Strategic Project Management

Whenever I write about the leadership quality of integrity, I get comments from those who either don't like my definition or don't think it's a black and white issue or just plain think I'm some kind of naive nut who is up in the night. This has been true as recently as the last few days.

The headline for the Harvard Business Review's, The Daily Stat, reads: Male Professionals with Higher Ethical Standards Earn Less. At least according to a study conducted by the University of Memphis. Andrew Hussey went through data on "thousands of students" and came up with the following:

1. Male business professionals who self-report high ethical standards earn, on average, 3.4 percent less than their peers who don't report having such standards
2. Men who reported that their MBA programs enhanced their ethical standards earned 6.5 percent less than those who didn't
3. Female professionals who self-report high ethical standards receive no pay penalty
4. Women who said their schooling raised their ethical standards actually earned a 5.5 percent premium

I guess I was wrong. Ethics and integrity don't seem to matter to corporate America. At least according to this survey. Needless to say, lying to employees, team members and customers seems to be the way for male professionals to get ahead. I can't help but wonder why it might be different for women. Maybe we expect women to be honest and don't have that same expectation of men. I must admit, that stat is a mystery to me.

I understand all the shades of grey that exist when we start talking about honesty, ethics and integrity. There are lots of reasons to bend one's personal standard of integrity (it appears now that money might even be one of them).

That being said, I still believe integrity matters when leading a team or leading an organization. In an economy where we need people to take individual ownership of what they're doing, perform at a higher level and create innovative products that create new markets and resonate with customers—integrity is still the supreme quality of leadership.

And yes, I'm naive enough to believe that it's just that black and white.

"Yahoo confirmed in a Sunday afternoon press release that CEO Scott Thompson will step down, effective immediately," writes Catherine Smith for the Huffington Post.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States and supreme commander of the Allied forces during World War II, said, "The supreme quality of leadership is unquestionable integrity. Without it, no real success is possible."

About a week ago I wrote about Thompson and how he falsified his background on his resume. Although I'm convinced that we have a flawed system for hiring talent by relying too heavily on resume scrapers to search for keywords (which might have contributed to why Mr. Thompson opted for lying on his resume) the fact that he did calls into question what Eisenhower describes as the "supreme quality of leadership". It's no surprise to me that Thompson has stepped down.

Over the years, those leaders I have responded to the best have been those I felt I could trust. I could trust what they said. I could trust the motives of what they did. And, I never had to second guess them.

Some time ago I wrote about honest project communication and was surprised that the reaction wasn’t a unanimous, “Yeah, honesty is the best policy.” I have to admit, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about those who suggested that it was OK to lie to colleagues, co-workers and team members than I should have. I have even recalled some of the poor leaders I’ve experienced over my career and recognized that many of them were liars. They lied to me. They lied to the rest of the team. They even lied to our boss.

It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.” I have observed that the great leaders I have worked with, regardless of their position, were men of unquestionable integrity.

I recognize that for many this isn’t black and white, but maybe it should be.

I couldn't help but smile when I saw Michael Schrage's recent post: Projects Are the New Job Interviews, on HBR.com. "Resumes are dead. Interviews are largely ineffectual. Linkedin is good. Portfolios are useful," says the research fellow at MIT Sloan School's center for Digital Business. "But projects are the real future of hiring, especially knowledge worker hiring. No matter how wonderful your references or how well you do on those too-clever-by-half Microsoft/Google brainteasers, serious firms will increasingly ask serious candidates to do serious work in order to get a serious job offer."

Are you seeing this in your organization? I am.

Job applicants here are asked to complete some kind of project to demonstrate how they think, how they approach work and whether or not they really understand what they say they understand. In a previous life, I worked in an organization that conducted what we called "auditions" for potential hires we really liked. We'd bring them in for a day (we paid them of course), and had them work with the team. At the end of the day, if we liked them, they left with a job offer.

I'll admit, both scenarios are still artificial, but they provide something a resume doesn't, an opportunity to see how potential hires work under pressure, how they think on their feet and whether or not they really have the skills they claim to have (you can't find that out with a resume scraper looking for key words).

Like a resume or an interview, I'm not convinced that projects are anything more than simply one more data point. I do agree they offer a better glimpse into a potential hire's skills than a resume.

"Ultimately," writes Schrage, "the reason why I'm confident that 'projects are the new job interviews' is not simply because I'm observing a nascent trend but because this appears to be a more efficient and effective mechanism for companies and candidates to gain the true measure of each other. Designing great applijects and projeclications will be a craft and art. The most successful utilizers will quickly be copied. Why? Because the brightest and most talented people typically like having real-world opportunities to shine and succeed."

