Introduction
In order for project management professionals to be consistently successful in their projects they need to start with a personal strategy that goes beyond the scope of those projects. For this, project managers should strive for a balance across all spheres of their lives by designing and aligning themselves to a personal plan built around a set of positive principles that naturally flow towards successful project management.
This paper helps the audience in the process of identifying and aligning themselves to a strategic vision of their choice and guides them in translating that vision to an operational plan with relevance to their daily lives. For this, the paper aims to capitalize on the common domain knowledge (business and management, including project management skills) of the readers and inspire them to apply their existing domain knowledge to groom themselves as leaders and improve all sections of their lives.
One of the key ingredients of successful project managers is their ability to govern themselves. Depending on the type and complexity of a project, project managers are required to demonstrate proportionally strong leadership skills and manage their personal thoughts and behavior to bring the project to its fruition.
But personal traits and behavior cannot be throttled as required in individual projects. It needs a strategy that goes beyond the scope of these projects. If we go by the theory of linear model of time, assuming an average lifespan of 80 years, most of us spend about 15-18% of our lives working and another 30% of our lives sleeping. This leaves another 55% of our life that we spend outside the scope of our professional world. We cannot behave in the 15% of our work time in one manner and behave differently in the 55% of the personal time. In essence, human behavior cannot assume different versions in different walks of life.
In other words, humans are actually manifestations of unique sets of ideas that remain fairly constant in all spheres and phases of their lives. These abstract ideas that we represent define us as a variegated entity and constantly represent us through all actions we do or don’t do. They configure the mental map of our identities in the people who think about us. So, it is important for us to be concerned about the ideas we manifest.
How is this relevant to the business world? Candice Z. Watters says, ‘Behavioral cognitive studies prove that outward performance is linked to inward thoughts and beliefs’[i]. To grow as leaders and perform at higher levels, project managers should build their lives around a set of principles and proactively connect those ideas to their lives on a daily basis. Even Stephen Covey says, ‘The way we see leads to what we do ...and what we do leads to the results we get in our lives.’[ii]
Also, the convictions that define our behavior play a very important role in the development of trust amongst team members in projects with diverse teams in our professional, personal and social lives. Jack Ferraro says, ‘Before one can go about constructing … trusted relationships, one must recognize and be willing to accept the emotional aspect of trust, as well as take a good look in the mirror to see how his behavior could possibly stand in the way of building trust’[iii].
So, how do we develop a strategic plan that encompasses our entire life, which holistically represents higher principles, and operationalize it in our daily being? In other words, we may ask how we should go about governing ourselves. How can we develop a plan that ensures we deliver the best value to all our customers and stakeholders of our lives? How do we plan our work and work our plan to ensure our impulses won’t fail us in our implementation? For many of us this implementation process may seem amorphous.
Humans, by default use the organic planning model to begin their life strategy. They grow as a child learning from people around them and then in their adulthood learn from the people and things they interact with. They are nudged everyday with values and thoughts that concern them and after a lot of experience, with introspection and reflection; they mature and learn a set of strong beliefs. Then they switch to the alignment model of strategic planning and adjust their behavior for the rest of their lives with the values they have learnt. This default approach is something we could call as the ‘passive coast’ model.
This approach has many disadvantages. To start with, it is slow and sometimes too late. With this approach, people often try to succeed in a walk of life at the cost of something else and they don’t realize it until it is too late. For example, one may see that many highly capable technical project managers seriously lack sufficient communication skills. Many successful entrepreneurs who are feverishly conscious of how their actions align with their business mission fail to see their families in their radar screens. If only they can effectively invest a part of their passion and successes in grooming themselves in other walks of life, soon enough, they can become complete and a true role model for others to follow. With some effort, we can reverse this growth-drain and maintain a complementary lifestyle where your personal life positively impacts your work and vice-versa, by proactively making the successes contribute back towards the spheres that have been deprived.
This is something we could call as the ‘intelligent navigation’ model of life, that applies traditional strategic planning methodologies to take charge early enough and build one’s life around a set of live ideas. The recipe to do this, to implement an envisioned concept or variable into a measurable procedure, is all around us. Every effectively run organization is a standing example of this process and we as people who run them are already a part of it, however small our contributions may be. If we are willing to learn and invest this domain knowledge into our own personal lives, we will be able to simply astound ourselves by the maturity of our relationships and the quality of the products and services we deliver.
An inspiration for this could be Tom Peter’s argument that ‘We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.’[iv]. While Tom focuses only on the branding aspect of individual personalities where each one of us have to position ourselves as a micro-equivalent of Starbucks, I would like to focus on the leadership and governance skills of the CEO of Me, Inc. I would like us to learn from our businesses how to please the customers and stakeholders of our lives (at work and home), how to lobby for ourselves, how to choose our priorities and projects, manage our risks, how to measure our successes and grow and decide what skills/qualities to acquire etc. I want us to effectively use the knowledge we have gained as project managers or business leaders to improve our most important project, our lives. (It is unique, with a definite start and end date, isn’t it? According to PMI, it fits to be called a project.)
The approach is simple. Start as every organization or business starts, imagine what you want to be. Visualize your future, where you want to be from wherever you are. Document them. Yes, write them down as Rick Pitino says, ‘One secret to success I have learned the hard way is incredibly basic: Write everything down’[v]. Describe what the dominant and recurring attributes of that state are across every facet of your life. Make the choice to travel and mature in that direction as your life’s mission. For this, as every thought leader has already said write a personal mission statement and align all your planning and implementation towards this goal.
