High Performance Leadership

  If you have a degree in the arts, no matter how business-like you try to act, a little art has to sneak in. It's stealth-like like that. What if the way we lead a project is the way we live our life? Charts, data, measures, details...or big picture vision and boundless interpersonal energy? It's not actually a choice of one or  the other -- but if you do enough projects, it will touch your life -- and if you live enough life, it will light up your projects. What do you think? -- doug smith

If you work on enough projects and goals, you will inevitably miss a deadline. It feels terrible. The energy can drain out and it can feel as if you will never achieve what you set out to do. Instead of giving up, though, what if you simply recalibrate, reset, and restart in order to redouble your efforts? What if you garnered more support and focused more sharply on the task at hand? Some goals we let go because their time has come and gone or they never really served our mission. But, if your goal is still in alignment with your mission and you do still have the support of your boss, then what if you took a few deep breathes, drank a glass of water, took a walk, and then hit that restart button on your goal? Sometimes missing a deadline is a delay, not a failure. -- doug smith Leadership Call to Action: Take two minutes to review your top three goals. What are you doing on them today? You'll never do everything, but you can always do what is most important to y...

Are your projects fun? Do people tackle their tasks with a sense of energy and enthusiasm? Most importantly, do you hear laughter at work? Find the fun in your project and your chances of success increase. You'll be happier, your team will be happier, and your projects will show greater results. -- Doug Smith

Don't start another project. Launch it. Give that project the energy, the momentum, the power it needs to focus on the goal, work the plan, and create something both useful and memorable. Your project is worth it. Give that new start the focus it needs with a workshop that brings together all of the key constituents. Let your project team feel part of something special by celebrating before they even get started. Giving your project a collaborative workshop launch could be the most high impact thing you could do for it. What goes into a collaborate workshop launch? You decide. I have found it helpful and energizing to include these: A vision/mission for your team.  This could be your project goal, expressed in a way that drives some excitement into the project A team identify. Depending on the project (and your budget) that could be as simple as matching T-shirts and coffee mugs, or as elaborate as a team name theme song, and video Carefully prepared agenda. Make si...

High performance leaders are constantly leading new projects, asking people to change and MAKE changes. These are seldom easy tasks. Getting people to change requires their support. If you've ever been in charge of a project, you know that all too well. People resist. People dig in. People ignore your pleads to please pull in the opposite direction. That's because a new direction is hard. It's fraught with unseen obstacles and traps. It's unfamiliar. Change stinks. But change is necessary and it is fundamentally what high performance leaders do: drive change. Where do you start? Start with agreement. Get people to agree on as many things as you can leading to whatever change is necessary. Get them to agree to listen. Get them agree to talk. Get them to agree to the need and POSSIBILITY of change. Agreeing to possibilities smoothes the way, AND -- agreements lead to better possibilities. High performance don't have to come up with all the best ideas, they s...

When I worked for GE and I was learning project management, they had a popular expression that was often spoken with pride and just a touch of arrogance. "In God we trust, all others show us the data." We used to say that opinions were like noses. Everyone's got one. So what. What does the data say? Since then data has become even more important. We rely on data for so much. It drives decisions. It sorts product offerings. It calibrates without feeling the temperature of the times. And yet...what about the heart? Haven't you sometimes had a feeling that something wasn't right and discovered that you were right? There wasn't any data to tell you, it just hit you as true. Relying on your gut instincts can be dangerous. Our intuition is wrong at a surprisingly high frequency. But data isn't everything. How we feel matters. How our customers feel matters. What we bring to our work through our emotions matters. Rely on the data. What other choice do...

What is the typical reaction to courage? Often, people respond to true courage with resistance. They push back. They run away. They refuse to change. That should not surprise us. We should expect it. I've worked on projects where the biggest part of the goal achievement involved working through the resistance. People didn't want to change software. People didn't want to print less. People didn't want to move from Chicago to Trevose, PA. But in each case the change was inevitable, and embracing that change was necessary. For those of us driving those projects, we had to maintain our courage and conviction even when people were unhappy and rebellious. Courage is more often resisted than appreciated. You won't always get an award. In fact, you will seldom get an award for your courage. But, your courage is still required. Of course it's not easy. It wouldn't take courage if it was. How courageous are you prepared to be to achieve your goals? -- Do...

