Voices on Project Management

by Dave Wakeman

I was going through my portfolio recently and came across the original notes from the very first piece I wrote for PMI back in 2012.

Egad!

I then noticed that I started writing for Voices in January 2013 after I left the world of political consulting and got my PMP. (Yay for needing credits for continuing education!)

All of that made me think about the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last 10 years. As a way of celebrating our time together, here are the 10 most important things I’ve learned writing this monthly piece for PMI and ProjectManagement.com:

1. Communication is an evergreen topic. I could probably write a piece on communication every month. The key to effective communication is to listen and to try and find the hidden meaning.
2. Tech comes and goes, but the process remains. I have learned over and over again that the most important thing I can do is be process oriented because the tech and tools change rapidly, but the skills of leadership are consistent.
3. You can learn PM lessons from anyone. I’ve written about the kids I coach, Nick Saban and many other topics over the years. The key idea has been that everyone uses project management skills to achieve their goals. Good PM skills aren’t specific to one industry or area.
4. Teaching is the ultimate learning lab. Coming up with a topic to teach and figuring out how to explain it helps me really understand what I think about project management. This lesson has popped up in other locations as well, making it certain that being a teacher is the ultimate learning lesson.
5. PM skills can work for anyone. Just like I’ve learned from everyone, I’ve also seen PM skills used everywhere. I shared my experiences of good project management in political campaigns, sports teams, and when my son does his homework. We are all project managers, even if we don’t realize it.
6. Focus on service, not on “leading.” I get a lot of interesting notes and comments about how people “lead,” and I’ve found that the people that focus on “leading” are typically the ones struggling the most. For me, the lesson has come down to focusing on being of service to the team and the project. The leading will take care of itself.
7. The best PMs have a light touch. This builds on service. By a “light touch,” I mean that the best PMs don’t try to overmanage or control over decision. They insert themselves when necessary—and get out of the way when necessary.
8. You can’t be an expert on everything. Especially as there is more and more specialization, you can’t and won’t know everything—there is too much to know. You have to trust your team.
9. “Let it go!” (Just like the movie Frozen!) Following from the lesson above, you won’t have all the decisions. You won’t know all the tools. You can’t be everywhere at once. You have to give your team instructions, direction and guidance, but the ultimate success of your project isn’t in your hands. So, “Let it go!”
10. Never stop learning. Writing these pieces month after month has reminded me of the most important lesson, one they don’t teach you in college. The key to a long and successful career? Never stop learning. Things are always changing—and you have to change with them.

Thanks for reading my musings on Voices. This has been a cool opportunity to speak with y’all each month, and I look forward to 10 more years of lessons to come. And if you have a favorite PM lesson, leave it in the comments.

by Dave Wakeman

I don’t know soccer as well as a lot of folks because I didn’t grow up with the sport in rural Georgia during the 1980s, but that hasn’t stopped me from coaching a group of 12-year-olds.

This means that I have had to fall back on my skills as a communicator, teacher and student to help these kids learn the game, grow their skills and have fun.

What has been the most important thing? Leadership.

Let me share some lessons.

1. Direction matters: When I first started working with the other coaches, I said, “We need a philosophy, a direction.”

Thus, the “3 Ps” were born: passing, pressure and possession.

Are these the right Ps? Is this the right direction? Does it work all the time?

Maybe. Maybe. No.

What the 3 Ps have highlighted for me is the importance of having a destination and a direction so that you can rally people around where you are heading.

With the kids, we know that our core principles are those 3 Ps—and that we if we focus on them, we are likely to be successful in growing as a team.

As PMs, the same thing plays out when we lay out the idea of “what success looks like” for our team and stakeholders.

2. Communication matters: Coach Jonah says that I am the “rah-rah” coach and the “motivator.” I don’t know if I buy that.

I do know that because I can’t fall back on my soccer skills to demonstrate certain ideas or experience to teach about certain situations, I have to be more thoughtful in the way that I communicate with our team.

What does this mean?

