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No Respect? Here's What To Do About It.
| How do you feel about being a middle manager? That’s what you are if you are a project manager – between a rock and a hard place. You have higher-level managers and stakeholders squeezing you for results on one side and an unevenly performing workforce on the other. And, if you are like many, you are required to spend more hours with fewer clear objective achievements to show for it – although you have an ever-growing stack of meeting minutes to show for your time.
You should not be surprised that many are leaving middle management positions and others are not in a hurry to take their place. Accenture says that roughly 40% of managers are extremely or very satisfied working for their employers. About the same number felt that they were doing all the work but not getting paid for it. Funny those numbers are similar.
Do you have the same problems as other managers?
Perhaps you should do something. Well, here’s my take: If middle managers are not getting any respect I your organization, move on. But only move on to another organization that supports middle managers. If there are fewer and fewer middle managers, and you get extra training and development in that area, then you can quickly become a hot commodity! Start your research now. |
Posted on: August 15, 2007 09:28 AM
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Stealing Communication Ideas, Part 3
| While we’re stealing, we better take as much as we can. The third step mentioned by the article is Achieving Workforce Commitment. This is the big kahuna. It’s a major component of engagement that has workers energized and pumping 100% into your project’s work.
The way we interpret this for our use in project management is maintain leadership involvement throughout the project. Organizational leaders must continue to visibly promote your project and its goals. They must speak clearly and the messages must appear often throughout the project as different phases utilize different worker groups. The messages must give feedback as to progress toward desired goals. The messages cascade down through your project leaders (team leads, matrixed managers, etc.), and must be consistent. You cannot expect to be successful in a vacuum.
Using the three communication steps from change management may be difficult to arrange if you have not had to do this before. But it can really generate superior performance in large, lengthy projects when the alternative is actual workforce resistance. |
Posted on: August 13, 2007 06:54 PM
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Stealing Communication Ideas, Part 2
| A project management adaptation of the second organizational change communication step described in the article is to make sure everyone knows why the project objectives are relevant and how the project fits in with the larger business goals. This information is usually given minimal exposure at the beginning of the project, making it easier for the average worker to feel like a small insignificant cog in a huge wheel. If this information is well-communicated, workers feel closely linked to a larger effort and tend to think out of their silos when problems need to be solved.
This communication should be provided by the middle levels of management using language that is pertinent to the workers. For example, managers of designers would stress the importance of higher business objectives to the design process. Managers of deployment specialists would stress the importance of coordinating early with all groups affected by the same initiative as they scheduled their detailed tasks.
This type of communication is not natural. Instead, the tendency is for managers to reinforce the walls of their silos as soon as the project begins. You will have to actively manage how managers are prepared and monitor the messages that are “cascaded.” But the effort will be worth it, because great increases in workforce performance can be achieved this way, especially in large, lengthy projects. |
Posted on: August 08, 2007 10:56 AM
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Stealing Communication Ideas from Culture Change Strategies
| Whenever you start a project, the effect can be the same on the workforce as some major organizational change like a merger. You have workers focused on new objectives, for instance, or perhaps using new tools and techniques. In a merger, you would set up a special communication strategy to ease the workforce into needed culture change. Why not steal that idea for use in a new project?
This article sets up a 3-step strategy for organizational change communications that can be adapted for project management. The first step is to set the stage with a description of the objectives of the project. This comes from an executive who should exhibit candor rather than hype. Workers of today will become immediately skeptical at anything that looks like Billy Mays hawking the Hercules Hook. On the other hand, they will respond to a truthful description of inadequacies in the competitive capability of the organization that the project is designed to remedy. The executive should support any key new systems, tools and/or techniques that will be used in the project.
To get the message to the workforce, use multiple methods of communication, taking advantage of newsletters, e-mails, intranet sites, and other methods. For a project with a very large workforce, you will want to do some kind of quick survey to make sure the message is getting across.
More on the following 2 steps in my next post. |
Posted on: August 06, 2007 12:58 PM
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Waste of Resources (Continued)
| Continuing from yesterday…
Your career management program has a problem if it
Hard to believe? Then it’s time you realized that your workers may approach work differently than you.
Career management for the youngest workers (“Millenials”) means succeeding in the current project, other than that they are not sure. They do not care about a future with your company because they have grown up in an environment where companies lay off large numbers of workers with impunity. Career management for them may be for you to say that they can stay on in the project if they succeed in their job.
Older workers are the most likely not to share their career plans. Perhaps this is because they assume that career management is just for the top employees in the higher floors of the hierarchy. Perhaps it is because they are included in the nearly 40% of U.S. workers who believe their next move is away from their current employer. Perhaps it is other reasons as well. These workers must be shown that their commitment and knowledge is valued in your organization and can actually be rewarded by better - and well-paid - work later. Meet the needs of all groups of workers – every individual - or forget about retaining them. |
Posted on: August 02, 2007 03:55 PM
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