team leadership

Forrester Research Puts Emotional Intelligence At Top Of List of PM Capabilities

A recent article in CIO magazine emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence to IT project managers. The article refers to a recent report from Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush titled, “Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers“. As a result of her research, Analyst Gerush published a list of the top 10 Capabilities of Next Generation Project Managers.

I am not sure exactly what Ms. Gerush meant by “Next Generation Project Managers” or how helpful I find that distinction. In my experience, these key capabilities apply to all project managers, current and Next Generation.

Strikingly, emotional intelligence dominates the list of 10 capabilities needed by these Next Generation Project Managers. Not only was Emotional Intelligence listed as the #1 capability, the next three were all part of the Framework for Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers. For more background on emotional intelligence for project managers, read this previous post.

#1 – Emotional Intelligence: The ability to pick up on events and interactions (both verbal and non-verbal) and to process those inputs in the context of the project plan. (Note: These are addressed in the framework in the domains of Self-awareness and Social Awareness.)

#2 – Adaptive Communication: The ability to articulate one’s ideas–whether orally or in writing–to a range of individuals, groups, and cultures using the most effective communication techniques for each group. (Note: This is addressed in the framework under the domain of Team Leadership.)

#3 – People Skills: The ability to quickly build and maintain positive relationships with team members and stakeholders. (Note: This is addressed in the framework under the domain of Relationship Management.)

#4 – Management Skills: The ability to serve, motivate and focus a team and to foster collaboration among team members. (Note: This is addressed in the framework under the domain of Team Leadership.)

If you want to immediately make an impact on your own capabilities in these 4 areas, you can read through the previous posts on this site and boost your understanding of emotional intelligence and how to apply it to project management.

Here are the rest of the 10 capabilities of Next Generation Project Managers as defined in the article at CIO Magazine:

#5 – Flexibility: The willingness and ability to change one’s approach to project management and/or course of action in response to business needs.

#6 – Business Savvy: Knowledge of the organization’s business, strategy and industry. Ability to understand a strategy and align tactical work around that strategy.

#7 – Analytical Skills: The ability to think through problems and decisions.

#8 – Customer Focus: The ability to understand the end-user or end customer’s needs and the drive to ensure that projects meet those needs.

#9 – Results-Orientation: The ability to get things done efficiently and effectively.

#10 – Character: The project manager should have an appealing personality and a strong moral and ethical character.

You can order a copy of the report from Forrester here: Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers. Just be prepared to shell out $499. As an alternative, you could buy my book (Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers) at Amazon.com for $16.04 and save yourself $485. That seems pretty intelligent to me. But then again, I think I might be a Last Generation Project Manager.

Cheers!

Anthony

Emotional Intelligence and Projects – A Research Study

My writing has taken a back seat for the last year or two while I have focused on delivering a couple of large-scale client programs and exploring troubled project recovery. Those are both topics of interest to me and I plan to write more on those shortly. For now, I am excited to continue to explore emotional intelligence and how that plays out in teams. I’ve taught a course titled Leading Teams with Emotional Intelligence and I am in the process of finalizing a distance learning coursebook for Prodevia Learning. I will be sharing some of the material from that book here including this post.

We are going to start with a look at some recent research on emotional intelligence and project management as documented in the book, “Emotional Intelligence and Projects“. This 2010 book was written by Nicholas Clarke and Ranse Howell and documents a research project they carried out on 67 project managers. The research project was seeking:

To identify the relationships between emotional intelligence abilities and specific project manager competencies identified as critical within project contexts.
To identify relationships between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership behaviors.

I have posted in the past on another study of project management and emotional intelligence by Ralph Mueller and J. Rodney Turner. The research by Clarke and Howell followed on that research but took a decidedly different approach. The following table is a summary of some of the key differences in the two studies:

Aspects of the Research	Clarke and Howell	Turner and Mueller
Instruments Used	MCSEIT, Empathy (Mehrabian and Epstein)	Leadership Dimensions Questionaire
Underlying EQ Model	Mayer and Salovey	Proprietary Model, loosely linked to Daniel Goleman’s
Study Size	67 Project Managers	400 Project Managers
Dependent Variable	PM Competencies, Transformational Leadership	Project Success

As noted, Clarke and Howell based their work on the MCSEIT which was derived from the Salovey and Mayer four-branch model of Emotional Intelligence:
a) accurately perceive emotions in oneself and others
b) use emotions to facilitate thinking
c) understand emotional meanings, and
d) manage emotions

The MCSEIT is an ability based test of emotional intelligence as compared to the self-reported competency model used by Turner and Mueller. Clarke and Howell also measured empathy using an instrument from Mehrabian and Epstein.

They studied the relationship of those emotional intelligence measures to competencies that previous research has shown to be important to success as a project manager: communications, teamwork, attentiveness, and managing conflict.

