Project Management Top Guns: Stay Focused on the Mission
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
by Cameron McGaughy,
Lynda Bourne, Kevin Korterud, Peter Tarhanidis, Conrado Morlan, Jen Skrabak, Mario Trentim, Christian Bisson, Yasmina Khelifi, Sree Rao, Soma Bhattacharya, Emily Luijbregts, David Wakeman, Ramiro Rodrigues, Wanda Curlee, Lenka Pincot, cyndee miller, Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres, Marat Oyvetsky
Voices on Project Management offers insights, tips, advice and personal stories from project managers in different regions and industries. The goal is to get you thinking, and spark a discussion. So, if you read something that you agree with--or even disagree with--leave a comment.
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Date
F-15 pilot-turned-leadership-guru Joel “Thor” Neeb talks focus, feedback and failure.
By Cyndee Miller
As with most things in life, apparently being a fighter pilot isn’t much like what you see in the movies. There’s not a lot of witty Top Gun banter from the cockpit. No Kenny Loggins soundtrack. If you’re smart, you’re concentrating solely on the enemy trying to blow you out of the sky—not staring at the control panels.
“You’re spending 90 percent of the time focused on what’s going on outside the cockpit,” said Joel “Thor” Neeb. (It turns out Top Gun-style nicknames are a real thing. And I want one.)
“It’s the mission objective you’re looking at,” he said in the opening keynote at congress.
And so it goes with project managers, who must stay fixated on the assignment at hand—or risk crashing their projects into the ground.
“If you lost sight, you lose the fight,” said Mr. Neeb, a former F-15 pilot-turned-president at corporate training company Afterburner.
But it’s easy to get distracted when you and your team don’t have enough time, tools or resources to accomplish the mission. That can translate to task saturation, what Mr. Neeb called “the silent killer to performance.”
The most common response is channelizing—focusing on the one thing you deem most important—to the detriment of everything else going on around you.
Clearly, that’s not a great idea.
Instead, Mr. Neeb advocates zeroing in on your “critical instruments,” aka, the factors that will influence project success. “These change all the time,” he says. “It’s up to you to figure out what they are and to teach your team what they are.”
Mr. Neeb promotes flawless execution, but he acknowledges that no project will be perfect. He says project management top guns must push their teams toward perfection while still allowing them to “pivot, fail and iterate.”
“Tell teams they’re empowered to fail and fail quickly,” says Mr. Neeb. “Make that mistake but never make it again.”
The best way to identify and avoid these mistakes is through a debriefing with “no names and no ranks.”
“The key to a debrief is the tone. We’re not pointing fingers,” says Mr. Neeb. “It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right.”
Too often, companies skip this step, but they’re missing out. According to Mr. Neeb, structured debriefings can increase the chance of success on future projects by 38 percent.
With “Danger Zone” as my official earworm du jour, Cyndee “Scoop” Miller is signing off now, but stay tuned for more from congress….
Posted
by
cyndee miller
on: September 26, 2016 04:23 PM |
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Daniel Krompholz
Principal Maintenance Systems Specialist, Asset Management| The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey
Jamaica, Ny, United States
Another silent killer is shifting priorities coming from upstream...
Many a time, its not the PM's focus on mission thats the problem, its the destabilising aspects from non Project Management folk, that trouble even the best of Project managers.
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