As the project management profession matured over the years, there has been a growing emphasis on developing leadership skills in order to become a better project leader.
In the words of the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) President and CEO, Sunil Prashara:
“Not only do today’s project leaders need a strong understanding of technology, the ability to determine the best project management methodology for projects, AND the new “power skills” like empathy, creativity and inspirational leadership, they must also have an understanding of the major business, technological, economic and geopolitical trends shaping the world.”
Sunil Prashara, President of PMI
To help prepare project professionals for this, the PMI has conducted research (interviews with project professionals; analyzed information extracted from political, economic, scientific and demographic databases) on the most pressing, long-term trends around the globe. The purpose is to gain a greater understanding of where these critical areas are heading and how industry project leaders can prepare.
With the speed of transformation and operating in a complex world, it will help to gain an understanding of these changes in order to thrive and make an impact where you are.
Signposts Report
The findings have been published in the PMI 2020 Signposts Report. In summary, the Report consist of the following Insights:
Insight 1: Africa and most of the developing world will be home to a new generation of talent ready to tackle a new generation of projects.
Insight 2: Climate change ranks as one of the biggest existential threats to civilization, but project professionals can play a pivotal role in avoiding the point of no return.
Insight 3: As artificial intelligence truly moves into the mainstream, it brings harsh realities—and immense opportunities for project leaders with the right blend of people and tech skills.
Insight 4: Rampant protectionism is forcing a rethink of the once unstoppable force of globalization. But for many project teams, it’s cross-border business as usual (with a few tweaks).
Insight 5: The global infrastructure gap between needs and investment is wide. To close it, project leaders are relying on data-driven innovation—and good old-fashioned people skills.
Insight 6: Keeping information safe requires a united front, backed by a cross-disciplinary, enterprise-wide cybersecurity culture.
The Report makes for a fascinating read about climate change, artificial intelligence, globalization, the infrastructure gap, cybersecurity and shifting demographics.
There are complex issues to be solved which require a new way of thinking and to reimagine the way work gets done. The PMI advocates that organisations need project leaders who bring holistic perspectives, a deep curiosity and broad skill sets to the work at hand who are capable of embracing new ways of working, leading diverse teams and exploring innovative solutions. We need to get ourselves ready.
Many teams all over the world, have been forced into a ‘work-from-home’ situation due to the Coronavirus spread and countries’ response with different degrees of lockdown measures to curb the spread. Inevitably, virtual teams have many challenges. This article will position how the skill of ‘Active Listening’ can play a huge part when leading virtual teams.
What is active listening?
Active listening can be described as follows:
Clarifying
Feedback
Focus
Improve the communication
Repeating
Intent
Encouraging
What are communication challenges to overcome?
The challenges people are coming across, include the following:
How to listen when you are part of a virtual team
Technology is overloaded; organisations and schools are using the networks, which could cause connectivity or sound issues
When no video is used, you cannot read body language. Tone of voice becomes very important
Participants can talk over each another, or some don’t get a chance to speak
How to address communication challenges with listening skills?
You will find with remote work that virtual teams require new rules and new ways of collaboration. Different ground rules will apply, for example to time-box discussions and to ensure that every participant get a chance to speak. More 1-on-1 discussions are required and you need to have more empathy.
Communication with virtual teams can take a lot of energy. Therefore, beware of low energy levels, for example if a person hasn’t eaten, or it’s at the end of a long day, people may lose interest.
Stages of Listening
Reception during communication can be explained with:
Intake
Meaning
Significance
Response
3 Phases of active listing
The following image provides a nice breakdown of the three phases of active listening, namely comprehending, retaining and responding.
Levels of listening
There are also different levels of listening to be aware of.
Level 1: Internal listening
You ask a question. When a person answers, you think of your own life, interrupt them, or just keep thinking of your own things, and stop listening while they’re speaking. It’s all about ME.
Level 2: Focused listening
The person who listens, asks clarifying questions. Now it’s about voice, information, body language (if it can be seen), emotions that are being observed.
Level 3: Global listening
The person listening has a sense of curiosity. You listen with emphathy. You consider the environment and you take into account a person’s background.
Level 4: Listening for potential
You listen with intent and a positive attitude while thinking of future possibilities and potential.
How to become better with active listening
What will really help you is to have curiosity and to use keywords. If you’re not interested, or curious, you won’t listen, or spend energy there. While listening, look for keywords, ideas and concepts. If things are repeated, look for patterns, because repeated themes are more important.
Another way to become better with active listening, is thinking in a visual way. To do this, you can draw notes, or draw a picture. This gives context, meaning and focus.
