Colin D. Ellis's Blog, page 21

The problem with authenticity

Almost every week I come across a blog telling us that the key to lifelong success is a thing called authenticity.

‘When you can be your authentic self, you will achieve happiness!’

‘Be authentic and follow your purpose!’

‘Authenticity is the key!’

These articles are laden with well-meaning commentary on what authenticity looks like and how to get there. Advice ranges from ‘stop buying material things’ to ‘find the love in everyone’. The articles are often confusing and not based entirely in the reality of our working lives and most of us will find it hard to apply the concept.

Authenticity is (according to my friends at Wikipedia) the degree to which one is true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character, despite external pressures.

Nice.

Researchers Erikson (1995) and Weigort (2009) found that it had more to do with a commitment to values and motivation and therefore is deeply personal and (crucially) ‘...incapable of challenge by others’.

And there’s the rub.

Your view of authenticity is different to mine. There are no hard and fast rules as to what it is, given that our values, behaviours, motivation and communication styles are different. My view of my authentic self is different to yours and therefore our opinions might differ widely.

I know a misogynistic, racist bully who fires off late night tweets in CAPS to world leaders threatening war, who thinks he’s the most authentic guy on the planet. Of course he’s not, he’s a dick and I can say that because my view of authenticity is different.

For me, the subjectivity of being told to ‘be authentic’ isn’t altogether helpful, however, you can become the person you want to be through continual self-awareness and feedback. And often the latter will force the former.

Some of the most authentic people I know take the time to ask others for their opinions on their values, behaviours, motivations and communication style. They spend time thinking about what it is that they stand for and whether that is in line with the way the world currently thinks and works.

These people never use age as an excuse, don’t put people into a box based on their gender, race or opinion, stay on top of the skills they need to be good at what they do and strive to behave in a way that positively influences other humans around them.

They think before they speak; challenge don’t conform; listen when they want to talk; make time for learning AND play; rest and recharge and are productively busy with their time. They consistently practice at being the very best human being they can be, which requires resilience, courage and reflection.

If this is you and your authentic self, then people need to see it and need you to share how you got there in a language and style that doesn’t alienate or confuse.

What questions did you ask? What barriers existed and how did you remove them? How did your lifestyle change? And who are the people that helped you get there?

Even though our views of what authenticity means might differ, often the actions people need to take and the behaviours they need to demonstrate to achieve it, are the same.

Being the best version of you will require education, feedback, hard work and personal change. The rewards may mean less material things and finding the love in everyone. It will also be the satisfaction that you became someone that others look up to and follow, in order that they can do likewise.

Just Another Blog About A Winning Sports Team

At the end of every major sports tournament and/or event the internet becomes instantly awash with blogs about the winning team and the tournament as a whole, with lessons to be learned for all. Except... they pretty much always say the same things.

So here is my humorous take on sports blogs. They tend to be formulaic in approach, find countless lessons in leadership and teamwork and identify the basic components of a winning team, namely:

visioncommunicationhard workattitudeplanninghumility,togethernesspassionsupportand a small amount of luck.

These things aren’t unique to sports, they’re inherent in every successful team in every organisation in every country in the world. You could win your own version of the World Cup today if that’s what you wanted to do.

So here we are, the end of [event name] and [winning team] were worthy winners. They were the most consistent team throughout the competition and no-one can deny them their moment in the spotlight.

They didn’t have it all their own way, however.

Early/late on (delete as appropriate) in the [event name], they were given a stern test by [team name] and had to pull together as a team to win. Losing that particular match/contest (delete as appropriate) could have changed the scenario that they found themselves in and given them a much tougher test.

The final showdown was memorable for [controversial incident(s)/moment of brilliance]. Had [incident/brilliance] not happened then the result might have been quite different and it will be talked about by the media in the weeks that follow.

At the heart of [winning team] was [captain’s name]. Whilst not always in the limelight, the leadership that they delivered was evident. They were vocal, led by example in the way they behaved and continually challenged themselves and the team to move forward. They were able to pick themselves up after [mistake/poor performance/injury] and demonstrate that they had what it took to lead the team to victory.

