A Solid Launch Consulting

A Human-Centered Approach to Leadership & Team Development

project leadership

What Are You Having For Dinner Tonight?

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Imagine this: it’s Tuesday night and you’re making dinner – spaghetti and a salad. No big deal.

You take the sauce out of the freezer (you’re Italian. There’s no way you’re opening a jar). You meant to take it out in the morning to thaw, but forgot till right now.

You decide you will take the chance on microwaving plastic because your family is really looking forward to pasta. So you pop it in for just a few minutes then plunk it in a pot to finish heating.

Okay, onto the next thing…

You boil the water and go to the cabinet…there’s 1/2 a box of spaghetti left. Argh! Decision – make something else, order takeout, or go to the store?

You already started defrosting the sauce and your family is counting on spaghetti so you turn off the stove, hop in the car, and head to the store. They don’t have your favorite brand. Another decision – different type of pasta, another brand, or scrap it and head home empty handed?

You decide call your spouse because they’ll have a strong opinion. They want another brand… you stay on the phone with them while you figure it out (you’re not taking a chance the 2nd brand will be out of spaghetti!).

You head home, then start the water boiling again and open the refrigerator. You take out the salad ingredients but…you’re out of cucumbers. @#$%^! You were just at the store!

This time you make the executive decision: forget the cucumbers. You’ll live without them.

In the end, you got dinner on the table and everyone is happy…sort of: it’s not the brand of pasta they were expecting and your daughter loves cucumbers. Oh, and all those little mishaps meant dinner was over an hour late and that messed up the rest of your evening plans.

What’s the moral of the story?

A LITTLE PLANNING GOES A LONG WAY.

I don’t mean you need to plan a week of dinners every Sunday (if you can, kudos – I’ve never had that skill). But maybe the night before would have been enough. You’d have taken the sauce out to thaw and checked your ingredients… you could have planned to go to the store earlier or picked something else for dinner before your family was counting on pasta.

Let’s turn this around now and talk about leading your team.

Teams – like dinner – run a lot smoother with a bit of planning and organization.

Do you make sure they have the tools they need to be efficient…and to succeed? Are you thinking beyond “this meal” and helping plan their workload so they don’t get crushed next week?

If you’re in charge of a team, you can make the difference between on-time & efficient and late & stressed. So please – take a few minutes to think things through in advance before plowing ahead.

And…ummm…sorry about the craving for Italian tonight! 😉

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

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Yes, I am quoting from the song “Closing Time” by the band Semisonic (way back in 1998).

I love this line. Whether you’re talking about closing your local pub or a global project, there are standard tasks to complete…and lots of emotions to contend with.

This isn’t quite the group to talk with about the bar scene, so I’ll focus this Leadership Update on projects!

The tasks to close a project are pretty standard (documentation, financials, Close Gate, etc.) so I won’t go into them here. But what do I mean by emotions?

Everyone on your project – individually and as a group – faces a range of emotions as they transition from this project to the next (or to their “regular job”).

First, there is the elation from the success of the project – or depression and other negative emotions if things didn’t turn out so great. Hopefully your team is feeling a sense of accomplishment from their work and you have a lot to celebrate. But just like any milestone, people will be coming down off of that high and start to think “is that it?”

Then there’s the hyper-focus that suddenly deflates like a balloon. Pre-launch through Hypercare, everyone probably worked a ton of hours gutting it out to bring the project Live, and it takes a while to settle back down from “overdrive”.

Along with that, your people may start missing that camaraderie they came to expect with the rest of the team during those intense weeks…or months! No project happens without the team working together – arguing, supporting, overcoming, fixing – and even if they’re doing it all over WebEx, they’ve become close.

And let’s not forget: everyone’s “regular job” has been waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on their time. When those floodgates open, your people can feel like they’ve been ripped away from everything they’ve come to know.

That’s a lot of emotions for your team to sort through! But it wouldn’t be an update from me if I didn’t answer “so what can I do about it?”

Believe it or not, one of your best friends is your Lessons Learned. The actual report may end up in a file folder somewhere. But the important piece is to help bring closure to the team – and to set them up for success in their next project.

As most of you do as well, I start off with a written reflection and then talk about it as a team (or sub-teams). I use the Lessons Learned to help my team think about what went right and wrong in each stage of the project.

Yes, at first there is the inevitable venting, especially during the group review. And this is where it’s key to let them have their say…but not spiral the whole meeting into the abyss.

