A recent (and ongoing) debate on domain knowledge sparked a thought that I am considering delving into in more detail, regarding how our personality styles as PMs influence both our capabilities as PMs, and our management style.
A leadership workshop I attended involving personality styles explored the subject of control. Some people are more comfortable in a highly organized environment, and others in a more chaotic one. You can pick up on some of that looking at things like whether their desks are neat or cluttered, so that you can adapt your own style to communicate with them personally. When people fall more to one side of the spectrum, they may become less comfortable when their environment is on the other side.
My question to my colleagues here is how do you think or personality styles affect our performance as PMs when we have to operate outside our comfort zones? For example: Will a PM who is more comfortable in chaos steer stable projects into chaos, and can a PM who is more comfortable in a highly controlled environment operate effectively when the big risk turns into an issue, and the project becomes a recovery effort? Saving Changes...
George FreemanThought Leader | Author | Architect| Florida, United States
After finding my “thinking cap” and wearing it for half-hour (maybe longer), I came up with this response:
A project manager who swings more on the chaotic (i.e. less structured) side is likely to steer a project to their side of the fence, no differently than a highly-ordered project manager will steer a project to their side. Either side of the fence can deliver a successful project, and either side of the fence can fall victim to unpreparedness. Stated another way: Regardless of where a project manager sits (from a personality perspective) on the chaos to order spectrum, they will be thrown off course if they have not been mindful of their environment and prepared contingencies for the known possibilities.
On the other hand, if a project manager is crossing over to their respective dark side, for example, by taking over a project that is running contra to their style norms, what would happen? Well, if their first response was to force the project to run in their preferred style, then their first response may be their last response, as they may cause the project to destabilize beyond repair and thus force a project reset. Whereas, a mindful project manager would be able to tolerate (i.e., accept) the style difference and plot a course with consideration of the current style, and would (in my opinion) have a better opportunity to find successes door.
---- One man’s chaotic adventure is another man’s paradise. Saving Changes...
Johanna Etresia EggerProject Portfolio Manager| Coca Cola Beverages Africa contracted by Dimension DataPretoria, Gauteng, South Africa
HI Keith
I personally believe your personality definitely impacts the way you manage and steer people to start with and also how you engage with stakeholders and steer projects. Your personal ability to adapt or control is build into the grain of who you are. You can learn to swing towards the other but will always default to the core of who you are when chaos strikes.
Interesting conversation. Saving Changes...
Funmilola KalejaiyeDeputy General Manager, People Operations| Ardova PlcLagos, Lagos, Nigeria
Nov 20, 2019 3:17 PM
Replying to Luis Branco
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Dear Keith
Interesting your question
Thanks for sharing
I have been thinking a lot about this topic.
I'm reading a book: "Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win" by Jocko Willink
He tells an episode about a team that, having changed the leader, had a fantastic performance.
Previously, under someone else's leadership, this team performed poor
According to him, leadership is a determining factor for team performance.
I take this opportunity to put some of my questions together:
How can we define personality?
Is personality unchanging?
Is leadership style related to personality?
Can the leadership style be changed depending on the circumstances?
Keith,
This is quite an interesting topic and one that consistently boggles my mind.
During a training session last year, I learnt quite a lot about personality types and found my leading colour energy is blue. As a procurement personnel providing support to user departments with multiple ongoing projects, needing to manage other people with different personalities, this has helped me to identify when chaotic situations send me into "paralysis analysis" leading to over analysing situations. I have learnt and am still learning to take a step back, calm down, break the situation into small bits that are not overwhelming, ask questions, make decisions and take action. I am also a note taker, usually i take down "to-do-lists" ticking off tasks as they are accomplished. This helps to give me a sense of organisation in situations and provides a form of control in projects.
In my opinion, a PM has to learn about personality types and understand the various colour energies to understand how to handle different situations and people. No two projects are ever the same and it is important for PMs to identify their strengths and weaknesses to know which colour energy needs to be pulled up with respect to different projects. Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Keith, I think like others that personality of a project manager influences project stakeholders and project execution.