Winning coach/manager (delete as appropriate) [coach name] was humble in victory afterwards, crediting the players and their hard work and taking little credit themselves. “I’m extremely proud of my team,” said [coach name]. “They have worked hard throughout the [event name], not just the people that you see out there, but also all of the people that you don’t see. This team always believed that it could win [event name] and we have proved that.”

They went on to say “Huge credit to [competitors names] who made it difficult for us. We knew we had to perform at our best in order to win and they pushed us hard.”
“It has been a long/short (delete as appropriate) time since we have won [event name], so we will celebrate the moment now, before starting our preparation for [next event name].”

The emergence of [young person name] has been one of the [event name]’s highlights. They have demonstrated that they have the talent to be one of [sport]’s greats for many years to come.

[Biggest disappointment] can only reflect on a [event name] that might have been. They demonstrated flashes of what they’re capable of, but were unfortunately unable to influence the result in a way that they would have liked.

[Biggest surprise] can take heart from [event name], knowing that they not only exceeded expectations, but also generated a level of pride and passion from their supporters that hadn’t been seen for a long time/before (delete as appropriate). They will be hoping to build on that for [next event name].

The organisers of [event name] can be hugely pleased/disappointed (delete as appropriate) with its organisation. There have been many highs - [high 1], [high 2] and [high 3], but things such as [low 1] and [low 2] will need addressing for the next [event name].

And so, as the dust settles on [event name], it is time for life to return to normal, albeit briefly before [next event name] starts. Will [winning team] repeat their success or who will another team emerge to challenge them?

Congratulations to [winning team]!

Four Easy Culture Improvements You Can Make Today

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a team of 2 or 200, your culture matters, with McKinsey finding in a review last year that ‘Shortcomings in organisational culture are one of the main barriers to company success.’ 

Culture is the thing that most executives and senior managers talk about –particularly when they get their engagement scores back – and yet, there’s often little action to address some of the ‘norms’ that afflict most organisations.

I say ‘afflict’ because most organisations don’t take cultural evolution seriously. It’s seen as being too hard, is the first thing to go when something else is deemed to be of greater importance or only addressed when peers and competitors are implementing the latest silver bullet.

The companies that I work with on my Build Your Tribe program don’t do this. They have decided to make culture change a priority and start with some of the most obvious things, which I thought I’d share with you.

These things don’t need money or permission, they need courage and resilience because once you decide to stand out from the crowd and do what’s right, you’re immediately seen as a ‘lone nut’ (to quote from Derek Sivers excellent TedTalk) or ‘maverick’ and that’s hard to maintain in an office full of conformists. But persist you must. Find a similar group of mavericks (top guns, if you will) and bond together to keep each other honest. Once you implement these things others will follow suit and before you know it you’ve started a movement, for cultural good. 

These four things are the most common issues I find when I start working with new clients, so I’m going to make an assumption that they’re issues for most organisations… here goes:

Stop having 30-minute or 60-minute meetings – The Atlassian You Waste A Lot of Time At Work survey last year found that over 31 hours per month are spent on unproductive meetings and you know this to be true. Most of this time is tied up with the fact that you’re too lazy to change the default time setting in Outlook. You should master the 20-minute and 40-minute meeting because you rarely need longer than this. Better still have 17 or 41 minute meetings. Sure, it might seem weird to other people but you’re simply thinking more about how much time you actually need rather than lazily making it 30 or 60 minutes. Oh and make sure you run it exactly (and I do mean exactly) otherwise the problem still persists.
 Make time to celebrate success – Dr. Gert-Jan Pepping, Sport Scientist and lecturer in Human Movement Sciences at the University of Groningen, found that ‘The more convincingly someone celebrates their success with their teammates, the greater the chances that team will win’. The teams that I felt most connected to throughout my career were those that dealt with poor performance and prioritised celebrating success. Whether it was a new contract being signed, a team win, a project milestone being achieved or the arrival of a new baby we never missed an opportunity to bring the team together and talk about what went well in order to get there. Except for that last one, we didn’t need those details, just that the parents and baby were doing well. Celebrating success not only keeps people together and engenders a growth mindset, it also builds continual momentum and puts a smile on people’s faces, which brings me to number three…
 Laugh more – nothing says ‘we’ve got an awesome vibrant culture’ like hearing lots of laughter. Not only does it have personal health benefits (stimulates organs, relieves stress, improves moods), it’s also proven to aid creativity in teams. Good natured banter should be encouraged as should sharing amusing videos. If you wanted to go one-step further you could have bad joke Friday, have a comedy movie night or hit up a comedy club together. Jokes from the latter could keep you going for weeks. Oh and of course, everything has to be in good taste and not demean or victimise another human being. (Though if you have to be told that, laughing more is the least of your worries.)
 Stop sending email – I told you these would be easy. I went for coffee with a manager of mine in New Zealand one morning and he complained about the number of emails he received. ‘Pete,’ I said (not his real name, his real name was Tim) ‘maybe you should stop sending them.’ I asked him to try it for one week and have a 15-minute (maximum) chat with the person instead, which he did. He instantly halved the number of emails he received. Easy! One other thing that also worked for me to reduce the amount of time people were trying to waste in my inbox was to set up a rule to send all emails I was cc’d into, straight to a separate folder (which I called ‘arse covering’). I had another rule to automatically delete BCC emails. They are just sneaky and we should never give people encouragement to send them by reading them.

