Delegation, the Missing Essential

     Try this little experiment:
     Pick one of your most intelligent, trustworthy, responsive associates. Time yourself at five minutes in describing some function of yours that the person has never done or seen. Keep it verbal. Explain freely in response to the person’s questions but take no more than five minutes.
     Make it something of moderate complexity.
     Then remain silent and uninvolved as the person carries out the function. Neither person speaks and there is no other kind of communication. Do not set a hard-and-fast time limit for this phase.
     Take notes on what happens, especially at points where the person forgets or ignores your instructions, or adds/changes parts of the process.
     At a suitable point, stop the experiment and discuss with the other person what happened, and why. Perhaps the instruction was at fault, leaving out elements that were so second-nature to you that you never thought to include them. Ones your partner had no way to know exist.

There Is No Perfect Process. Why? People.

     There is no limit to the varieties of Project Management methodologies out there, but they all share a couple of characteristics: Assurance in the presentation that this is the approach that accounts for everything, and that it works.
     Some of the books and programs also tell you further that this is the only design that really works. And there are some that ascribe inherent flaws to competing formulations, thereby highlighting the claimed superiority of their own.
     None of this is true.
 

Attitude Is Intentional

     Attitude. It’s what makes the difference.
     Skill can take you a good ways, at times. So can persistence. And assistance from powerful friends. Sometimes far enough, but nothing is assured.
     And there’s confidence.
     Confidence is the expectation of a positive outcome in whatever you’re doing. It is the driver of a winning attitude.
     Attitude and confidence. Confidence and attitude. No question, expectation of success can fuel a winning attitude. If you are sure you’re going to make it, then you act that way – and you succeed, often.
     But what happens when you don’t feel all that confident? When you’re missing that surge of confidence to drive you over the finish line, can you do it on attitude?
     You bet you can, and the people who live and work that way are the ones we admire the most. 

Persuasion

     “Every person in this room is in sales,” he said.
     This charismatic guy stood in front, facing a dozen-plus of us middle managers in a smallish organization, a daily newspaper operation.
     He came and stood behind me. He put his hands on my shoulders.
     “Jim, here, shows a lot of promise for sales leadership. He should work at it.”
     What? I tell myself. Hey, man – I’m an editor. I don’t do sales. I do news.
     This sales leadership thing was an alien concept. To all of us.
     Still, the presenter kept at it for two or three 11-hour days. There was no noticeable effect on me – or the guys from production, accounting and other functions who weren’t out there selling ads, subscriptions or news dealerships.
     Not then.
   

Where Projects Leave the Tracks

    I wonder what the boss was thinking during those first few sessions.
    We were exploring Project Management in response to someone’s concern about the prospects for this fine old company. Its products were large, complex and individually crafted by skilled workers who had been at it for a long time. This was a high-end operation, much admired for quality.
     Its process was very customer-driven, characterized by uncontrolled scope, nonexistent budgeting and loose scheduling. The entire workforce devoted itself to one beautifully crafted product at a time.
     This was very expensive, and otherwise not well suited to a world of rising costs, increasing competition and a marketplace tossed by ever-changing global competition.

It All Takes Time

      “I didn’t have time.”
     Not true. I did have time. I just spent it on something else.
     During every 24-hour cycle, I have 1,440 minutes at my disposal. That is 86,400 seconds, and I am doing something during every second of every minute of every hour. There’s plenty of time. What am I doing with it?
     Each action I take during the 24 hours has a relationship to what I would like in my life. That suggests a scale of importance for my activities.
     When I spend some thought on understanding and specifying those activities, I can establish priorities for them – high priorities for the important ones, lower priorities down the scale for the others.
     The secret to personal productivity is in how I establish and manage the priorities. When I do it right, I plan my days to give the high priorities more time and attention; lower priorities should take a back seat. And then, ideally, I stick to the plan.
 

Writing Is a Powerful Tool. Treat It as One.

            There were these six guys, submarine diesel mechanics in the U.S. Navy. Their early careers had not involved writing, and that was fine with them, because they weren’t very good at it. One of them misspelled the same word six different ways in the same document. 
      Now they needed to write. Fighting vessels were periodically refitted at their naval shipyard, and the mechanics had to write reports on their examination of the engines. I was a writing coach working with them.
       The reports had to be clear, accurate and complete. People’s lives depended on those engines.
       The Navy mechanics’ problem differed only in degree from that of many fully functioning, intelligent, articulate adults, including project managers and team members. Many people don’t like to write. Many simply avoid writing. Why?
       There are various reasons. Sometimes it is the narrow inflexibility of writing as compared to personal conversation. Sometimes it is the one-way nature of the form, making true exchange clumsy and inadequate.