You can also improve your active listening skills by being aware of yourself. Do this through reflection, mindfulness and self-awareness. Ask yourself questions like:
How do I listen?
What is good and what not?
Can I improve something?
Nonviolent communication
Nonviolent Communication is an approach to nonviolent living developed by Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s. NVC is based on the assumption that all human beings have capacity for compassion and empathy and is really about communicating honestly and receiving empathetically. It is an essential ingredient to active listening.
The steps involved with NVC are:
Observe – when I see, hear
Feelings – I feel
Needs – because I need
Requests – please could you now. The needs of the other person are important and always considered
Tips to improve
There are several ways to keep improving your active listening skills. They are:
Conscious practice
Write down keywords
Note your own ideas
Ask neutral clarifying questions
In your mind repeat what other persons says
Try to visualize what the other person is saying
Ask additional questions until you can form a mental image
Don’t talk; rather use non-verbal signals like sounds and expressions, grunts and body language
Reply with 1-2 syllables
Admit you are lost
Repeat back or paraphrasing to show understanding
Adjust your own posture
Mirror the other person
Apply mindfulness
Check the environment
Drawing of notes, or pictures
The skill of ‘Active Listening’ should not be underestimated; it becomes even more important with virtual teams. It is something that can be practiced and improved over time.
As a virtual team lead, it is your responsibility to hone this skill and to model the behavior of good active listening to your team members so that they can also practice it and improve their listening skills. You will find that it will greatly contribute to building trust within teams and to help overcome the challenges of working virtually.
Sources:
Webinar by Pascal Papathemelis from Agile 42
Corporatecoachgroup.com: “How to improve active listening skills”
In light of this crisis, some of the best things a Project Leader can do, is to arm yourself with information and to be a pillar of strength for your project team(s).
By now we all know that the Coronavirus, known as the COVID-19 pandemic, has serious implications for economies all over the world and is causing a huge business impact in every country where it is spreading. Countries, organizations, and individuals are faced with extremely serious risks, uncertainties, challenges, questions, and decisions—in many cases existential in nature. It is important to arm yourself with accurate, comprehensive information to manage your organization and teams through this crisis by making informed, thoughtful decisions.
Let’s look with a broader lens before we try to understand the impact on project teams.
Based on the rapid, exponential spread of COVID-19 across the world over the past month, McKinsey has revised its Scenario Analysis (as shared in the previous article) to include 9 potential scenarios. These scenarios capture outcomes related to GDP impact, public health response, and economic policies.
Stages of Recovery
Different countries have had different levels of success in handling this crisis, therefore McKinsey is proposing 4 stages of recovery readiness.
Overview of the 4 Stages of Recovery
To understand what state of readiness a country is in, the 9 scenarios are mapped to the 4 stages of readiness. The best prepared areas are in the upper right box.
For every country and territory, there is a path to recovery—before parts of the economy can be restarted, you must first slow the spread of the virus. If you prematurely restart the economy prior to truly containing the spread, you risk re-starting the spread. Most countries expect to experience significant decline in GDP in Q2 of 2020, which would be the first time since WWII. In fact, GDP drops to its lowest point globally in Q2.
COVID-19 Scenarios Overview
Based on the COVID-19 scenarios, here are the proposed paths to recovery.
If you examine the Stage 2 scenario: A3-Virus is contained, which captures the situation where the virus is contained by mid-Q2, it is expected that public health containment and mitigation efforts, along with a seasonal decline, leads to a reduction in case load.
The result is that by the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, GDP will have recovered to the pre-pandemic levels for most countries.
Under the A1 scenario (medium virus spread), we endure a slow, global recovery—there is severe and large-scale human and economic impact. Most countries will take over 2+ years to recover to the pre-pandemic GDP levels. In this scenario, the GDP shows a gradual U-shape recovery stretching multiple years.
Implication for Companies and Projects
If the Stage 2 scenario (A3-virus is contained) materializes in your country, you have the possibility that the economy should return to normal within a year, with little impact on larger projects and programmes that were able to continue, despite wide-scale lock-down measures in many countries. Of course many small projects would have been put on hold, postponed, or cancelled altogether due to the economic downturn.
However, in the event of a possible A1 scenario in your country, the slow economic recovery, may cause many planned projects to be postponed and multiple cost-saving measures are expected to be implemented by stable companies who will try to survice over the 2+ years that it will take the economy to recover to pre-pandemic GDP levels.