But once you help move them beyond this point, they start thinking about all the bits they would have done if they’d “just known sooner” or if they’d had experience on a project.

They may talk about testing they would have done differently – and won’t ever do it any other way!

Possibly, they’ll mention a method of communication that really seemed to work for the team – and they’ll keep using it in other areas of their work.

At the end of the day, helping your team transition away from the project is just as important as closing out any open POs. They can’t truly move into their next project if they’re emotionally stuck in the old one.

As I said at the start, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Help them look forward to it.

Communicating with the C-Suite

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One of the biggest challenges in moving from an Individual Contributor to a Project Manager is learning how to successfully communicate with both the team and the executive levels of the organization. 

When you are in charge of a project, suddenly you find yourself in that dreaded “middle manager” position. A Project Manager typically doesn’t have the formal authority that comes with having direct reports.  At the same time, you feel beholden to the demands of your Executive or Steering Committee.

Woman in black jacket sitting on chair working on a computer. Picture by Christina Morillo from Pexels

Communicating Up

In this post, we’ll talk about communicating “up”, because this is typically one of the biggest gaps in a new PM’s experience.

It can be intimidating to report to the executives of your organization for the first time.  It’s easy to get caught up and start to overthink things. What do they want to see? What’s the right level of detail? Will they be angry if I tell them bad news? What if I mess up?

Communication is as much art as science and it takes some practice, as well as paying attention to how your stakeholders react and to the questions they ask.

Years ago, I heard an explanation of corporate levels that really stuck with me. Essentially, the higher up you are in an organization, the farther ahead you need to look.  Individual Contributors focus on today or perhaps to the end of the week. Their managers are responsible to plan out to the end of the month, Directors the quarter, Vice Presidents the year and the President or CEO several years into the future.

The higher up in the organization the more one needs to look at trends rather than details. Executives focus on the impact of decisions and actions, not the particulars of the work being done. It’s fewer details and more vision. It’s knowing what’s coming up, being mindful of the past, and figuring out how all the pieces fit together.

So what do they need from you?

You can help both of you be more successful by understanding how your project fits into the company as a whole and by paying attention to the type of information that will either reduce risk or increase benefit in their area of responsibility.

Specifically, let’s talk about status reports, as these are one of the most common ways we are asked to communicate with our executives. At first glance, a status report seems so high level that it doesn’t really explain what’s going on in the project. Maybe it’s just a monthly traffic light system and if you’re “green” in budget, scope, and resources, they won’t pay much attention to these areas. They will only focus on items that are at risk or anything coming up which requires their time or participation.

Your Steering Committee isn’t supposed to focus on the underlying details – they trust you and your team to get it done. And that is also why you should never “water down” these reports.  Executives don’t need to know the everything about the project – that’s why they hired you! But they do need to understand when a deliverable is at risk so they can take action to help you and your team.

A Different Point of View

They also may need to shift other elements in the organization based on your information. Just like you don’t give them the details on the project, they don’t tell you everything going on outside your project. Remember, the higher the title, the longer the view.

Approach each communication with your executives from their point of view, whether it’s in a status report, monthly meeting, or even answering an email. Ask yourself: what information can help them be confident the project is on track, understand the areas of risk, or know where the project needs their help?

Also, keep in mind that no one starts out as a VP. Everyone on your leadership team, at some point in their career, has been an individual contributor. Maybe they started in accounting or worked on the shop floor. Perhaps they were a Business Analyst. Even if their current position doesn’t warrant project details, they know how important those details are to get the job done.

A Two-Way Street

Finally, communication is a two-way street. You need data and feedback from management, too. If you have questions or need guidance, be willing to ask.  Your Steering Committee wants the project to succeed and they’re trusting you to give them enough notice so they can help.

Can I Get A Word In Edgewise?

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Remember the days of being in the same room as your team?

Most of the world has been remote for a long time. But I’ve heard rumblings that some people are heading back to the office…and some aren’t.

While I don’t bring this up to comment on the state of the world in the coming months, I do want to talk about the difficulties managing a team that’s only partially remote.

One particular time sticks in my head. I was on a conference call with my Core Team. Usually, I was in the room and could keep the meeting on track. But this time I was one of the team members who dialed in, while others were in the office.

WOW. That was one tough meeting.

I felt like I was “on mute” the whole time – I couldn’t get a word in without someone talking over me! It was as if the people in the room felt like they were the only people involved in the project – those on the phone were on the outside looking in.

