PMO Manager Leadership - Commit to your company, not just your career

PMO Manager Leadership - Commit to your company, not just your career.

Today, most people suggest that you should commit to yourself, not your company. After all, you might get outsourced or your company may go out of business. Sure, you should have a career and advance your career and self interests. But, you also must commit, truly commit, to the company, organization, or individual that pays your salary. Take project management as an example. Are you a project manager? Are you in the project management profession? Are you a member of a project management institute or organization of some kind? In the past five years, how much time have you spent (invested) in the following:

• Committed to yourself
  • Learning about project management
  • Attending project management training
  • Sitting for a project management webinar
  • Going to a project management conferences
  • Frequenting local PMO chapter dinner meetings
  • Networking online in the various social media sites

Now, over the same five year period of time, how much time have you spent in the following:

• Committed to your company
  • Learning about every aspect of your company, market and offerings
  • Understanding the customers you serve and why they do business with you
  • Understanding the value of your partners and what they need from you and provide to you
  • Becoming knowledgeable about your competitors and how they might impact the success of your company
  • Meeting division heads of your company
  • Sitting down at the company cafeteria with folks you don't know to build relationships and to listen and learn
  • Developing improvement suggestions for both formal and informal project management
  • Developing ideas to socialize project management (as a technique) throughout all of the various departments
  • Developing and presenting at least one formal recommendation a year to management to fix a problem or do something better

Regrettably, one of the unintended consequences of standards and standard organizations like PMI is that we (myself included) can quickly become inwardly focused on our project management "community" and "ourselves" and out of focus with the organization for whom we work. Just consider the activities listed above and do the math and add up all of the hours invested. The results will speak for themselves.

Now, of course, you could argue that being committed to yourself enables you to be committed to your company, but let's be honest with this reflective exercise. Or think of it another way. If the PMI had a companion category to the PDU (professional development unit) called the PAU (professional activity unit) and you can only get PAUs by the kinds of activities shown in the "committed to your company" list and the achievement of PAUs were required to get and maintain your project management professional credential, would we all find ourselves engaging in these activities? Of course we would. Whether PMI ever develops a PAU or something like it, it is hard to argue against the merits of such a professional activity.

When you are in service to yourself, your level of commitment and world of achievement is quite small. When you are truly in service to others, your level of commitment and potential achievement is without limits. And, you are making a contribution, growing as an individual, and developing the skills you need to not just survive, but to thrive in today's competitive workplace.