And that’s it. You can do them all right now and you won’t regret any of them. Cancel your next meeting and use the time to set yourself up for success and put your team on a pathway to a more vibrant culture. Oh and if you feel someone would benefit from this blog, feel free to forward it on to them! Just don’t CC them in...

What choices will you make?

Our lives are made up of a series of choices. They define who we are, what we achieve and how we will be remembered. We make these choices every day, consciously and unconsciously and rarely stop to think whether they are the right ones or not. They are the key to being a good human, to getting through our work and to create a legacy for others. What choices are you making and what will they say about you? 

Choose to be the best human you can beChoose to stand up for those who find it hard to stand up for themselvesChoose to be different from those around youChoose not to conform to cultural normsChoose to say no to things that are of low value to youChoose to make time to self-reflectChoose to continually ask what you could do betterChoose to celebrate the things that you’re good atChoose to set yourself a vision and take action to achieve itChoose to take on work that makes you uncomfortableChoose to have a conversation when sending an email is easierChoose shorter meetings or none at allChoose to share something that you got wrongChoose to make time for the opinions of othersChoose to share how you’re feelingChoose to ignore people around you who say that something can’t be doneChoose to create something uniqueChoose to inject humour to alleviate stress and anxietyChoose to embrace others as equals Choose to take a break when you’re not feeling yourselfChoose to ask for help when you don’t know the answerChoose to continually self-develop to get better at what you doChoose to create balance for work and familyChoose to make the time for relationship buildingChoose to be vulnerableChoose to block out time for workChoose fresh air over air conditioningChoose to be inclusiveChoose to look for better ways to do what you doChoose to not react when it’s easier to do soChoose to listen when you want to speakChoose to address poor performanceChoose to praise good behaviourChoose to invest in things that will make a differenceChoose equality of everythingChoose to be the energy when there’s none around youChoose to seek answers to questions not yet askedChoose to ditch unproductive work and tasksChoose to be an inspiration to othersChoose love over hateChoose teamwork over isolationChoose to treat every person as a human beingChoose to stop pretendingChoose your vision and stick to itChoose to want others to succeedChoose to accept that others take risks that you wouldn’tChoose to live a long and happy life and to create a lifestyle to get you thereChoose to spend your time and money expanding your appreciation of lifeChoose silence over noiseChoose to share what you knowChoose empathy over sympathyChoose productive over lazyChoose now over tomorrowChoose decisions over complaining.

Bad management kills culture

Organisations with poor engagement scores, high attrition and absenteeism rates, who consistently miss deadlines and targets don’t have people at the top who behave consistently well and create an environment in which employees are proud to work and can do their very best work.

I say this a lot at conferences and corporate events around the world and am usually met with nodding heads and ‘you’re soooo right’ looks. At least, I think that’s what they are.

But it’s true.

