Trained Observation

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

A daily commute provides some observations on personality types that most likely exist on your teams as well. It serves as a helpful reminder to stay alert to your team dynamics and to take action when appropriate.

I write a lot of these leadership articles sitting on a train traveling from my work office to home at the end of each day. It’s a fairly lengthy commute so I have plenty of time to collect my thoughts (although the editor may wonder about that sometimes!). I see a lot of the same people each evening, so even if I am sitting with headphones in and typing away I get to “know” some of them through observation.

Over time, I have come to be amazed how much this group of people has to teach us about leadership. Let’s meet some of them.

It’s all about me and you need to know it.  This individual is very important, just ask him. He sits in one of the seats most visible to other commuters and constantly yells into his cell phone. It seems as though he is always trying to close some major deal, but I can’t help thinking that he is more focused on what the people around him think about his high powered conversations than what the person at the other end of the phone is thinking. It’s clearly important for him to impress people, even strangers on a train, but he doesn’t realize that he is having the opposite …

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