Having
and being able to share a clear vision; being strategic in your purpose. I
believe this is what people are talking about when they refer to needing
someone who is “details oriented”. It’s also widely recognized that having one
is important. I did a Google search just a minute ago and it responded with
about 57,300,000 results in 0.17 seconds. And yet having a vision is rarely
listed when people are asked what the most important characteristics are for
being effective. For example, it was listed only once in a recent LinkedIn PM
Community group post.
Now,
before I go any further, I’d like to repeat and clarify that the following is
focused on those in the project management profession. I and many others have
been inspired by leaders over the years. JFK’s vision of landing a man on the
moon and safely returning him the Earth by the end of the 1960s. Martin Luther
King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. Those and many other leaders had a very
clear vision of what they wanted to see happen. They did not, however, have the
skills to technically know how to achieve it. Still, both these and other
visions were achieved and the world is a better place for them being achieved.
Would they have made great project managers? Probably. JFK was the captain of a
PT boat during WWII. Do all great project managers possess the skills to become
leaders of industry, government, and causes that will change the course of
history? Probably not.
Now, with
that out of the way, the clarity of a PM’s / PgM’s vision and level of detail
that can be discussed are very much inter-related in my opinion. It is the ability
of this person to:
- get into the weeds with the
team if and when needed and
- commensurate to their role and
- for the teams they are
managing and
- for whom they are reporting
into.
Where
this seems to go off balance in many cases is where people (both individual
contributors and those already in leadership roles) sometimes have a perception
that you must be able to do to lead. This, depending on how extreme this
position is taken, can be a promotion of individualism over teamwork. It is
also the downfall of many people new to management roles. That lesson being to
learn to delegate rather than do. Toyota
It’s also
those “and”s that really make a
difference. As systems theories seek to promote, it’s not so much the
individual components as the interrelationships among them that really make the
difference. They are very important because the vision needs to be shared at
the level of your audience, and as a PM/PgM I believe we all know that your
audience consists of management teams, vendors, customers, and other
stakeholders in addition to your core team. Making anyone feel stupid at any
time at any place is just plain wrong. It may be immediately satisfying to put
a bully in their place in a public way; and I admit that in the past I have
been guilty of doing that myself. However, the loss experienced doing that also
meant losing the skills that other person had to offer. Yes, sometimes it’s
worth it but that should never be the first option. U.S. President Theodore
Roosevelt’s famous foreign policy statement to ‘speak
softly and carry a big stick’ can equally be applied today. And as he also said
during his presidency, the objective should always be to never have to use that
big stick. On a lighter note, even in the Bugs Bunny – Yosemite Sam cartoons of
my youth Bugs never sought out to humiliate Sam. I think that was a good life
lesson.
Finally,
if people perceive you as making it up as you go you’ll very likely be
perceived as flaky, insincere, not credible, whatever; and that’s regardless of
how clearly, concisely, … you communicate. And they won’t follow you. As the
old adage goes, you can’t be a leader if no one wants to follow. Someone once
said to me a few years ago in a moment of frustration, “It’s not about you! And
what makes you think you’ve got all the answers anyway?!” My response was
simply, One, I don’t think I have all the answers. That’s why I’ve built a
strong team around me. And two, I was put in that position because of the
vision I had and communicated to the executives; on what we needed to do to both resolve
existing limitations/gaps, achieve stated strategic objectives, and how and
what we should do to go about doing that. If you think I’m completely wrong and
the wrong person for the job, take that up with our executives.
I never
did find out if I was the source or just the target of that person’s
frustration. I do know thought that person was able to convince our executives
that the gloss and polish they offered actually made them the right person for
the job (not me). I wouldn’t take too much stock in their decision making
skills though. I got a call from a recruiter about 18 months later telling me
who had been ‘let go’ and asking me if I would consider coming back because the
project still needed to be completed. This was a project that should have and
could have been completed in less than a year. Yes, karma does exist. A
favorite analogy of mine for this event is a beloved children’s game, King of the Castle.
The specific analogy being that others may and will knock you off that heap
(out of your position) but without possessing the depth of your vision they
won’t stay there too long themselves either.
In
closing, I’ll offer to you the request and hope I have for you, and why I am
writing this post. If you’re going to have a vision, share it. If you want to
take over someone else’s vision, I hope you actually have the depth of
understanding to actually carry out that vision through to fruition.
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