Think of every organisation that you’ve enjoyed working in and it was the result of senior people ‘walking the talk’. They create a team of people that set an example for others, make themselves available for those that need help and consistently push each other to deliver against their targets. These organisations are a joy to work in and when you eventually move on, it’s with a heavy heart and a toolkit full of ideas to take to your next place of work. You wistfully talk about the culture you co-created and bore other people stupid with your stories.

Every single organisation in the world can have a great culture – but they don’t, because bad management kills culture.

I’ve deliberately avoided using the word ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’ because in poor working cultures there’s a distinct lack of it. Along with fear, a lack of honesty, integrity, empowerment and trust. Indeed, the latest Edelman Trust Barometer shows that as a global population we continue to distrust our institutions; another survey found that a third of the global workforce is disengaged costing organisations billions of dollars every year.

But none of this is news. I’m continually amazed at how many senior managers talk about the importance of culture yet spend next to no money or time developing the important aspects of it.

It tends to be easier to sign-off on the superficial things like furniture, methods, branding, new systems (digital transformation anyone?) and to a lesser extent restructures, but the truly meaningful stuff – that’s a lot harder. Things like self-awareness, communication, making time for innovation, making ourselves accessible and addressing poor performance and poor working practices such as meetings, decision-making, quantity of email, diversity and feedback.

Engagement surveys are a good way to find out what staff think about those in senior management positions, yet they are often treated as an annual exercise, required to ‘give staff a say’.

In Australia a Royal Commission is currently underway to investigate the behaviour of the major banks. The scale of unethical behaviour is shocking, but it’s not a surprise given past behaviour and, of course, it starts with those at the top.

An investigation undertaken by APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) into the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), found ‘a widespread sense of complacency’, ‘reactive stance in dealing with risks’ and that its culture and accountability had not learned from the mistakes of the past.

The current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said a similar thing to a collection of staff at Westpac in 2016, calling on banks to “stand up and show real leadership over the cultural issues damaging their [collective] reputations”.

This poor behaviour is by no means limited to the established institutions. 

Uber is often held up as the paragon of disruption so it’s easy to forget that former CEO Travis Kalanick presided over a toxic culture across the organisation that new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is finding extremely difficult to unpick. The same was true of Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn and the diesel pollution scandal that engulfed the car manufacturer a couple of years ago.

When I talk to organisations about creating an environment for cultural evolution, the immediate assumption from senior managers is that they can do the work themselves.

If that were true, then they would have already done it and prioritised it above all else. 

Off-sites would have had a different focus and involved people from outside the ‘top-tier’. Managers would be taking all of the blame and none of the credit for financial or project performance. They’d be listening more and providing regular feedback. They’d have stopped walking past poor behaviour and performance, instead dealing with it empathetically and honestly. They’d be concentrating on doing fewer things really well and ensuring that staff have time to look for smarter ways of doing things. But they don’t.

Senior managers need to ensure that they get help with the things that they don’t have time for. They need to utilise people who can help them see the things that they can’t. They need to spend time and money on the things that matter and create a new ‘normal’ that has a different feel, a different energy and provides all employees with a sense of purpose and a renewed motivation.

Adding the word ‘Culture’ to someone’s job title is a pointless exercise unless that person is provided with the opportunity to change what happens at the top, as well as below.

Every organisation can have a great culture – don’t let bad management stand in the way. 

To get insights like these, exclusive content and links you’ll love sign up to my dapper fortnightly newsletter Pocket Square here www.colindellis.com/boom 

BONUS 2 Free Ebooks when you subscribe: How To Hire Great Project Managers and How Are You Measuring Your Project Managers? 

Please Don't Set Up An Agile PMO

The Program Management Office (PMO) is a product of the early 2000s. They were designed to ‘enforce’ methods to provide consistency of delivery and to ensure that senior managers were given the right information at the right time to make the decisions necessary to deliver against business strategy.

Except, in the majority of cases, that didn’t happen. Worldwide project delivery rates stagnated, and researchers found no proof whatsoever that this approach added even 1% to outcome delivery. Indeed, KPMG in New Zealand found that only 25% of PMOs were effective in supporting change.

The PMO has become a honeypot of framework diagrams, process flows, templates, email reminders and self-important people demanding a ‘seat at the table’. Moreover, I know this because there was a time early in my career in when I was one of these. I forgot everything that made me successful as a project manager and built a fiefdom.

