2015 PMI® Region 7 Leadership Summit: PMI Volunteer Leadership Development – a High Value Proposition

 

By Mike Adams, PMP® 
President Elect - PMI Otowi Bridge 
@MichaelAdamsPMP

Sitting in the parking lot of the Blue Corn Tortilla, my wife turned to me and said, “Oh thank heavens we’re here, I’m so hungry.” I nodded my agreement, stepped from our mini-van, and staggered towards the entrance. She said, “you HAVE to stop walking like that.” But I still wasn’t accustomed to walking, or even standing on solid ground. I had never taken a cruise, so I jumped at the opportunity to get trained and developed as a leader, while my wife enjoyed a great vacation.

We had a great New Mexican meal in Santa Fe, and headed for home, where my mother-in-law and our nine year old welcomed us home. He had prepared a surprise violin concert, featuring “The Hall of the Mountain King,” a song he had worked on furiously since our departure only four days earlier. Those four days had been intense for me too. I had spent countless hours in conversations, attending presentations, and collaborating in workshops as part of the 2015 PMI Region 7 Leadership Summit @ Sea.

In this article, I’ll try to paint a picture of this year’s PMI® Region 7 Leadership Summit experience, and I’ll begin exploring some of what was learned and discussed. For those of you who don’t know, a PMI® Leadership Summit is an opportunity for people who volunteer as chapter leaders to meet the PMI® staff, who support their chapter, as well as to meet their counterparts in other chapters, and share ideas. This was my first experience of this sort, and it is something I plan to participate in whenever I can. The mix of presentations, workshops, discussions and networking at dinner and in fun settings was invaluable, and something I want to see my whole board take advantage of in the future.

If you’ve read my first ever PM article, “PMI Volunteering: A Chance to Learn and Grow,” you’ll know that I credit my PMI volunteer experience with pushing me across the PMP® certification finish line. What you don’t know is the degree to which I attribute my subsequent professional development to volunteer experiences with PMI. As the VP of Education, I had the opportunity to manage projects that I would never have been accountable for as an IT Technician. As a board member, I’ve had the opportunity to think strategically as an organizational leader, to brainstorm and implement strategic initiatives, and to develop my “soft skills,” particularly relating to conflict-management, public speaking, creating buy-in, and negotiation. In short, volunteering for PMI has been a bonanza of development and training for me personally and professionally. I can’t recommend, highly enough, that you take a position on your local PMI® chapter.

Now, back to painting a picture of the 2015 PMI® Region 7 Summit @ Sea. First, Region 7 includes chapters from Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. We have some very small chapters, like mine, with less than two hundred members, and some very large chapters with more than three thousand members. That being the case, leadership challenges may vary in terms of specifics, for example, a small chapter may have a difficult time finding volunteers, while a large chapter might struggle with internal conflict, or with keeping an eye on strategic initiatives. All of that aside, successful leadership seems to rely on similar traits, and those were eloquently addressed by Darryl Jackson, our PMI Chapter Development specialist, during the Summit’s opening ceremony.

Darryl touched on a shift in PMI focus from concentrating on the technical abilities needed to manage projects, to development of leadership qualities, and soft skills. Apparently, organizations are experiencing a need for leaders, who can think strategically, and see how their project fits into the success of the organization, or the program. A variety of Industry leaders have asked PMI to develop these critical soft skills, and PMI is pushing that concentration out to chapters.

This focus on developing leaders, with strategic vision really guided my conversations for the rest of this summit, and caused me to really consider how vital my volunteer experience with PMI has been to my career. One of my favorite workshops was a discussion among chapter leaders for how we could work together as a Region 7 Leadership body to support smaller chapters and create opportunities for volunteers to grow, and gain a high value of return on their time as volunteers.

We agreed to pilot a project where chapters with strong monthly programming will make available, via webinar, their monthly speakers for other chapters. This will allow all chapters to offer more resources for earning PDUs and for personal/professional development. Additionally, we’re going to explore creation of Region 7 Leadership groups based on roles, so that on a monthly or quarterly basis, Region 7 leaders can meet virtually with others who have the same role(s) in other chapters to discuss problems, share solutions, and brainstorm ideas. Finally, we are exploring how to create a regional speaker board, where we can both assess speakers for inclusion in Region 7 webinars, but also provide mentorship and development to potential speakers, who may need some development prior to addressing an audience of potentially several thousand.

There were many other presentations, workshops and discussions, which I’ll explore in future articles. I’ll also ask my fellow board-members to write some articles about the workshops and presentations they attended. I also promise to publish an article based on the presentation I gave Sunday, “Chapter Marketing through Education: Good Education Gives You a Good Name.”

If you have any questions, please post them below. Also, your comments and thoughts are, as always, welcome.