patience into your previously impulsive behavior.

You can install a little red light in your mind to warn you when anxiety or fear is rising, so you can immediately kick in your personal problem-management process. It works.       

          So confidence indeed is optional. It takes some work. But the payoff can be lifelong, and incredibly worthwhile.

         

          

The Precious Resource

      Management 101 defines the manager’s job with stark simplicity: to get the highest possible value in the shortest possible time at the lowest possible cost . . . for the longest possible period of time.

Nothing to it. Just get out your calculator and organize an efficient investment of resources, then implement, monitor, adjust.

If it were that simple, of course, there would be no need for expensive managers. Just resources, planners and monitors. Here’s how it would work:

At its simplest, the list of resources is a short one:

                  TIME

                  MONEY

                  PEOPLE

                  EVERYTHING ELSE (Facilities, materials, etc.)

Time is the most rigid of the resources.

Everybody has the same amount of it. It just ticks away, one second at a time, sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour.

Einstein theorized that time becomes flexible as one nears the speed of light, but since few of us work at that rate, Einsteinian time is not an issue.

In reality, time is a great tool for measuring the investment of the other resources against results, and that’s it. It is a tool for making value decisions, but otherwise contributes nothing. A deadline’s value is in what a person or group can accomplish by a given moment. The people action is what’s important.

Money is the universal resource.

Everything can be converted into a cost. If you have enough money, you can buy whatever you can absorb of any other resource.

The People resource, for example, can be calculated in terms of “fully loaded labor cost.” That means a person’s salary and fringes plus the person’s proportionate share of cost of the organization’s common amenities: the building, insurance, air conditioning, marketing, etc.

If everyone in a company were of exactly the same value to the organization, you could divide its total cost of operation for a week by the number of employes. That would tell you how much each employe was costing the company, and therefore how much value that worker should provide for the company to break even on employing that person.

Things aren’t that simple in the workplace, but you get the idea. Money makes everything else possible, but has no intrinsic value of its own.

Let’s skip to Everything Else.

Here you can have construction materials, computer databases, office furniture, whatever. None of it does anything but sit there (costing money and probably deteriorating) without the wise use of it by human beings.

Information can be vitally important, in a Project or other activity, but only if it is known, understood and properly employed by people.

The “everything else” category is the one that, in general, can be replaced or substituted for by other resources. For example, if you have enough time you can swing an old-fashioned hammer instead of using an air-operated nailer. If you have enough money you can buy more raw materials.

The People resource is the central and most meaningful of the resources. Without it, the other resources have no meaning. They don’t do anything.

Under weak management, the people involved in getting things done are seen as the “adapter” in the scheme of things When you run out of time, make people donate time by working extra hours. Withhold overtime, and you save money, too.

If the Project suddenly hits an unexpected problem or picks up some added requirements, you can’t afford to bust the budget or miss the deadline – so you push the people harder.

In a properly planned Project or other activity, the human resource is not an adapter. The people who staff the Project have been carefully “estimated” to fit the requirements by devoting reasonable time to the effort. The result has been defined, and all the resources – including the human one – have been organized to get it done. Again in simple terms, the overall “investment” can be represented in a formula:

      Time + $$$ + Everything Else x Human Effort = Outcome

                                          T + $ + E x H = O

Time is added, along with Money and Everything Else. The role of Human Effort is that of a catalytic multiplier employing the other resources to achieve the planned Outcome.

If something happens, say the deadline is suddenly moved up to hit a window of opportunity in the marketplace, something has been subtracted from the T.

Logic – or good management – says O will be proportionately reduced, unless a sufficient increase is made in one of the other elements on the lefthand side of the equation.

Instead, what frequently happens is a greater burden is placed on the less-measurable human resource. Can’t you hear it now? “Let’s just take a few of these people sitting around drinking coffee and get another few minutes of work a day out of each of them.” Bingo! Problem solved.

You do that a few times – and it can work over the short term if the people care about the organization and believe in the Project – and you wear the human resource down. Its productivity declines. People get tired and uninspired. You miss the deadline (time), run over budget (money) and still have a poorer result (Outcome).

 So the substitution of human effort for other resources is of very limited value, and in fact usually is negative.

And, of course, if the enthusiasm was not there to begin with, there was not even a short-term gain.

However, the biggest price paid for such mismanagement is the effect it has on the people. They learn to distrust managers and their plans. They learn to protect themselves. They play the game as survivors, placing no value on courage, commitment or extra effort. You won’t get them back.

In short, you have blown the most precious resource.