Step by Step

Sometimes I had the rude consultant in my mind; it helps me not to forget about how we need to take care and improve our communication or stakeholder management.

Honestly, I did not think at any time to share my intimacies or invite him to a close family party, I did not pretend to be his friend. A Simply, cordial relationship with co-workers.

Throughout my professional life, I’ve recognized that I made great friends as well as good co-workers. We spend many hours in our work, and over time the relationships between us never stop improving.

Personally, when I start a new project or start working in a new office, I do not go with the idea of making a lot of friends or inviting the whole department to a Saturday crazy party dinner in my home. I usually consider myself a reserved person, and the step to move from peer to friend, is not a fast step and usually occurs when I leave that company or project. I should point out that I have been a freelance for years, which has made me travel around Europe from project to project and from client to client, meeting amazing people.

I have been living in the United States less than two years, and I’m gratefully surprised that we can find statistics and data on anything, I love that.

A few days ago, I’ve taken a look to the Bureau of Labor statistical, I was curious about how the Americans spend their time. 

So, it is a fact that we spend more than 8 hours at work.

Some newspaper articles, important doctors, psychologists, coaches, and mentors, argue about the fact that we must stop separating professional life from the work.

As project managers, here are the key reasons can help us to improve our skills if we’ll stop separating both lifes. 

• We'll be better workers. Increasing productivity and reducing stress.
• We'll engage the teams better. By getting to know the team members better, it is easier to know their needs and get a buy-in.
• Improving communication
• Diminution of stress

But, there are also some inconvenient:

• Overconfidence makes the requests you make are not taken in the required way
• Falling into the error of talking about work during leisure time
• Possible conflict of interests or leave in a disadvantage relation to the rest of the team.
• Less productivity due to a more distractions, longer coffee breaks, more time to have lunch,
• Lose the boundaries, and then, the outside issues will affect to work.

Each of us is very different, and each of you will take different approach how to manage the ties at work, but, here few tips for the first days that will be useful not to  be rude but don’t spoil anything.

• Prioritize the work
• Be a little reserved. Avoid speak about religion, politics, money.
• Don’t participate in gossips
• Live together, share time at the office with your peers, don’t lunch alone, participate during the coffee breaks, or after works drinks
• Collaborate with the group, offer your help, and share your knowledge.
• Don’t exclude any team member, sometimes in a team, people try to join with people with the same role, be open! Talk with the technicians, or with the developers, you’ll discover an all-new world.

What’s your approach? Friends or Colleagues? 

Reference: Bureau of Labor Statistics - Charts from the American Time Use Survey. 

http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/

Few years after, I wondered what had happened to the rude consultant, I was trying to remember the name, the last name…but the bell didn’t ring.

Days ago, I’ve received a LinkedIn request, I’ve checked the picture, and OMG was the rude consultant. Grace to this tool, I was available to check his photo (hi seems older that he is), his career progression (nothing special). During few minutes I was thinking in answer his request with something like I’m not on LinkedIn to be your friend or sorry who are you?

Instead of my emotional response, I accepted his request and I’ve thought about how the networking has developed in less than years, the objectives of networking, how to consolidate my professional network.

When I was at university for me, networking was two or more connected computers that share resources such as files, printers or CD-Roms and are capable of electronic communications. The networks are cables, telephone lines, radio waves, satellite, etc.

Nowadays when we listen to the word networking our mind think about business cards, LinkedIn, job opportunities. It’s amazing how we completely changed the sense of the word.

Maybe you can remember those company dinners, village festivals or your neighbor’s birthday where people were distributing business cards as if it was an Olympic game. I had a mate that told me “Today I bring with me fifty business cards, and at the end of the party I only have 5, I’m an expert in networking” This kind of comments always make me think about how we manage the tools that we have, or how sometimes we misunderstand the new uses of old words.

With the evolution of social networks, how we keep our professional and personal contacts changed at the same pace, there are companies that help us to increase or presence on the web, if you spend some dollars you can get mobile applications that combine all your social networks, apps that allow you to share in a cloud your business information and profile.

There are books, articles, videos that explain what the goals of networking, how to properly networking, best practices, how to improve our efficiency and performance.

Since I am no expert on the subject, having read about networking, I prefer to keep to in mind only one quote from Woody Allen.

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." - Woody Allen

Where from my point of view success is something subjective, that depend on each of us, maybe your professional success will be a CIO of a big company and mine maybe becomes a speaker in a PMI Global congress?

In the XXI century, where every day will launch new applications, new social networks, new careers, "showing up" isn’t limited to hand a card to a birthday party or PMI chapter event, neither purchase a premium account on LinkedIn or write a blog about a rude consultant who worked with you.

We must keep up, retrain, and be aware of all these new technologies that we can use to increase our chances of networking.

As project managers, we have to increase and maintain our network of contacts, not only use it for business opportunities or new professional challenges, but also to acquire new knowledge, develop ourselves and our team, and above all, prevent any of our team members come to us and said something like  "I did not come here to make friends"

Brief review of the book

For those that are interested in reading this book, take this book as a summer lecture, at entertainment book, this is not the PMBOK ® or one of those business manuals, this is only for fun…or not?

Título: No he venido aquí a hacer amigos, Desventuras de un consultor IT

Autor: Jaime Miranda

Editorial: Lengua de Trapo

For all you, this is my own brief and personal opinion.

Is it Fiction o reality? I don’t know, I’ve never tried to contact the author, this book explains the day to day activities of an IT consultant and all those bad moments that he suffered because of the non-ethical behavior of their manager which whom he will have during the history a very special relationship.

This book is not only for entertainment, also you can read and find in it all this “worst practices” with unfortunately more that one we had found in our professional life.

Not only this book, but also some of my bad work experiences made me as I’m now, an IT project manager worried not only about my day to day tasks also about ethical, volunteer and mentoring in order to avoid that in IT world unethical managers, unethical leads continuing destroying the dreams and the careers of newly or futures great minds and project managers. 

First of all, this is not mine, this is not my phrase, my rule or my belief…I heard once, someone told me…it has a history, and here I will share with you.

More than ten years ago, I arrived at my first remunerated job in IT. Big company, big office, big team.

Do you remember your first day in an office? Year after year, project after project, the situation is the same, the recruiter manager or de project manager walks around the office and you are presented to a lot of people.

Your new team, your new family, all of those people that from this day you will share your knowledge your happiness, your stress, more than eight hours day with same people, sometimes will be easy, sometimes a challenge.

One of those first days, after connecting the computer, check the connections, check the first emails, lunchtime arrived. I turned around, I’ve checked that nobody was in their desks, and nobody asked me to go with them to the lunch room.

I’ve checked again, and I see a guy, I stopped few minutes to think, yes! It’s him, he is in my team. I walked until his desk, smiled and said, “Did you have lunch? Or do you want to join me?” his answer was…I didn’t come here to make friends.

I was shocked, without words, this guy was so rude.

Two or three years after, walking around a library I saw this book:

• Yo no he venido aquí para hacer amigos, desventuras de un consultor IT – Jaime Miranda

There is no English version of this book, but I tried to literally translate the title:

• I didn’t come here to make friends, memories of an IT consultant (or something like this)

I bought it, I read it, and I laugh too much.

Was this rude guy the author of the book? No, he wasn’t.

Maybe the rude guy read the book before me, maybe the rude guy continue working in the same company, maybe the rude guy ten years ago didn’t have knowledge about the importance of networking in 2016.