Another important aspect of this study was that the researchers attempted to control for personality, general intelligence level, and PM certification. I was a little puzzled at first by the control for personality – I mean, is it like the difference between a Rodney Dangerfield and a George Clooney? If my personality turns out to be ineffective, does this mean I cannot be a project manager? Not to worry – the control for personality is to try to isolate any characteristics that may be inherent and unchangeable from those characteristics, like EQ, that can be trained.

The Bottom Line

Are you interested in what Clark and Howell found in their study? Well then stay tuned to my next post where we will look at the results and the implications of the study.

Cheers,

Anthony

When in Doubt, be Nice!

Last week, a good friend and mentor of mine overheard a conversation I was having with one of the team leads on my program. I was not satisfied with the leader’s performance and I was not nice in my remarks about what I expected. My friend observed the exchange between me and the team lead and she spoke up and said: “When in doubt, be nice”.

Her comment stung. I pride myself on my political correctness and being nice to others. Being called out for not being nice hurt. And she was right.

The truth is that I have a hard time balancing being kind and getting the results that I want. I am not suggesting that these two things are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think that I have placed a higher premium on one than on the other. I choose to be nice rather than to be satisfied, and this is a real problem for me.

I was recently in a weekend workshop on growing as a leader. While the workshop helped me to spot several strengths of mine, it also revealed to me a couple of key weaknesses:

I don’t go for my own personal satisfaction; I am OK with coming up short.
I am not honest with myself about my lack of satisfaction. I am ok with feeling like a victim, rather than getting what I really want. I don’t tell the truth about what I really feel or mean. (For more about telling the truth, see my previous post Tell the Truth).

Going for Your Own Personal Satisfaction

Let’s start with the idea of going for your own personal satisfaction. The principle of responsibility says that I am responsible for my actions and my outcomes. If I don’t get the results that I want, or if I am not satisfied, that is my responsibility and mine alone. That is all great but the problem for me is this – I am OK with being dissatisfied as it gives me something to complain about, a reason to blame someone else, a way to be a victim, or just a general ‘out’ about not giving it my all.

The better approach is to go for 100% satisfaction of what I want. This requires being clear about what it is that I want and working with others to make sure it happens. No excuses, no complaints, and no blaming others. Just going for what I want and not being satisfied with less.

I like what I wrote about personal satisfaction in this post from January 2009:

“Instead of seeking comfort, we should seek our own satisfaction. In every situation, we should be monitoring our own level of satisfaction and using that as an internal gauge for whether we are doing the right thing. My mentor Rich Blue calls this going for our 100% satisfaction. If you seek to get 100% satisfaction out of every meeting, presentation, project assignment, and workshop, you won’t have to worry about feeling comfortable. Being satisfied is a higher value than being comfortable.”

Let me give you a real-life example. If you are at a restaurant and you order a salad with the dressing on the side, what are the odds that the waiter will remember and bring your salad with the dressing on the side? I do this often and I think the odds are about 90% – that is, the waiter will correctly put the dressing on the side about 9 out of 10 times. What happens when they don’t, and they bring the salad with the dressing already on it? What do you do when that happens?

I know what I do – I eat the salad. I will sometimes mutter under my breath, or make idle threats about reducing the tip, but I rarely draw attention to the fact that I did not get what I ordered and I am not 100% satisfied. You see, I have been conditioned from an early age to be OK with that, to even expect that I will be disappointed and to minimize the importance of it. This is not a healthy response for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it builds resentment that can surface later in undesired ways.

I don’t tell the Truth about my Satisfaction

The second big idea here is that I don’t tell the truth about my level of satisfaction. Just like with the salad, I suck it up. Quietly. I tell myself it is not really important, or not worth fighting about.

I am increasingly aware that I do better or worse with certain people or in certain situations. With some people and in some situations, I have this large blindspot that I have come to think of as a form of ‘corporate denial’. It is as though with certain people or situations, I completely toss out my expectations the idea that I could be personally satisfied. I am unable – no, unwilling – to clearly see the truth in what is happening and orient to my own satisfaction. A good example of this is with authority figures.

I am learning that this corporate denial has become so ingrained in me that I think of it as normal. It is like the water in the fish tank that the fish cannot see or appreciate.

Being Nice

How does all this relate to being nice? Well, generally I am very nice. I am often ‘nice’ at the expense of being effective, as I can be in the restaurant example. The problem is that while I may be nice on the surface, underneath the surface I am hurt and angry.

Let’s be clear though – being hurt and angry is what I have co-created. It is also what I expect to happen. The shift that I need to make is to be crystal clear about what I want and determined to have things the way that I want them. I need to go for 100% satisfaction for myself. This needs to be a top priority.