Thankfully, that approach failed, led to me being made redundant and refocused me on what was important in getting things delivered. As comedian Chris Rock once said, ‘If you don’t let failure defeat you, it’s what fuels your future success.’

The fact of the matter is, if you need a central ‘unit’ to tell a project manager to follow a process to build a plan to deliver a project, then you’ve already failed. It should be immediately obvious that that person doesn’t have the right skills to get the job done in the first place and unfortunately, I see a lot of that.

Organisations often confuse compliance with performance management, and then they wonder why nothing ever improves.

The PMO has no place in a future organisation…in its current format.

Those in charge of PMOs need to downsize and reassess the value they provide to a future version of the organisation, to remain relevant.

But this does not mean setting up an 'Agile PMO'. This is the complete antithesis of what’s required and further proof that empire building, process adherence and names hold sway over what it means to create an organisation that understands that agility in delivery requires much more than that.

Swimlanes should be confined to deep swimming pools and those in PMO roles should concentrate their efforts on simplifying just about every element of execution. To remove roadblocks for teams and to put the emphasis on executives getting more involved and providing their peers with regular verbal updates, rather than producing overly complex ‘governance packs’ that get in the way of decision-making, not make it easier.

This will mean that PMOs need to fundamentally change the way they think of themselves and the service they provide. In the PMO Benchmark report in 2016, PMO Managers saw their top three services as:

Reporting and analysisGovernanceTraining

Those who currently have responsibility for PMOs will need to look at how they can better serve the organisation moving forward, by placing greater emphasis on the following things instead:

Helping people across the organisation build a new mindset and (real) skillset that fosters agility of delivery AND thinkingBuilding talent profiles to facilitate the swift mobilisation of teamsCreating visual spaces were strategic progress can be charted, great ideas or failures can be sharedBeing the hub for cultural evolution initiativesLeading design-thinking (or similar) workshops

Forward-thinking organisations do not need a central group to tell their people how to get the job done or to produce endless pointless reports that nobody reads anyway. They need people who role model what a growth mindset looks like; that know how to communicate; that value getting things delivered swiftly; and who create an environment where teams are allowed the time to concentrate on what’s important.

The new emphasis should be on support, sustain and role model, not command, control and report. If they can’t do that, then, they have to go, regardless of what they call themselves.

To read more on the evolution of project delivery and the five things you can do right now, download the whitepaper from here .

Quick, hide! It's another generation...

‘Every generation, blames the one before it and all of their frustrations, come beating on your door.’

So said social commentators of the 1980s, Mike and The Mechanics. Although they also said ‘Take the children and yourself and hide out in the cellar’... so maybe you should take their preachings with a pinch of salt. Especially with their generation line, because today the current generation seems to be blaming the one after it and they haven’t even got started yet!

I recently published a white paper (you should read it here - I think you’d like it) in which I studied some of the great organisation cultures around the world. I’ve received lots of feedback (thank you!), some of which included the following:

‘It’s easier for these companies as they’re staffed by millennials’‘I don’t want to be negative, but there’s no way that would work in my organisation’‘This good is stuff in theory, but the new generation doesn’t understand how we do things here’.

Ugh. Excuses, excuses from older generations, who should know better.

Past is prologue

Dad came to visit us recently and it was great having him here. The evenings inevitably drifted towards games, whisky and stories. I love talking about the good old days (so does Dad, which is lucky) as I can don my rose-tinted glasses and think back to a world that was.

That WAS… that’s the key word in the sentence, because that world and the generation it existed in, have ceased to exist. Its metabolic processes are history and it’s joined the choir invisible. It’s pointless pining for it because it’s never coming back. And in its place is a generation in which the older me is definitely more uncomfortable.

This generation has a different motivation, uses a different language, knows the answer before I’ve finished the question, interacts in a different way, dreams big and wants to know what you stand for. And yes, it watches videos of other people playing games and records pretty much every second of every experience for posterity.

But that’s what it does and whether you like it or not, you’re part of that generation (admittedly an older part) and have a choice to make. Do you hold it back or do you continually evolve who you are in order to contribute to its success?