If I know my style, if I am self-aware about my feelings, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses, I will be more self-confident and authentic (since I have less blind spots). I can easily admit mistakes, laugh about myself and as such confer a sense of being in control of myself and hence of the project.
I used many different personality assessments, 360 being the most comprehensive, but also MBTI (IBM), True colors, DISC, 4D (used by NASA). The latter all end up boxing you in, labeling you, do not like that as we are also driven by the situation and might change boxes. I came up to like and use Humm-Wadsworth which assesses along 7 temperaments, of which we normally show 2-3 as dominant.
While I have my 3 temperaments, the team should show all 7. So I try to hire people to the team that we can have all personality styles. For example, if everybody is risk-averse, I try to get someone on board who is more prone to take risks. Then my own personality is not so important since the team is diverse in styles.
One of my beliefs is that the best project manager is the one who seems not needed for project success. It also reduces stress. The team celebrates success because they did it, not because they think I led them.
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2 replies by Luis Branco
Nov 22, 2019 4:08 AM
Luis Branco
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Dear Thomas
Here, in your reflection, you raise four very interesting questions:
1. Bring team members together according to their personality traits and / or roles
2. How to achieve this when it is not always the project manager to select and recruit the people on your team
3. How to train people to take on a specific role
4. Who bears the costs of recruitment, selection and training
Nov 22, 2019 4:15 AM
Luis Branco
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Dear Thomas
Have you heard about EGOS MAP?
Saving Changes...
Drew CraigSr. Agile & Product Coach| VanguardPhiladelphia, Pa, United States
Some thrive on changing environments, seeing these differences as a challenge and to keep things fresh. Others prefer more of an atmosphere of consistency.
A switch of the environments is two-fold. For instance, I would struggle in a mundane, repeating type of environment. Boredom, which leads to complacency and a drop of overall individual and professional productivity. In other instances, the change could bring a new invigoration, once not realized, or on the other spectrum, the inability to adapt, leading to negative impacts.
In short, the impact is dependent on a variety of factors and the individual.
There are tests to help individuals understand personality and behaviors; DISC or HDBI. Saving Changes...
Your leadership style effects your project management style. If you are an emotionally intelligent leader, you can understand your team members behaviours and manage them. This will provide you success. Saving Changes...
Thank you all for the very thoughtful responses! I had been thinking a great deal about this question, and the general consensus seems to align well with my own thought process (or perhaps that is just my own confirmation bias :-).
Our personality stiles will definitely bias the way we manage projects, but if we are self-aware of that fact, we can correct for the bias. That raises the question as to how do we know when we have corrected for the personal lens through which each of us sees the world, and as Kiron pointed out, that requires feedback.
Unfortunately, good feedback can be hard to find. Some team members will be more than willing to tell us everything we have ever done wrong, but most just try to be supportive and are uncomfortable giving constructive criticism. The most common feedback we get is that our projects usually end up successful or we wouldn't be in the job long, so that just reinforces our own biases.
Since we know that we bring our own biases with us but we can adapt our styles if we are aware of them, it becomes all the more important to seek out quality feedback, which can be difficult to find. If we don't find it however, we are likely to assume our biases were correct to begin with. The micromanagement avoided the problems, or we fixed the problems without wasting time with excessive oversight. Saving Changes...
Hi Keith
I would guess that Command and Control type PM's do not make a lot of friends these days .
On the other hand , Servant leaders would tend to get work done from the team through influence and polite assertiveness and are likely to be more successful in delivering any type of project, be it chaotic or halcyon.
Since this discussion is related with the one with the PM's domain knowledge it is important to say that the domain knowledge does play a crucial role when it comes to the style a PM can use while managing a project.
An obvious question arises: if the PM is not an SME then how can he formulate the commands to give to the team? The obvious answer is that he/she simply can't.
Many PMs are forced to be so called servant leaders since they simply lack the knowledge to give commands to the the team members and as such they can't adopt a command and control approach even if they wanted to.