Initially, my need to go for 100% satisfaction may come at the expense of being nice. Because I have been off balance for so long, the pendulum needs to swing the other way. I need to have an extreme focus on my 100% satisfaction.

So for me to speak up that day and in an unkind way to challenge my team lead to do their job better, was actually a grow for me and a step in the right direction. It wasn’t pretty, and I know that I can improve on that. But I need to continue to get in there and be willing to be messy but insist that things be done the way that I want them done.

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts and reactions, in particular, if you pride yourself on being a nice guy ora nice girl.

Cheers,

Anthony

How Happiness affects High Performing Teams

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune discussed the topic of happiness. Based on research by Jack Bauer, associate professor at the University of Dayton, the article provided some interesting tips for those interested in happiness. In this post, we look at those tips for pursuing happiness and we apply those to leading high-performing teams.

Happiness is an elusive emotion. How do we go about being happy? Is that a choice, that is, can we simply choose to be happy instead of feeling sad or angry? If so, the question for many of us is this “why can’t we just be happy?”.

Which is a great question. Why can’t we just be happy? The research by Jack Bauer and others indicates that happiness is not something that we seek directly, but that we achieve indirectly through other things. Here are some of the key findings from the research:

Happiness flows from engaging in activities in which we are totally immersed; when we lose ourselves.
Happiness is rising to a challenge that we have the capacity to meet. When we tackle something difficult and our skills are up to the challenge, happiness tends to flow. It is when we are working toward personal mastery, rather than performance.
Happiness is more likely to to be experienced in community with others, rather then when we are alone and isolated. This was an overarching theme of the research.
Happiness was more likely when people were doing things that were personally meaningful or for the greater human good, rather than for our own personal goals or for material goods.
The research also showed something that many have heard before, having more money doesn’t necessarily increase happiness. Interestingly enough, the opposite is generally true. Happy people tend to make more money for a variety of reasons including because of others like them and their work, they are more creative and optimistic. (There is actually a book that has been around for a while called, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow, which is based on this premise.)

I looked at these lessons from a personal perspective at first, then began to think through the lens of a project manager or leader. What can we apply from this research to help our teams perform at the highest possible level? Here are my conclusions:

#1 Know the strengths and weaknesses of your individual team members and align them with it.

If we want to align people with the right work, we need to know them inside and out. That will help us to get people into those positions where they are doing work they like and are good at and where they are stretching themselves to meet a challenge. Likewise, we need to avoid placing people in roles where they feel overwhelmed or not up to the challenge. We want to be pushing people to stretch themselves in roles where they feel challenged, but not necessarily overwhelmed.

This can be a bit tricky and may require taking some risks. On a recent program, we put a junior PM into a role leading a large outsourcing effort. She had little PM experience and no prior experience with outsourcing and she quickly began to feel like she was in over her head. What she overlooked was that she was very familiar with the teams that were affected, and the tasks and specific products that were being outsourced. It was because of her unique prior experience in these areas, and her good relationships with the impacted teams that made her capable of rising to the challenge.

#2 Challenge Team Members at their Growth Edge

When we know the strengths and weaknesses of our team members, we can also push them to perform at high levels. We can challenge them in those areas where they are up to it but need to be supported to increase their performance.

This is something I have personally experienced and written about here and in my book. I do some of my best work when I have a mentor or coach who is supporting me, challenging me, and yes sometimes pushing me beyond what I think I can do. It has been one of the most important things that has fueled me, encouraged me, and has resulted in the most personal growth. My mentor Rich will often say something like, “my vision for you Anthony is that you are…”. He holds the bar high for me when I am not able to do it for myself.

#3 Prevent Individuals from working in Isolation.

I recognize that it is a natural tendency for many people to want to isolate and work alone. There is an attraction for many of us to think that if we were just left to work alone, we would be happy. (Hey, that’s exactly why I became a writer!) In fact, people are more happy and engaged when they are working as part of a team. So while there is a tendency to isolate, and certainly there are some tasks that naturally need to be performed by a single person, we want to avoid this if possible. We want people working together. As leaders, we need to build a sense of community and help team members to stay connected to the greater team.

Building community can help with happiness and actually speed the progress toward the team’s goals. I recently had a virtual team of developers working to create programs to convert material from one format to another. This team had a consistent track record of missing every deadline and milestone. Working together with the leader of the team, we implemented twice weekly standup calls. What we discovered during our standup calls was a little shocking – each developer was working in near perfect isolation; they didn’t talk to each other! While there was some level of email between them, they were largely isolated in trying to solve the collective challenges. Our standup calls quickly became their forum for communication and they started performing as a group and actually hit a few deadlines.

#4 Help people to connect their work to the goals of the larger organization or the company.