If it’s the latter, it’ll mean unlearning certain phrases and the behaviours that come with them:

‘It never used to happen in my day.’

Of course it didn’t. In my day our parents sent us out into the world without caring about where we were, showering us with love and affection, spending hours getting to know us intimately or investing in our future. The assumption that that is somehow more preferable to what today’s generation have is absolutely ridiculous.

They have different interests, just like we do. Different personalities, just like we do, and different challenges, just like we do. That they are younger than us doesn’t mean their opinions or feelings matter less. If anything, they matter more as they stand to inherit all that we leave behind - good and bad.

‘Kids these days expect the world.’

Guess what? Other generations did too. 

Maybe if their workmates opened up a little more, showed more empathy and listened more they’d realise that their expectations are justified. They have ideas that are unsullied by time on how to breakdown the needless bureaucracy that’s been amassed over the years. Maybe the language would change? Maybe things would get done quicker by collaborating in different ways? Maybe if we invested time in building teams relationships would improve? And maybe if we created a vision that connected the day-to-day with the future, everyone would feel more connected?

Instead lip service is paid to creating more diverse, smarter and more purposeful ways of working. Back-to-back meetings still prevail and poor performance and behaviour continue to go unpunished.

‘I don’t want to be negative but…’

Well don’t be then. Find something good to say so that every generation (not just the latest one) can feel optimistic that they’re working with people who give a damn about each others’ wellbeing and collaborative success.

Find ways to better frame issues that focus the mindset on solutions, not problems. Stop protecting that knowledge that you think is yours to own and share it instead. Coach, mentor and distribute the wisdom that you have and ask for the same in return, because no generation has ever had all of the answers.

‘What you don’t understand is…’

Look, there’s lots I don’t understand, but I’m also self-aware enough to know that I don’t understand them. I’m not clinging on to a reality that hasn’t existed for years or hoping that everything will go back to the way it was.

Stop creating roadblocks in your own head and thinking that everything that has gone before is fixed and unable to change. Stop dealing in right/wrong absolutes, and avoiding conversations where you may find out there’s a better way. The future will be better than the past whether you contribute to it or not.

But I get it, I really do. I’m 50 in 2019 and it gets harder every year to unlearn some of the habits and relinquish some of the ideas that are holding me back in the generation that I’m living in. It gets harder to find the time to relentlessly develop my emotional intelligence and technical skills to stay relevant. And it gets harder to show the courage required to stand up to out of date, old fashioned people who refuse to change. But if I don’t do this, I’ll become just another member of an ex-generation working hard to hold back the next one.

Every generation has a part to play in the future of our businesses and our world and only by sharing the knowledge and good behaviours of each can we succeed in achieving the vision that we set for ourselves.

To get insights like these, exclusive content and links you’ll love sign up to my dapper fortnightly newsletter Pocket Square here www.colindellis.com/boom  BONUS 2 Free Ebooks when you subscribe: How To Hire Great Project Managers and How Are You Measuring Your Project Managers? 

Tribes, Squads, Neighbourhoods and Confusion

I was chatting to someone recently who said that their organisation was changing the names of their roles and moving everyone into squads and tribes. I asked what that meant to them and their colleagues and they said, ‘we think they’re trying to improve teamwork, but it feels like we’re following the latest trend and using it as an excuse for a restructure’.

Teamwork continues to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to project and operational delivery. Organisations low in delivery maturity talk a lot about toxic cultures without ever doing much to change it. Exercises such as office refurbishments and renaming teams (the current favourite) are undertaken to try and lift performance, without ever correcting the behaviour of the people that work within them.

Great teamwork is a key differentiator.

Most of what organisations do today happens between people in different teams, often on different floors or even in different parts of the world. There is still a misguided assumption that we can throw a group of people – with disparate skillsets, personalities and behaviours – together and expect it to immediately work. The truth is that, of course, it takes time, skill and the collective agreement of those on the teams to do it well.

The days of drawing a structure as a hierarchical diagram should be long gone as this is the opposite of what great teamwork is. There’s no ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ when it comes to team, there is just an interconnected group of people doing their best to deliver against a business idea.