Our response
There is no point in panicking about the situation we as project practitioners are finding ourselves in. Rather prepare for the eventuality that uncertainty, challenges and difficult decisions are lying ahead for most companies.
In another McKinsey article: “Saving our livelihoods from COVID-19: Toward an economic recovery“, they state:
The pandemic could give rise to a new era of human development
McKinsey, April 2020
Recognise the impact of COVID-19 on people’s livelihoods. There will be an increase in unemployment and poverty. This means that some of your team members are experiencing a decline in household income that could last months. This will have a demoralizing effect on families and on teams we lead. We need to raise our awareness and focus on providing emotional safety to our teams. When people feel safe (a basic need) and still secure in their jobs, they will stay committed and motivated to work productively.
It will be the government’s responsibility to help companies to safeguard employment. People will be allowed to return to work under strict health protocols. We need to support those protocols in order to contain the virus and still stay economically active.We can expect that companies will make structural changes during the economic recovery period like leaner operations, digital and industrial reconversions, the introduction of new channels, agile organizational structures, digital innovation and innovative learning techniques. These changes will certainly have an impact on how projects are prioritized and executed in future. As project professionals we need to position ourselves to have market related skills to fill the demands of the recovering economy.
We need to work on being more resilient in these difficult time and keep developing our leadership skills. This is why I’m reading a book called: “Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting” by Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart. It gives specific, attainable steps you can take today that can limit your vulnerability and help you to live your life with greater purpose.
Keep yourself informed, be realistic, but stay positive while leading your teams as best as you can through these uncertain times. As long as value is delivered by projects and the outcomes serve companies and their customers, you will stay in high demand.
Please comment and let us know how you are dealing with the pandemic crisis. How are you supporting your teams through this? Share anything that will help others who are in the same predicament.
This is the story of a project manager, Heinrich Kruger who worked on a complex set of projects in a business startup environment in the short-term insurance industry, within a large corporate.
The projects consisted of a mix of IT and operational initiatives in a business environment typical to that of start-ups i.e. lots of ambiguity and very little structure. Within the business there was no context of any formal project methodology and the stakeholders had to be nurtured with regards to good project governance in order to become more self-sustained over time.
Dedicated Team
It worked well to have a dedicated core project team consisting of a Project Manager, a Change Manager and a Business Change Manager. They had shared values and the same vision and understanding of the business need. The business could not be expected to adopt good, but unfamiliar project practices overnight. They needed constant support through-out, as well as after the project went live.
It was required for this team to take ownership and responsibility. In a start-up environment, the business is often immature as far as projects are concerned. People often don’t know what is expected of them and don’t know anything about following a project based, structured approach to get things done. You will rather find a lot of “survival” behaviour and “just getting things done”.
The project leaders had to educate the business gradually whilst at the same time being part of that start-up process and culture – this take time. It would be different working with with a group of people who were used to starting new businesses and in the process, have established specific ways to work, especially in that kind of environment. Instead the team found that they had to take ownership of processes, tasks and structures that would normally no be expected from a project team.
Immature Project Environment
Trying to establish new ways of work in a business environment that was largely immature in terms of project implementations. The project team had to do more support (spoon feeding so to speak) and some-times taking on responsibilities that would normally be expected from the business.
External dependencies
There were dependencies on other external projects which impacted the planned timelines of some of the projects. The business had to compete with other corporate business units and their respective projects with its demand on shared services suppliers and as such did not always get the audience needed to reach project and strategic goals according to desired timelines. A separate Project Board with the corporate executive was setup in order to create the necessary visibility of the business’ needs. Furthermore, external project environments also had no reference point for understanding the unique culture and the speed with which new initiatives had to be implemented in this environment.
Failure to reach project goals would ultimately mean a failed business case with the potential to impact roughly 200 employees. It would put the business in a position to seriously revisit and reconsider its strategic goals and approach.
Separate Project Board
Where insurmountable challenges were encountered, the businesses pivoted around its strengths and pushed forward with workarounds, even when it meant loss of efficiency for a time. This meant bypassing systems that weren’t ready and setup of an executive Project Board who would help to prioritise the business’s requirements in the greater corporate environment.
It also meant building an alliance with other business units who had a special interest in seeing the business’ initiatives succeed. Lastly, to gain greater awareness in the corporate environment and motivate prioritization of its own needs, the business promoted its initiatives in such a way that the implementation thereof would hold value for other business units, not necessarily being direct stakeholders, also. It achieved this by positioning itself as an incubation hub to the rest of the organization – this proved quite successful.
Lessons Learned
If an environment is different from what you as a PM is used to, learn to take ownership and responsibility and don’t be disappointed when you have to do more than your job description.