1. First, I need to come up with stories that the kids can relate to when I want to make a point. To get the kids to see the world through my eyes, I have to see the world through a lens of what makes sense to them.
2. Second, since I’m learning everything even now after four or five years, I can be “motivational” because if I can learn all this stuff, the kids certainly can. For you, it might mean taking your team on a journey of discovery. In the world we live in, it’s impossible to have all the answers right there in front of you. But you can learn. Sharing that message can empower you and your team.
3. Third, consistency. We have the same message we deliver regularly:
   • Be a good teammate.
   • Be positive.
   • Let the coaches do the correcting.
   • Pass the ball.
   • Defend.
   • Play the Mustang Way.

This may sound like a lot, but it is really the embodiment of our 3 Ps.

You can use this idea as well by knowing the three or four things you need to get across for your project to be successful—and reinforce the message over and over.

A lesson that I learned in my marketing training that applies everywhere is that it takes many more times hearing a message before it sticks with your audience.

As the PM, you might get tired of the message or explaining things, but you are thinking about a certain aspect a lot more than most people—and you need to recognize that it might be only a small part of someone else’s life or job.

3. Leadership matters: Ultimately, the whole project comes down to the idea that leadership still matters.

With our kids, it isn’t that they want me, Paul or Jonah to be great soccer coaches or players. They need us to be leaders.

They look to us to provide direction, vision and instruction that will help them learn the game, improve and have fun.

In your work, your team members aren’t always looking to you for technical direction. Often, they want you to be a bridge for them to success in the project, growth in their skills, and stronger performance as a team.

It is a simple message, but sometimes you need a group of seventh graders to remind you. What do you think?

by Dave Wakeman

I was reading an article the other day about understanding the signs of burnout. The list was pretty much representative of what most people share when I talk with them about it these days: It included things like trouble focusing, missing deadlines, not feeling like they know what they’re doing, and struggling for motivation.

Then I saw a reminder of how we are in the third year of the pandemic—and that’s when I realized that we are all likely dealing with some level of burnout. So let’s take a step back and figure out how to help our people during tough times…

1. Be aware of what is going on.

I’ve had to slap myself upside the head a few times to remind folks that we are currently dealing with a situation that can rightly be referred to as “toxic stress.” We are still struggling as a society to get COVID under control, many of our economies are showing signs of recession, people have new routines, there are climate issues…I could go on.

I won’t because that would be too depressing. But the starting point of addressing stress and burnout is recognizing what is going on. You can’t solve a problem you can’t see.

If you are feeling a little stressed or under pressure, you can imagine that most people around you are feeling something similar.

2. Be open about these challenges.

In working with my clients, I try to give them room to talk with me—even about things that aren’t related to our projects. Sometimes, just getting things off your chest can just help you cope with challenging times.

Unfortunately, many of our organizations (and our culture) try to reinforce a feeling of stoicism around troubling times and encourage us to keep our issues pent up inside.

As a leader, you have to recognize that the default is unfortunately to not mention anything and to not seek help or a sympathetic ear. So, you may have to force this issue a little bit; that’s okay. The payoff for your team will be huge, and your ability to help people will make you a better leader in the long run.

3. Look for ways to release the pressure valve for folks.

Everyone has deadlines, meetings, internal and external pressures, and much more. We can’t control everything for our teams, just like they can’t control everything around them. But we can often find solutions to help relieve some of the pressure.

In North America, I see a lot of businesses letting their teams have Summer Fridays off. I also see team get-togethers at ballparks, picnics and other places where they can be outside together in an informal way (as mentioned above, anything simple where we can just provide an ear). You might encourage this by setting up “bull” sessions where there is no agenda.

Going even further, you might be able to relieve some of the deadline pressure or the feeling of endless connectivity by setting expectations around turning off devices, response times, or turning on your out-of-office notifications to get a break. The big idea here is that you have to actively engage in this process with your team.