Atlassian, in a paper titled AI – The Future of Teamwork, found that 50% of the people they interviewed were more motivated by team success over organisation success and that 56% were more confident working in a team than individually.

Indeed, Atlassian, like many organisations that I’ve researched for my recently published white paper, encourage their teams to compete. Not to outdo each other in a low emotional intelligence way, but to stretch each other professionally.

Spotify does this too.

Spotify has divided its organisation into tribes – groups of connected people focussed on delivery in one specific area – who also share knowledge with other tribes via guilds – groups of teams who knowledge share and develop each other. In this model, the learning between teams becomes cyclical. Everyone learns from everyone and they all push each other to success.

Like most good ideas, this one is being copied around the world.

Names such as tribes, squads, neighbourhoods, guilds and chapters are seen as the way forward in the agile organisation of tomorrow. Of course, simply changing the name of a team in a move towards a more flexible way of delivering is pointless without careful implementation.

Without people with high emotional intelligence, having a strong sense of belonging, displaying a different set of behaviours, who are trusted and empowered to deliver, this ‘regrouping’ exercise will fail and those who implemented it will blame everything but themselves.  

Enhanced collaboration requires a strong social contract to be built between the members of the team.

An agreement on how they’ll behave towards each, what ‘collaboration’ looks like and some shared principles to bind them together. Atlassian has five values, Spotify and Netflix each have Playbooks. Simple statements of what it means to be part of a self-organising team that’s striving to be successful.

These teams know how to talk (and listen) to each other and how to provide honest feedback on performance. They understand the priorities of the organisation, have space and time to work on other things and care deeply about wellbeing and lifestyle. They accept responsibility readily and strive to evolve the status quo.

Jack Welch talked about this years ago in his assessment of what it meant to lead well, saying: ‘'People with passion care – really care in their bones – about colleagues, employees and friends winning.”

So, before organisations rename their teams, they should first ask themselves whether they’ve done enough to develop a culture that supports healthy competition. Otherwise, the result of the exercise will be enhanced confusion, not enhanced collaboration.

You can download my white paper on the future of project delivery here.

Project Management – Change Or Be Changed

After a significant period of research, both in theory and practice, today I’m publishing my new white paper entitled Project Delivery - What Next? A white paper on the future of project management and 5 recommendations on how you can change the way you get things delivered. 

 

What has become clear to me while writing this paper is that the profession of project management HAS to change or it will be changed for us.

Let’s be honest, it’s already happening.

One large organisation I reviewed when writing this paper has recently removed its project managers in favour of a DevOps (more information on that here) approach. Note that it hasn’t redeployed its project managers, it has removed them altogether.

If you understand the value that good people with great delivery skills can bring, then you might call this approach foolish, but ask yourself this, ‘how many good people with great delivery skills can you actually name?’ How many take the time to build great relationships? How many are role models for communication? How many utilise a range of skills to get to the detail required to provide certainty of delivery? How many are good at self-reflection and continual learning? How many of them are open to new ideas and take risks? And how many of them empower and trust a team of talented people to deliver?

1? 2? 3? I’ll bet it’s not many.

Now, how many can you name that have all the certificates and will tell you they’re a project manager?

10? 20?

Some organisations are complicit in this mismatch. They develop their people in the wrong way (technical over emotional skills); hire using the wrong criteria (‘have you got your agile/PRINCE2/PMP?’ over ‘how do you communicate to someone who isn’t you?’); and for implementing structures that kill creativity, rather than encourage it (‘if you follow the process, you’ll be successful’).

Enough is enough. It’s time for the profession to demand better of itself and change, before others do it for us. It has to stop listening to old fashioned views, implementing old fashioned structures and buying old fashioned approaches.

There’s so much to be learned from those that get it right, which is why I’ve written this paper.

I want those involved in project management around the world to use it as a call to action and to focus on the evolution of a great profession, rather than repeating the rhetoric of the past and see it laid to waste by those in favour of quick fix approaches. The profession needs to ditch the blame, arrogance and the endless process and to build a new set of values and skills that empower great teams to deliver.

At the heart of our profession should be good humans.