Innovate and try to find workarounds. It won’t help to wait for dependencies and challenges to go away. This means actively monitoring and managing all risks on the project.
Although the business is in startup mode, it will gradually mature into a project based organization provided the PM and his core team gently but assertively pushes the business into a more planned, structured approach to new project implementations.
Key Takeaway
Success Stories Shared
In future projects, the PM will follow a more determined approach to the planning phase. He will ensure to introduce more structure upfront and move out of “survival mode” sooner, and work according to more realistic, planned (with all required stakeholders) outcomes and timelines.
Heinrich Kruger has been working in project based environments throughout his career with experience primarily in the Fintech industry but also Internet business like MWEB. Apart from project management, he has also worked as programmer, business analyst and business architect.
When comparing the qualities needed to be a successful manager (as shown in the Infographic below) with the characteristics of a successful project leader, and research analysis, there is much overlap.
Good managers tend to be natural leaders with a genuine interest in helping others. Not all project managers are natural leaders, but fortunately that is a skill that can be honed, especially when coupled with the desire to serve others.
Effective leadership is built on respect and trust. Leadership is critical during the beginning phases of a project when emphasis is on communicating the vision and motivating and inspiring the project team to achieve high performance. In a project context leadership is about focusing the efforts of a group of people toward a common goal and enabling them to work as a team. It’s also the ability to get things done through others.
Guidance to the project team is given in the form of influencing, mentoring and monitoring, as well as evaluating the performance of the team and the project. Open communication is essential together with listening to your team’s needs.
It’s always in the best interest of project leaders to keep investing in their own development and growth. For professionals who are new to project management, check out the Growth Program for new Project Managers that will put you on a fast-track for learning how to become a successful project leader.
What I liked about the book: “The Power of Project Leadership: 7 Keys to Help You Transform from Project Manager to Project Leader” by Susanne Madsen, is the fact that it’s an easy read and it’s applied specifically to project managers. For project managers who are seriously aspiring to become better leaders, the book will help make the transition from project manager to project leader. Looking at project management future trends, more leaders are what organisations need.
Susanne Madsen
It’s organised into 4 chapters and very practical with exercises, reflective questions, check-lists and calls to action. An excellent break-down of the six human needs is given and you are guided towards an in-depth understanding of your own values and beliefs. The seven keys of Leadership are covered in much detail. It guides you to new insights and helps you to become very clear on your intentions.
There are multiple resources spread through-out the book that will help you to change your mind-set. Susanne has a very engaging writing style, she shares useful tools and perspectives from experienced project managers that inspire.
The book has the potential to take you on a journey of transformation from manager to leader, to being conscious about what you want to achieve. It will help you gain clarity on the impact you would like to have on other people, on projects and on the industry. You are guided to compile your own project leadership vision and to determine your action steps.
The book leaves you with the thought: “unleash your project leadership potential, because the world needs your leadership” and that will inspire you to follow through with your action plan.
I would recommend this book to all fellow project management professionals and PMO leaders. For more information about the author, the book and many other resources, visit the Power of Project Leadership website.
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Recently I attended a school function where the head master passionately explained the school’s values. It made an impression on me and I wanted to share them with you as I believe they will help you become more value driven as a project leader.
FAITH
You need to have faith in yourself. That means you need to conduct your business with confidence, creating trust with the client that you’re serving, and trust with team members and stakeholders on projects.
People need to know that they can rely on you. You have a sense of loyalty, you show commitment to what you promised and you work with dedication to achieve your goals.
INTEGRITY
Good leadership demands commitment to ethical practices. You show integrity and set the standards for ethical behaviour. That means conducting your business with honesty and truthfulness in all circumstances. You take honour in the service that you deliver and you are completely reliable.
RESPONSIBILITY
You can be held accountable for duties that are your responsibility. People see you as being trustworthy and dependable to take charge and complete the tasks that you set out to perform.
EXCELLENCE
You strive to excel in all you do. Over time it will show in the quality of your work and people will perceive you as being competent and even brilliant in your field of expertise. That distinction will differentiate you in the market and make your services sought after.
When serving our customers and stakeholders we need to strive for good values, otherwise we will lack F-I-R-E! People want to follow leaders with enthusiasm and a can-do attitude. As Timothy Barry puts it in this article: “Top 10 Qualities of a Project Manager”, ‘Enthusiastic leaders are committed to their goals and express this commitment through optimism’.
Let the FIRE burn inside us in 2015 and make it easy for others to follow you as an inspirational leader.
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