Identify the stakeholders and customers of your life that would be a part of that conceptualized future. Profile them. Identify their needs; their expectations, personalities, communication style and document them. Understand every relationship (personal or professional) is an unwritten contract. You need to be consciously aware of what your contribution is in those relationships and what value you plan to provide those people along your path towards your envisioned future.
In a cognitively diverse environment, a message sent is not necessarily a message received[vi]. When scope dissects international boundaries entropy is a given. For each one of your important customers that interacts with you, develop a communication plan. Document how and how often you are going to keep in touch with them. Don’t treat them how you would them to treat you, but treat them how they want to be treated. Develop a customized relationship for every important individual that is woven around the principles you stand for.
All these things may seem cumbersome and laborious but it becomes very simple with an effective technology solution and practice. Invest in a personal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Not a personal information manager, but a customer relationship management system. Can you think of a business that could successfully achieve its mission without an effective CRM solution? There are dime-a-dozen of these targeting small businesses, perfectly customizable for your life.
Develop a five-year strategic plan, which identifies what personal goals and milestones, when attained, would directly lead you towards your future and enrich the people in it. These may be resources you can acquire, or knowledge you learn or skills you plan to develop or even habits you want to lose etc. Use your technical skills from work in your life-strategy. When you get a new idea, don’t fall in love with it. Wear your portfolio manager hat to decide if the projects you plan to undertake align with your life's goals. Roger Von Oech writes, ‘On the one hand, you have to be critical enough to insure that you give [the] warrior [in you] an idea worth fighting for; on the other, you have to be open enough not to stifle your artist [in you]’[vii].
To achieve your five-year strategic program, list specific projects with measurable outcomes that you could undertake within a year from now and document how it would affect the people in it. Use your project management skills and execute those projects. Successful project managers know exactly what to do in their projects and bring their focus, energy and direction in doing it because they are continually aware of the bigger picture, that is how projects align with the business mission and how people’s interest align with the project.
The anatomy of success has two main organs – Direction and Discipline. Now that direction is firmly established what remains is discipline. Follow up on your annual plans with persistence and diligence.
Creatively mobilize and apply the knowledge that you have acquired to impact all spheres of your life. It may seem ridiculous if I suggest you to develop a risk database for your life’s projects, say sending your child to college, but project managers who don’t use scientific risk management aim to fail. Scientific risk management methodologies maximize the conditions that positively affect the project result and minimize those conditions that are detrimental to the project’s success. Use earned value management to monitor your metrics and measure your progress. If you decide to develop a network of 800 people in 4 years with whom you plan to have a one-to-one relationship, monitor your progress against time and throttle your effort, accordingly.
Celebrate successful project completion, reflect and write lessons learned document for every project of life. Wisdom and fears of humans are unfortunately biased towards recent history. Lessons learned documents straighten this skew.
These are not to say, lose your spontaneity. Just don’t depend solely on it. Use the science of strategic planning and project management to orient your life towards what you really want to be and supplement it with spontaneity.
Revisit your vision of your future and the planning process towards it every year, slowly but steadily; you will be on your way towards your envisioned future.
We may know about analogous nature of magnetism and leadership. They both attract and charge the attracted. There is a deeper science behind this relationship.
Every piece of iron is a potential magnet. In it are millions of atoms that are individual magnets with a north and a south pole. But in a normal piece of iron these molecules are randomly arranged. That is, they are oriented in all directions so they effectively cancel out against each other. When the piece of iron is magnetized, effectively, these atoms simply align with each other, pointing in the same direction. When this happens, the normal piece iron becomes a natural magnet.
Similarly, every individual is a potential leader. If every action they perform on a daily basis is oriented towards different short-term fashions or fads, they remain a normal person. However, when they align all their actions and thoughts towards a particular vision, they transform themselves into natural leaders, attracting others and convincing them to believe in their mission.
The thoughts in this paper simply a practically ideal solution that tries to integrate life around a set of ideas with tools and techniques borrowed from the business world. ‘The value of intellect increases markedly as one moves up the scale from cognitive knowledge to self-motivated creativity’[viii]. The author encourages the readers to apply the content in a customized manner in their lives and groom themselves as successful project management leaders.
[i] Candice Z. Watters, ‘A matter of Perspective’. Focus on the family. Retrieved April 02, 2005, from http://troubledwith.com/stellent/groups/public/@fotf_troubledwith/documents/articles/twi_pf_029832.cfm?channel=Life%20Pressures&topic=Self%2DImage
[ii] Stephen R. Covey, First Things First. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994. p. 28
[iii] Jack Ferraro, ‘Do you Trust that Project Manager in the Mirror? Generating Positive Energy through Trust’. Proceedings of 2004 PMI Global Congress, North America. Anaheim, California, Project Management Institute, 2004. p. 1
[iv] , ‘The Brand Called You’
[v] Rick Pitino and Bill Reynolds, Success is a choice. New York, Broadway Books, 1997. p. 100
[vi] Dorothy Leonard, Susan Straus, ‘Putting your company’s whole brain to work’. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. First edition, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1998. p. 118
[vii] Roger Von Oech, A Kick In The Seat Of The Pants. New York, Harper and Row Publishers, 1986. p. 110
[viii] Quinn, Andersen, and Finkelstein, ‘Managing Professional Intellect’. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. First edition, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1998, p. 184
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