Would you rather make your next hire based upon a keyword-dense resume, or because he or she wow'ed you with the results of a successful project?

According to Knowlege@Wharton, MetLife's recent 10th annual survey of employee benefits, trends and attitudes released a few months back shows employee loyalty at a seven year low. "One in three employees,the survey says, plans to leave his or her job by the end of the year." What's more, "According to a 2011 Careerbuilder.com report, 76% of full-time workers, while not actively looking for a new job, would leave their current workplace if the right opportunity came along. Other studies show that each year, the average company loses anywhere from 20% to 50% of its employee base."

Wow. Wasn't it just a few months ago that we were all just happy to have a job?

This is very consistent with a Gallup pole published last year that claimed 71 percent of the workforce is "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" in their work. In other words, they are emotionally disconnected from their work.

Last fall, in an article published on the Grapevine, Owen Morgan asked, "So why are so many employees currently thinking about changing employers—and at a time of such economic uncertainty?"

The last few years have been hard on everyone, the companies we work for, our bosses, their bosses and our team members. Listening to the radio the other day, I heard that U.S. companies are dealing with the last several years of hard economic times much better than our counterparts in Europe. They suggested this is largely to do with U.S. corporations' ability to do more with less. In reality, I guess it should be really defined as the U.S. workforce that was able to keep their jobs, were willing to work longer and harder to keep the companies they work for afloat.

This is a good thing, right?

Wharton management professor Adam Cobb sees another reason for this loyalty problem, "When you are talking about loyalty in the workplace, you have to think about it as a reciprocal exchange," says Cobb. "My loyalty to the firm is contingent on my firm's loyalty to me. But there is one party in that exchange which has tremendously more power, and that is the firm."

According to Cobb, when employers complain that employees have no loyalty anymore, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg conundrum. "Imagine a different world where firms took care of their employees, and loyalty was reciprocal," he suggests. "Would employees be job hopping to the extent they are now."

Most companies (and their employers) have thus far survived the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And those same employees have watched loyal colleagues suffer the consequences of layoffs, and the termination of many loyal and hard-working people with little, if any, regard for their loyalty or length of service. This doesn't create an atmosphere of loyalty within an organization or on a project team.

According to Cobb, we're suffering from behaviors that started about 30 years ago. “Firms have always laid off workers, but in the 1980s, you started to see healthy firms laying off workers, mainly for shareholder value.” In their announcements of pending staff cutbacks, “firms would say, ‘We are doing this in the long-term interest of our shareholders,’” Cobb notes. “You would also see cuts in employee benefits — 401(k)s instead of defined benefit pensions, and health care costs being pushed on to employees. The trend was toward having the risks be borne by workers instead of firms. If I’m an employee, that’s a signal to me that I’m not going to let firms control my career.”

I guess the short answer is yes, employee loyalty is a casualty of the new normal. The question then becomes, what can I do about it?

I was looking back over some old resource material the other day and found (or re-found) an article from Entrepreneur.com that offers seven suggestions for how to keep good team members, as the economy improves. I think these suggestions apply very well to team members:

1. Revisit Old Promises: It’s important to address any benefit cuts or salary freezes which were agreed upon by team members due to economic conditions, but it’s also important to review any other promises made to the team that may have been forgotten. For example: the extra day off for working the weekend, the bonus that was promised but wasn’t realized, etc. The team will remember, so you had better remember too.
2. Take Action: If employees have concerns or complaints, don’t ignore them. If team members are asking for additional responsibilities, give them an opportunity to participate in an expanded role on the team. When team members feel that their voice matters, they are more inclined to feel satisfied at work.
3. Have Fun: A lot of teams plan activities outside of the office. If that works for your team, that’s great. However, it is possible to make the work environment a fun and enjoyable place to be. Focusing on "all work all the time" can make the job a drag. Sometimes all it takes is a 5-10 minute break during the day or bringing in a pizza once in a while to ease the tension and make the workplace fun. Be creative.
4. Keep Talking: Keep the team up to date regarding the status of the company and its prospects. This can go a long way to ease fears about the future. Our company meets together every quarter to talk about our successes (and failures) during the quarter. We also get an update on our company’s health. I find this hour very valuable and appreciate that our CEO makes it happen every quarter. It may not be a company-wide meeting in your organization, but you can certainly keep your team up to date.
5. Be Transparent: Make sure to communicate both the company’s good and bad news without "sugar-coating" the bad news. It’s important to speak to every member of the team individually from time to time to let them know how they are doing and how they fit into the company’s (and the team’s) plans for growth.
6. Address Inequities: Rewarding employees based upon performance can be a good idea, but if there are significant pay inequities on the team, they aren’t a secret. Now is a good time to address pay inequities with raises where appropriate. As a project leader, you might not have the authority to implement a pay raise for a key employee, but you sure have some influence with who does.
7. Be Realistic: As the economy improves, you may very well loose some team members to the "bigger or better" opportunity. However, if you can show the team that they are important to the organization’s success, and are open and honest with them regarding what’s happening at your company and their future, they will more than likely stick with the team.