In my world, I think I find that this is the key to everything when you are dealing with people, especially in an environment where everything can feel like a struggle. Put on the brakes and take a step back. Then, be deliberate in finding ways to give people an ear to bend, a feeling of support, and a little space to catch their breath.

Maybe I’m crazy, but we all need that right now.

What signs of burnout have you noticed in yourself and your co-workers, and how have you dealt with it? Share your thoughts in the comments below. And for more on this topic, read The Danger of Project Manager Burnout.

by Dave Wakeman

My mind is on summer break. Anytime I start thinking about my summer plans, I also think about how I can use this to teach a lesson. I think I’ve come up with a pretty neat way to tie a trip to the beach into the jobs that project managers do every day. Let me explain…

As PMs, the job is to manage stakeholders, communicate, adapt and adjust, put out fires, and to end up as a clearinghouse for everything that has to do with your projects. We also hope to achieve a break because we want people to be able to make their own decisions and to take actions independent of us doing all the thinking.

This is where my vacation comes in, because when I am away, I like to be totally away—independent of any decisions for my business. Which brings us to the question: “How do we create an environment where our teams go on without us?”

Let’s take a quick tour through three ideas:

1. Give people some autonomy.

I remember reading the book The 4-Hour Workweek, where Tim Ferriss talked about turning over problem solving to his outsourced sales and service team. His solution was to set parameters when the outsourced team should just act.

Such as, “If solving this problem costs $100 or less, you make the best decision and let’s move on.”

How can we apply that to our work?

As a PM, you might set parameters for your purchasing agents that tells them, “If the purchase is under $1,000, you do what you think is best.” The number isn’t important, the transfer of authority is.

The same idea applies for correcting errors, changing a process, or communicating an issue. Set up the parameters for when you need to know (or don’t need to know). Then, you stick with them…no matter what.

2. Don’t be the first to respond to everything.

Some of the worst habits that we encourage when leading a project or a business happen because we feel like we must do everything ourselves.

Look, I’m as guilty as the next person of doing that—responding to emails at all times of the day and night, trying to juggle what can feel like 30 or more different things at once.

When you give yourself a few moments to think about it though, it won’t work for taking a real vacation. It doesn’t allow you to be a really effective PM.

Why? Because you become a bottleneck.

How do we not become a bottleneck? First, you set those parameters like we discussed at the top.

After that, you want to be more in control of your time and how you use it.

Do you check your emails constantly? I used to. Now I don’t.

Instead, I might check them once an hour or every few hours even. And, on vacation, I’m likely to check my emails twice a day.

You can do this even in your normal workday. I do two things to force myself into better habits:

• I schedule things aggressively, meaning that I set out my priorities for the day and I schedule those into my calendar so they have the time I need to complete them. I schedule writing posts like this one for the same recurring time every month. I get them done.
• Second, I use a tool called “Focus To-Do,” which is an app that I have on my desktop, laptop, iPhone and iPad. It is a timer. I use the Pomodoro Method of 25-minute chunks of deep work, with five-minute breaks. It might seem too simple, but I’ve trained myself to set aside that 25 minutes to only focus on the task in front of me. If I finish early, maybe I check my email or do a different task. But the key is blocking out the distractions and setting the expectations that I’m only going to be available at certain times. That works well on vacation, sure. But it also works well all year round.

3. Be gentle on yourself and others.

Most mistakes aren’t fatal and can easily be fixed. Which makes the constant churn of work and the constant need to be “on” seem less necessary.

I worked on some political campaigns, and I’d train folks to write campaign ads. They’d always start with apprehension, because a lot of folks would snap under pressure, yelling and screaming about an ad that didn’t work the first time.

I took a different approach by saying, “If we mess up, we will fix it. No one is perfect.”

What happened was removing the pressure of perfection (or near perfection) enabled my teams to do better work. They felt freed from the need to get everything exactly right the first time because they knew that I was going to say, “We are off here, but let’s see what we can do to fix it.”

