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Date
We were listening to one of our favorite podcasts the other day - Wayne Turmel's Cranky Middle Manager. In this particular episode, Wayne was - in his usual witty and outstanding fashion - was interviewing Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, co-authors of The Orange Revolution.
The more we listened to this podcast and the more we heard these authors speak, the more we thought that the Orange* Revolution and Green Project Management had something in common other than an association with a crayon color. Much more.
In our book, Green Project Management, we assert that the project manager, as a change agent, can be a source of change for their organization. For example if they are to seek a connection to their organization's Environmental Management Plan (EMP) - and find tha their organization has no EMP, that you - the project manager could be the one to prompt the organization to create one.
And in The Orange Revolution, the authors study hundreds of thousands of people (350,000, to be exact) in a wide variety of organizations, and share their findings about how great teams were formed - teams with "breakthrough" capacity. In many cases these were operational teams - groups of nurses, for example. However the principles they expound certainly fit with project managers, and definitely can be adopted by green project managers.
For example, the authors found four essential qualities amongst these breakthrough teams:
-
A noble cause
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Simple Rules (simple, boiled down to 3: [Wowing customers, no surprises due to great communication, and mutual team support].
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Drive engagement
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Have team loyalty, sometimes at the expense of enterprise loyalty - not always popular with CEOs, but it works
In the book they go on to define 6 traits of breakthrough teams:
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Big dreams and ambitious goals
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Belief in in each other
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Belief in what the team can accomplish together;
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Take calculated risks while closely measuring results;
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Perseverence despite problems or conflicts that arise; and
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They have a "charming habit of Telling Stories" exemplifying what they are trying to achieve.
The big dreams and ambitious goals could be the dreems of making an organization as a whole more sustainable (economically, socially, and ecologically), couldn't it. And that's one of many touch points we found.
Some others, very quickly -
Perserverence despite problems - well we know that getting people to think sustainability takes (ironically) sustained perserverence. Telling stories - that's what we've been doing at EarthPM and it's working. By telling stories and giving webinars on the topic of sustainability in project management we have found that our followership (heading towards 1,000 twitter followers, and an exponentially growing LinkedIn Group for example) is growing by leaps and bounds.
Bottom line: we recommend that you start with listening to Wayne Turmel's podcast regularly, but in particular the interview with Gostick and Elton. Then, or in parallel, pick up their book, the Orange Revolution, perhaps buying it in tandem with Green Project Management. After all - as the post heading says, they go together.
*why Orange? We knew you'd be curious...it's a nod to the authors' first book, the Carrot Principle.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: October 09, 2011 10:26 PM |
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