How is your most important project team doing? When we lead projects we must stay on top of the performance. No matter who is on our team, it's best to not take performance of their goals for granted. It's best to occasionally follow-up. I'm a focused and goal oriented person, and yet I know that I benefit from a leader following up with me to keep me accountable. We're all so busy, it's easy to take our eyes off the target and drift from our center. High performance leaders help people stay on track. High performance leaders follow-up. No matter how reliable your project team is, they still need follow-up. What follow-up will you do today? -- Doug Smith Front Range Leadership:  High Performance Leadership Training doug smith training:  helping people communicate more effectively What have you learned today?

Do you have the people you need on your team to solve your biggest problem? You might need to find them. You might need to develop them. You might need to recruit them. But, you need them. You need who you need. It doesn't fool you or the problem to proceed pretending that you can solve that big problem without the necessary resources. Get what you need or stop fooling yourself. I hear what you're thinking (that's spooky but you know what I mean, don't you?) in that sometimes you just have to suck it up and put on your super hero cape and get it done all by yourself or with the limited resources you have. Just because resources are limited doesn't mean you can't develop them. And, just because resources are limited doesn't mean you can't interest another superstar in your work if the work is valuable enough. Your work IS valuable enough, right? Get the help you need. Even superheroes need teams when the problem is big enough. -- Douglas Bre...

How earnest is your mission? Is it clear, indisputable, energizing? My partner Dorinda has a favorite expression, "If you have a plan B to fall back on you'll fall back on it." I'm not saying that we don't often need a plan B. When we are leading high performance projects we need to manage our risks and that means establishing contingencies. But, those contingencies do NOT mean abandon the mission. The mission is the mission. There's no plan B for a genuine mission. -- Douglas Brent Smith

How many times during a problem solving effort do you pause to reach an agreement? In one of the many subtleties of managing a problem solving team we find our leverage in our agreements. When teams take the time to reach and confirm agreements on the details and behaviors as they go they are far more likely to be able to reach agreement on a solution AND the implementation of that solution. Sometimes agreeing on the right solution to a problem is tougher than coming up with a solution.  We generate lots of ideas. We develop some energy around our own ideas. We fatigue and subliminally wish to move on. We push when we should be listening. All of those issues are handled quickly when our team gets into the habit of reaching agreements. Agreements on details such as: how will we interact as a team? how do we reach decisions? what is our process for managing conflict? when do we step away and take a break? how long will we invest in this project? what are our roles? ...

Have you ever tried to solve a project problem by throwing more resources at it? More people, more budget, more tools, more materials? The problem with solving project problems is that we often end up solving symptoms and not the problem itself. To solve the problem we need to find the root cause. To find the root cause it helps to hold deeper conversations. High performance leaders create the kinds of environments where deeper dialogues can achieve shared meaning. More important than "truth" (because truth is constantly open to interpretation and misinterpretation) is reaching shared meaning. We know what we are talking about and we agree on both the facts and the feelings. It's easy and tempting to ignore the feelings but when we do we allow the feelings to distort the facts. Then where are we? Getting to the root cause of a project problem takes patience, curiosity, and skillful communication. The answer to your project problem is probably not more resource...

What's the biggest project mistake you've ever made? I've been doing projects long enough to have made some big ones. But sometimes it's the little ones that cause the most grief. Little mistakes like forgetting to thank people for their work. Little mistakes like assuming that customer will be delighted by the brand new process or product my project is delivering. Little mistakes like failing to track expenses until they exceed the budget. On second thought, those aren't small mistakes after all, are they? And yet, in each case there were valuable lessons learned that transferred directly into better projects later on. Learning from my mistakes (not that I'm done making them) has powered my projects into more creative areas and kept me on my toes. When it seems obvious, it's probably not. When it seems too good to be true, there's probably a problem lurking under the surface. When everything is on schedule and under budget how can we be sure that ...