That’s something we should all be paying attention to. On vacation, I can turn over tasks to people and they feel comfortable doing them because they know I’m not going to freak about an error or something having to be redone.

In our projects, giving people that freedom probably gives us a break from being the bottleneck we talked about before. But it also gives our team members the chance to do their best work without fearing that wrath will rain down on them.

That may not mean you are on vacation, but certainly it can make your job easier…and that might really feel like just the break you need.

I’m off to the beach! See you next month

by Dave Wakeman

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the art of strategy. I did some research to rebuild my website during 2021 because I decided the pandemic was a good opportunity to create a new version of my business—and what I found was that around 40% of businesses have no clear, stated strategy. And, of the 60% that say they have a strategy, around 80% of those strategies don’t pass the test of actually being a strategy.

Ask yourself:

1. Do you know your ambition?
2. Are you focused in your targeting?
3. Do you know why someone picks you over someone else?
4. Have you identified the resources you need to be successful?
5. What will (and what should) your action list look like?

In a lot of ways, this looks like the role of a project manager as well. But where I really want to turn your attention to this time is to the third question about knowing why folks will pick you over someone else. Because I want to talk with you about having a competitive advantage in your role as a PM.

Let’s begin by defining a competitive advantage for our purposes as the skills, attitudes and competencies that you have that help you stand out and get your projects completed successfully even in very challenging environments.

Now, let’s look at some of the key competitive advantages that I see missing pretty regularly—ones that can change everything because you can work on improving them. Here are my top three:

1. Leadership skills: It can feel like we live in a world without leaders. Managers, yes. But real leaders feel few and far between.

In fact, I’ve seen a sharp reduction in the amount of “thought leaders” preaching leadership principles or highlighting the way that folks can be better leaders in their organizations. A leader is someone that uses persuasion, not just positional authority, to get their team to achieve the results they want.

It can also be improved by focusing on the right actions and attitudes. The first attitude is one of team over individuals. On projects, it can be easy to fall into the trap of looking at the task list and thinking of the individuals and the individual tasks independently. That’s often the road to trouble, since success doesn’t happen alone or in a vacuum. Helping your team see this is a strong start to success—and one you can work on as a PM.

Start here and master this attitude. This alone will help your leadership skills.

2. Vision: I understand how crazy this one can seem to a lot of you, but bear with me. Vision is often missing because we can all fail to see the big picture from time to time.

For PMs, it might not even always feel like an important skill—but it is, because having a feeling for the vision of what success will look like can be the difference between success and failure. This is due to the reality that in most instances, our projects are part of a larger ambition—one that might have many stakeholders and many smaller tasks or projects that lock into ours.

We need to know this, recognize what the entire scope of the environment will look like, and be able to share this with our teams. That’s vision.

You get better at vision by being willing to take a step back from the task at hand, connecting with key stakeholders and working to see the 50,000-foot view of the project. In my strategy work, the first thing we focus on is setting the “ambition” for the organization. This is simply figuring out what success will look like.

That’s vision, and if you put your organization’s overall thinking into the framework around ambition, you’ll have an easier time with it.

3. Communication skills: Since I started writing these pieces, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about communications skills because your ability to communicate effectively has arguably the most impact on the success or failure of your projects.

Why? Effective communications can help propel people to action, shortcut potential challenges, and draw people toward a successful conclusion of your project.

Where does communication fall short for most people?

1. Too much jargon or complicated language: You have to speak to the level of your audience and their understanding, not just yours.
2. A failure to listen: We are all guilty of waiting to talk at one time or another. But being an effective communicator requires a willingness to listen to the other person.
3. A lack of ensuring the message got across. I have an affinity for making sure I got my message across by making myself the point of ineffective communication. I do this through offering up that I may not have shared everything, or that I may have been too technical. By making yourself the butt of the joke, you can lower people’s resistance to saying they didn’t understand something.

These three skills are competitive advantages—and are unfortunately often missing. But like a good strategy, you can focus your energy to give yourself a chance to be more successful. Give these skils a try, and let me know what happens.