Self-aware individuals who take the time to create an emotional connection and to build empathy with those who they are working with. Who are able to stand up and speak with passion, listen intently and ask for feedback so they can improve further.

These people will naturally seek smarter and better ways to do things. They don’t need to be told to ‘go agile’; they’ll use a mix of techniques and approaches that suit the initiative to be delivered. They’ll bring clarity to complexity and humour to mundanity.

These people will grow a movement that seeks to make organisations endlessly better. To accentuate what works, learn from mistakes, share the knowledge they have, challenge the status quo and be at the heart of cultural evolution. They’ll bring stability to flexibility and lead the organisations of the future.

So what next for project delivery? It depends on the will of the people in the profession – how much they’re prepared to change and who they’re prepared to follow.

You can download the white paper from here and I’d urge you to please share it with others you might feel would benefit from these insights or recommendations.

The Career (and Life) Case for Emotional Intelligence

‘In the last 10 years, the most sensational strategy for achieving goals has been to focus on developing emotional intelligence. It is an indispensable set of social and emotional competencies for leveraging knowledge and emotions to drive positive change and business success.’

So says researcher and author Martyn Newman in his book, Emotional Capitalists.

Do you want sensational success in your life? I do. I’m not happy to bumble along continually oblivious to the world around me and looking to blame others for my lack of progress in life.

Sensational success doesn’t have to mean status and wealth. You don’t have to become CEO of the world or win a ‘Friend of the Year’ award. It’s about doing the best that you can with what you have for the short time that you’re on this planet. That’s why you read this blog and other blogs; listen to podcasts; watch Ted Talks. It’s why you ask for training in your place of work and seek out the opinions of others.

We all do it in the hope of getting a small piece of information that we didn’t have before that we can act on and become a better version of ourselves.

Daniel Goleman had identified emotional intelligence (EQ) as the key differentiator in 1995. In his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence he found, ‘What makes the difference between stars and others is not their intelligent IQ, but their emotional EQ.’

That was a true statement 28 years ago and it’s still true now. It is also going to be an important differentiator in the future, not just for us but for our children too.

Earlier this year, a Harvard Business Review article The Rise of AI Makes EQ More Important reported that researchers had found ‘Skills like persuasion, social understanding and empathy are going to become differentiators as AI and machine learning take over other tasks.’

Not only is it good for continued relevance, but ‘people who have a high EQ have been proved to be happier in their lives and more productive in their work, than those with low EQ’.

Emotional intelligence is a learned skill. And like any worthwhile accomplishment, it isn’t always easy. As Abraham Maslow once pointed out, developing yourself takes ‘great courage and long struggle’. 

You will have to unlearn some things and work hard to learn new things. You have to challenge assumptions or beliefs that you have. You have to listen when you’d rather be talking. Mostly though, you have to make time to do all this. You have to make becoming the best version yourself a priority.

You need to make the time to understand what it means to be emotionally intelligent. Work through the elements of it. Know how to recognise when you’ve got it right and celebrate the win!

I waited too long to get this right in my own life and I don’t want others to make the same mistake. This is why I’ve created The EQ Room.

The EQ Room is a set of 12 videos that explains what it means to be emotionally intelligent and provides you with the practical information on how to do it well. It’s the culmination of 30 years of my own experience and two years of research distilled into a format that I have designed to be accessible, engaging and encouraging.  

You can work through the program at your own pace and in your own space. Follow the modules in order or jump to the skills that are most pressing for you and your current situation. Do one a week, one a month or have a Netflix-style binge and then revisit! The course content is designed to be evergreen and you will always have access. 

It’s my hope that we build a community of people committed to being emotionally intelligent leaders, managers, mentors, colleagues, friends and partners. I’ll soon be opening up a private LinkedIn group to program participants where we can share experiences and be accountable.

The life and career case for investing your time and money into emotional intelligence is there for all to see, the only thing that’s stopping you, is you. 

As someone who is dedicated to their own development, we are offering the course to you at a discount of $25. Please use the code PRIORITY. To pass this on to a colleague or friend, ask them to use the code FRIEND.

These codes will be available until midnight Monday 30th April (AEST).

To get started, head to www.theeqroom.com