Leadership Lessons from Swans and Poetry

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.

  Communications Management   Leadership   Talent Management  

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

…….

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And--which is more--you’ll be a Man my son!

Those are the first two and last two lines of a poem that you may be familiar with--“If” by Rudyard Kipling. It’s a poem that I studied as an English Literature student in England many years ago, and it expresses a sentiment that is as relevant today as it was when Kipling wrote it in 1895. It was written as advice from the poet to his son, but it’s advice that applies equally well to project managers--or indeed to any corporate leader of today.

I don’t want to turn this article into a study of poetry, but I do want to use that poem as a starting point for my thoughts here. The poem speaks to a son becoming a man by demonstrating a number of traits that Kipling believes to be admirable, and there is a recurring sense of succeeding over adversity. If you think about leaders in your own lives (professionally or personally) whom you admire, that probably resonates--they are people who have traits and/or behaviors that you respect, and they have likely demonstrated those elements in times of stress and adversity.

As project managers we have to accept that we are viewed as leaders within the organization, at least by our …

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