This is something that is important but not done very often. People don’t get inspired by working each week for a paycheck. They might get inspired by being part of a team that is making an impact inside their organization or out. It is important that team members understand the bigger picture of your team goals and how their task or activity contributes toward that. When people see the connection, they see it as for the greater good and not something that they have to do for you.

Back in 2003, I was lucky enough to get involved with a large program that was implementing systems to support education reform in the country of Qatar. It was fascinating to me how many people wanted to join the team to be part of that work. We capitalized on it by providing lots of information about the country of Qatar, the state of education, and the people that would be impacted by the program. People got it, and it helped to fuel their performance. We had a very high-performing team because everyone understood, and bought into the larger goals of the organization. We worked some incredibly long hours and met some goals that at the time seemed unachievable. We even adopted the team slogan ‘Inconceivable!’

I am sure there are other takeaways from a leadership perspective. As always, I am interested in your thoughts. Cheers!

Anthony

Tips for Leading Agile Teams with Emotional Intelligence

As I noted in my last post, I am working on the second edition of Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers. Thankfully, I was able to send the manuscript on time today, so that is no longer hanging over my head!

The second edition includes a new chapter on Success with Agile Teams. Anyone who has used Agile methods though will attest to the fact that leading Agile teams is not the same as leading traditional teams. Agile teams are expected to be self-organizing. This doesn’t mean there are no leaders,
but it requires a style of leadership that is less prescriptive and more supportive. It is often called Servant Leadership, and it requires a lot of emotional intelligence.

I ended the new chapter in the book with the following 9 tips for leading Agile Teams with Emotional Intelligence. I’d love to hear your feedback on these.

Evaluate your level of Command and Controlism. Take a step back and really evaluate the ways you use command and control. Are you holding back the teams you lead by trying to control them? If you are having trouble seeing it in yourself, note whether you see it in others. Or, ask those you trust to provide you with accurate feedback on your behavior.
Proactively step back and let others step up. Try stepping back and letting others decide what to do. Spend less time trying to force your will on others, or to manipulate them to do what you think they should do. Trust that whatever they do, they will learn from their behavior.
Say less; a lot less. Rather than always being the first to speak up, trying shutting up and listening more. Really tune in to what others say, rather than your own internal chatter, or simply waiting for your chance to speak. See where the leadership comes from when you don’t hog all the airtime. Try the empathetic listening techniques we’ve discussed in the blog and in Chapter 5 of the book.
Practice some form of daily mindfulness. This is important for all PMs, but it is especially important for leaders of Agile Teams. Whether you use meditation, prayer, journaling, or some other technique, establish this as a daily practice that you do to be clear with yourself before you engage with the team. Put to use some of those Self-Awareness techniques discussed in this blog.
Get underneath your fear. Most of us who feel the need to control do so out of fear and many of our fears are irrational or unwarranted. Look below the surface to see if you can determine what you are afraid of. I know for me this is usually a fear of failure. I am afraid that the team will fail and that it will reflect poorly on me. Some of us also fear a loss of relevance. After all, if the team can do great work or come up with great ideas without me, what value do I have? Dig deep into what your underlying fears are so that you can understand how those are affecting your behaviors within the team.
Use Jedi Mind Tricks – When it comes to decisions, put the decision back on the team rather than jumping in and making the decisions for them. Try holding back on your own opinion even when asked. Take time to pause and to ask the team, “What do you think we should do?”. You might be surprised at what they say. Or you might say, “Is anyone else feeling the pressure to decide right now besides me?”
That’s a Great Idea! – Some of us are so hungry to be affirmed, that we often find it hard to accept new ideas or perspectives from others. We’re used to saying things like, “that is a good idea BUT it won’t work because of… “. To overcome this type of behavior, practice saying “That’s a great idea!”, and then look for every opportunity to say it. It may not come easy.
Use Positive Regard with Everyone – See the team at its very best, not necessarily in their worst moment. Know that the team will rise to the occasion when they need to; that they will learn from their experience, and that they will get better over time. Hold each member of the team, and the team as a whole, with high positive regard.
Be a Servant Leader – Agile team leaders, Program Managers, and Functional Managers all need to support the agile team. They frequently need to serve as a buffer between the Agile team and the rest of the organization. Tune in to the organizational norms that run counter to Agile and run interference for the team. Help streamline mandatory documentation or other PMO requirements do that the Agile Team can be empowered and self-organizing.

I’ve mentioned this before, but a great resource for Agile project managers, coaches, program managers, and functional managers is Lyssa Adkins 2010 book, Coaching Agile Teams; A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition. Lyssa provides many ideas for supporting Agile teams, overcoming command and controlism, and leading ourselves.

I’d love to hear your comments, whether you are an agile project manager or one who is using more traditional methods.

Cheers!

Anthony