Do you keep your deadline promises? High performance leaders deliver on their deadlines. No excuses. No delays. No renegotiation. Occasionally, mistakes force us into extending a deadline. Vendors or team members let us down. But we should never take this lightly. As high performance leaders we keep our promises. The time to negotiate a deadline is before you agree to it. Once it's yours, deliver. Because that's what high performance leaders do. -- Douglas Brent Smith Develop more high performance leadership in your team, your organization, and in yourself by bringing our one-day workshops to your location. A great place to start is with Supervising for Success . Need a free sample first? Ask to schedule our free webinar " Ten Secrets to Leadership Success "

Do you find your projects getting bigger and bigger? Is scope creep more than a concept to you and more like a way of life? I call it the "wouldn't it be cool syndrome." Our bosses do it to us, our clients do it to us, our customers do it to us, our team members do it to us, but most of all we do it to ourselves -- we let our boundaries disappear and work expand endlessly. Do you know what that leads to? Unfinished work. That's not what you probably want. While your job might be without boundaries, your projects need them. And guess what -- if you don't set them and enforce them, why would anyone else? Centered leaders, high performance leaders create project boundaries. Shouldn't you? -- Douglas Brent Smith

Change creates unexpected reactions. People rebel. Some people simply ignore the change. Others react emotionally with sadness, confusion, and even anger. Whenever leaders create change -- through a project, a new process, a new team member -- it creates a reaction. We can anticipate many of those reactions, but not all. To improve performance we must create change. There is no standing still. And, the change never stops. People can grow tired of change, but the change must never stop. As leaders we can provide some relief from the change fatigue that sets in. We can celebrate. We can preserve treasured artifacts and features of the culture before the change. We can honor those who have brought us as far as we've come. We can provide the breathing room that people need to remain centered and ready. Ready for the next change. Change creates unexpected reactions. How will you handle them? -- Douglas Brent Smith

Have you noticed that not all learning is easy? That sometimes, the lesson in front of you took far more effort than you'd expected or wanted? We learn in so many ways. Some of them take work. While music comes naturally to me, I do have to really work to learn a new language. My Spanish is broken and at an elementary level, but brings me such joy I plod on, even though it comes with much difficulty. Projects learn at the speed of the team, and sometimes the team is reluctant to learn. "Why can't things just work the way they always have?" "How long do we have to stay with this until it turns out the way we want it to?" These are questions team members sometimes ask. It depends, of course. It depends on how fast, and with how much difficulty, we learn what we need to learn. If all learning was effortless it wouldn't do us much good. It's in the effort that we stretch. It's in the difficulty that we grow. It's in the testing that we ...

How often do you follow-up with your people on a project? Do they know that? Different people need different frequencies of follow-up of course. You may have some superstars who hardly ever need follow-up and will still get their tasks done. Then there are those who if you do not follow-up frequently will not get their tasks delivered. As a leader, how do you decide when to follow-up? I like to ask the people I'm working with when they would like follow-up. If their answer makes sense (and most of the time it does) then that's what I go with. The follow-up happens on their schedule and they are prepared to report their progress. If their answer does not make sense all that means is that the conversation continues until we reach agreement on a schedule that does make sense. Maybe I've underestimated the time they need. Maybe they are more responsible than I'd expected. Maybe they have information I need to know, but not until a certain time. It's also possi...

How often are you asked to do a project that you don't really want to do? Maybe it's a project that you have tasks due. Maybe it's a project that does not align with your goals. Maybe it seems like more trouble than it's worth. Some of the most important choices leaders make are the projects they refuse to do. High performance leaders, when they can, refuse projects that: - are not aligned with their goals - are not aligned with their organization's goals - are not aligned with their organization's mission and vision - could be best handled by someone else - have already been assigned to someone else You need to have the authority to refuse the project of course. It may not be a popular decision. But how much effort do you want to put into low priority projects that you don't want to do? -- Douglas Brent Smith To arrange training in project management, leadership, or handling multiple goals and projects, contact me at: info@frontrangeleader...

What is the most important tool for a leader? How can a project manager herd all the cats needed to get the project done to specification, on budget, and on time? Through influence. Building strong relationships able to respond quickly to needs. Delivering constantly on promises so that promised are owed. Helping others and thanking them meaningfully when they help you. The most important tool for a project manager is influence. Understanding people so that they will take the time to understand you. Figuring out what they are about so that what you are about matters. Appealing to a person's desires not to manipulate them but because you sincerely care about those desires, those dreams, those visions What are you doing to build influence today? -- Douglas Brent Smith