As the leader, I struggled to communicate with the folks in the room. It was a really big reminder of how my remote team members feel whenever I held a meeting from the main office.

The reality moving forward may be a partially remote team. That’s so much more difficult than everyone remote!

So what’s the solution? How can we make sure everyone feels involved?

One way is what I call “All On or All In”.

That means, if everyone isn’t in the room, everyone dials in from their desk. I realize that “all on” can be challenging, as some people work next door to each other in the office.

But there are ways to handle that. The most obvious is to use headphones so you don’t hear audio from the cubicle next door.

What it does not mean is “cheating” and having 3 people in a conference room looking at 1 person’s projection on the wall.

Make it a level playing ground. If no one can have a sidebar conversation, the whole team feels included. And that makes team bonding a whole lot easier.

Stay safe, stay healthy – and lead on!

My office is a mess…

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My office is a total mess. Papers on the floor…and the chair…and the counter tops. Stickies with reminders…and notebooks, regular books, pens & pencils. It’s driving me crazy!

It’s not always a mess. In fact, I’m generally a very neat person. But I’m at a point in my project that demands so much time and attention that filing and straightening up are just not a priority right now.

Can you relate?

Project Managers are used to the swells and troughs of workload on a project. I know that soon I’ll be able to take a step back and literally clean house before the next surge of work hits.

We need to remember that not all our team members understand this. And they may go a little extra crazy when the wall of work hits. When their stress level soars, they don’t have the comfort of knowing that there really is an end to it…at least until the next milestone.

It’s our job as leaders to teach our team the realities of project work. We warn them when a surge is coming, support them when it’s busy, and make sure things really do calm down when the storm is over.

How do we do this? I have a few approaches to share with you:

  • Periodically, review the high level project plan with them. Explain the milestones. Let them know when to expect surges so they’re not surprised
  • As a heavy workload time approaches, don’t just remind them about it. Start strategizing on how to cope with the impact before it hits
  • During intense times, keep them focused on what’s real. Help them to prioritize their workload. Make sure they know they’re not alone
  • Know what you will be able to cut out if you need to. Understand when to be flexible and when you need to draw the line on workarounds that are inevitably suggested
  • Once you achieve the milestone, make sure they take some time off, or at least work more relaxed hours. A burned-out team member isn’t good for anyone

Most importantly, show your appreciation for their efforts before, during, and after the intense times. It may not be possible to do something extravagant, but I’ve found that the best received form of a thank you is an honest one.

Sticky Note or Video On?

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Be honest – how many of you have a sticky note covering the camera on your laptop?

Even if you don’t, I’ll bet half your team does…or wishes they could!

My husband is one of those “sticky note” people. I got used to being “video on” during meetings. It’s 2nd nature to our kids!

So what’s going on? Why do some of us prefer video on, and some can’t stand it?

Some of it is personality based. But part of the difference is generational.

If you’re not familiar with generational preferences, let me explain what I’m talking about.

I attended a project management presentation a few years ago on communication between the generations. I always knew that people in different age groups sometimes struggle to communicate with each other…I just didn’t know why.

This speaker taught us that not only is it the technology that shapes each generation’s communication style and preference, but the social norms, political environment, and economic realities during our formative years.

A really high level overview of the impact on generational attitudes toward work and career:

  • Baby Boomers grew up in the post-war era that supported both economic and population growth. They expect, and were rewarded for, hard work, loyalty, and following the direction of management
  • GenX was the first to have widespread 2-income households, plus economic unrest, so they tend to overwork and worry about job security
  • Millennials were shaped by 9/11 and value freedom and family over job security. They don’t expect loyalty from their employer
  • Gen Z grew up with absolute access to technology and doesn’t know what life was like before 9/11 – they live on-line and accept the security risks (and mitigations) as part of life

When you are leading your project, you’ll likely have people representing all 4 generations. And each reacts to your leadership in different ways.

For example, if you’re a new PM working with folks who have been with the same company for their entire career, it might be a struggle for them to take direction from someone who may be the youngest team member.

On the other hand, if you are a seasoned PM and your team has a lot of brand new college graduates, they may view your role as too dictatorial.

How do we work together?

The next time you have a meeting, consider not just what your message is, but how you are conveying it. If you find it difficult to reach a particular stakeholder, maybe it’s a simple generational-mismatch.

Once you know this, you can learn how to adapt. Because clear communication leads to success for both your project – and you!

…and remember that not everyone is comfortable being on camera, no matter how easy it is these days.