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1 reply by Keith Novak
Nov 21, 2019 9:48 PM
Keith Novak
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Adrian, I don't want to rehash the domain knowledge debate, but what struck me is that how much knowledge we *perceive* we need is related to our own personality style relative to control.
More knowledge enables more control, but since different people are comfortable in environments with more or less control, that becomes the lens through which we each see our projects. I think most of us have seen people who micro-mange too much, and others who should be more involved in their own projects.
That right there shows that there are different perceptions within teams of how much control vs. trust is actually required, and both our team members and our bosses may have a different lens than our own.
The other relationship between the comfort level is our confidence in our own ability to figure out what we need to know when when we get there. I often describe myself as a firefighter as Tiago aptly described. In that case you may not know what you're getting into, but you will quickly determine how to put out the fire once you get there.
Although you may not have the knowledge going in, you will get up to speed quickly. For this reason I often describe my core competency as: Becoming a temporary expert in something I know nothing about.
Keith
Saving Changes...
Deepesh RammoorthyICT Project Manager ( PMP®AgilePM®Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®))| Australian Red Cross Blood ServiceTarneit, Vic, Australia
Nov 20, 2019 9:59 PM
Replying to Deepesh Rammoorthy
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Hi Keith
I would guess that Command and Control type PM's do not make a lot of friends these days .
On the other hand , Servant leaders would tend to get work done from the team through influence and polite assertiveness and are likely to be more successful in delivering any type of project, be it chaotic or halcyon.
Hi Adrian
Completely disagree with your understanding of Servant Leadership. Servant leadership is independent of Domain knowledge.
In your Utopian world , perhaps organisations will let SMEs do their jobs without there being a PM to steer the ship . In the real world however, a good PM is worth their weight in gold . It does not matter if it's a development project or a Commercial off the shelf application or a building contract or making a movie, there absolutely needs to be a project manager and they DO NOT need to have domain knowledge . They need to have exceptional people skills though.
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1 reply by Adrian Carlogea
Nov 21, 2019 6:23 PM
Adrian Carlogea
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Well, many activities are not performed as projects and as such in these circumstances PMs are not needed at all.
At the beginning of my career I worked as a software developer on a software product development department. The activivity was not performed as projects and as such there were no PMs working there at all. You only need PMs when you have to deliver a fixed scope for a fixed budget. This usually is not the case of a software development product structure that is continuously resourced to maintain and enhance a product for an undetermined period of time.
When PMs are really needed they can indeed play an important role, I have never argued with that. However when the PM is not a SME he can't function as a project's team leader as the the leader must be able to make work related decisions. Decisions requiring domain knowledge are critical for a project and the PM can't take such decisions. That's all :)
Supposing a PM with no domain knowledge would like to use a command and control approach how can he know what commands to give to the team? That's what I don't understand. I don't think this is possible.
Hi Adrian
Completely disagree with your understanding of Servant Leadership. Servant leadership is independent of Domain knowledge.
In your Utopian world , perhaps organisations will let SMEs do their jobs without there being a PM to steer the ship . In the real world however, a good PM is worth their weight in gold . It does not matter if it's a development project or a Commercial off the shelf application or a building contract or making a movie, there absolutely needs to be a project manager and they DO NOT need to have domain knowledge . They need to have exceptional people skills though.
Well, many activities are not performed as projects and as such in these circumstances PMs are not needed at all.
At the beginning of my career I worked as a software developer on a software product development department. The activivity was not performed as projects and as such there were no PMs working there at all. You only need PMs when you have to deliver a fixed scope for a fixed budget. This usually is not the case of a software development product structure that is continuously resourced to maintain and enhance a product for an undetermined period of time.
When PMs are really needed they can indeed play an important role, I have never argued with that. However when the PM is not a SME he can't function as a project's team leader as the the leader must be able to make work related decisions. Decisions requiring domain knowledge are critical for a project and the PM can't take such decisions. That's all :)
Supposing a PM with no domain knowledge would like to use a command and control approach how can he know what commands to give to the team? That's what I don't understand. I don't think this is possible. Saving Changes...