I don't believe there's a silver bullet for this, but before you whine about the lack of employee (or team member) loyalty or their motivation, maybe it's time to stop giving lip service to creating a great place to work and focus on actually doing something about it.

I'm convinced that it's the individual members of a project team that are the key to project success, just as it is the employees of an organization that create success. What are you doing to build loyalty among the members of your project team?

There's a lot of talk about working in the "cloud" these days. If you're like me, you have some personal storage in the cloud, a handful of the apps you use every day are in the cloud and your company is always looking for new ways to work in the cloud.

Earlier this month, Mark Thiele suggested, "As an IT community we are still stuck in the past relative to the strategic nature of cloud. Many of us are looking at the adoption of cloud as just another technology, and are leaving the decisions on how to adopt, own, and manage the cloud up to engineers." Managing the cloud "...is not an engineering decision—it's a strategic one," says Thiele.

I agree. What's more, managing work in the cloud just makes strategic sense to me—particularly with distributed teams. I know of a number of project managers that regularly work with teams spread throughout the country, and the world for that matter, who deal with time zones, languages and the communication issues associated with the every day. The cloud makes it possible, but they've all developed strategies that make it work.

The world has become a pretty small place since I started my career—the technology that allows me to interact with colleagues instantaneously from around the world continues to blow my mind.  Computers, cell phones, VOIP, and video conferencing allow me to work from almost anywhere in the world.  Although my adult children harass me about growing up when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we did get a lot of work done without cell phones, personal computers, or SKYPE

As convenient as things are now, there are some unique challenges to working in a global project environment.  Organizations regularly working with teams from around the world need to consider their strategy for dealing with cultural, language, geographic, and time differences that can sometimes make working with global teams problematic.

• The Challenge of Different Time Zones: Collaborating with teams in South America, China, the UK, and Cincinnati can sometimes be problematic.  For example, as I write this at 7:45 am local time, it’s 11:45 pm in Tokyo, 2:45 pm in London, 12:45 pm in Rio, and 10:45 pm in Beijing.  The challenges of putting together a project team meeting with a globally diverse workforce are sometimes as basic as determining what time to hold the meeting.
• A Possible Solution: Nobody on the project team should be asked to regularly stay up until 2:00 am just to make it more convenient for you.  Everyone on the project team should be able to share the burden of an inconvenient meeting time once in a while.  A simple solution is to try to hold team meetings when everyone is at work, which might be early in the workday where you are and later in the workday where part of the team is located—at least everyone should take turns meeting at inconvenient times.
• The Challenge of Bringing the Team Together: Sometimes it’s important to bring the team together, which has the potential to be pretty expensive.
• A Possible Solution: At @task, we have global project teams that work out of Europe and Asia.  Although we don’t get together often, we do get together.  Online project management tools help organizations collaborate and work together in different countries, timezones, and languages—but the need to get together doesn’t completely go away.  Personally meeting together as a team once or twice a year is important for building morale and team esprit de corps.
• The Challenges of Different Languages: The nuances of different languages beg for miss-communication.  Even where your particular language is spoken as a second language, it’s critical that communication be clear.  We need to be cautious, particularly where the lion’s share of communication is written, where body language and facial expression are not available to aid understanding.
• A Possible Solution: Video conferencing is a good option, but at the very least, make sure emails contain all the information necessary to communicate your ideas clearly.  I try to address all my emails with a salutation and a name to remind me that I am actually communicating with a real person.  Even amongst my co-workers, where English is our native language, we sometimes misunderstand and misinterpret an abrupt email.
• The Challenges of Cultural Differences: If part of what defines us is our shared experiences, taking time for global team members to become better acquainted, and share experiences to create a team culture is important.  This is true even if your team only spreads across your own country.
• A Possible Solution: Take the time for global project teams to become familiar with each others varied customs and cultures.  It might be as simple as sharing a regional dish for lunch.  In this regard, a little effort goes a long way.

Working in the cloud allows us to work globally, but it should also encourage us to think about how we use cloud-based tools strategically. Simply having the ability to collaborate on projects, tasks and issues with team members from around the world isn't enough—we need to think about how to do it best. How do we use our cloud-based tools to maximize the contribution of everyone on the team—regardless of their location?

What do you think? Is project management in the cloud tactical or a strategic play?