Things I Wish I Knew About Leading as a Project Manager 20 Years Ago (Part 2)

In Part 1 of Things I Wish I Knew About Leading as a Project Manager 20 Years Ago, I talked about the times we look back and say, "If only I'd known that, I would have done it differently, or I would have moved a lot quicker…". I outlined 5 of the things that I've written down from time to time and that I have found particularly impactful to my career. Below are the other 5 things that pretty much make up my 10 Leadership Rules of Project Management…from my experience, which I fully understand may not be your experience.  

6. You Do Need to Mind Yourself as a PM…. 

I thought this was good from Farnam Street¹:

It summarises another key learning that took me a while to accept. If, like me, you grew up in an environment that didn't really promote yoga, meditation, or some form of mindfulness, then you need to consider a change. Ten minutes of meditation a day trains your mind to slow down, giving you a chance to see things more clearly, with less anxiety. Doing it every day builds a strength, I find, that is very welcome in stressful times. 

To me, it seems nowadays that everyone wants money from you for a subscription of some sort. If not a streaming service, then a nutrition programme, a workout programme, a cooking series, or a magazine or e-newspaper. I've never found it easy to agree with subscriptions (yes, I might actually be cheap). But I'll tell you this: I pay for the meditation app I have (Headspace), and it's great. See rule 8 for what happens when you let them have too much of you. 

You'll recognise stress symptoms only when it gets very bad. You'll find you can't watch a boxset series on Netflix all the way, as you have in the past. Wine starts appearing in the evenings, Monday to Thursday. Slowing down to understand what your child is telling you about the new way to do the maths homework is the hardest you've had to concentrate and remain calm in a long time. Your neighbour painting the front door and surrounding a ridiculous bright purple is the final straw. Don't they care about house values? 

Stress is physically debilitating. Physical exercise has been proven to combat stress. Meditation, yoga, and a range of other simple techniques are widely available. Also, Project management is a skill that is completely transferable. Meaning you can go and work anywhere. You are not tied to a building or a technology. But the skill is you. So, if you're unwell due to stress, there's an issue. I have found it incredibly hard every year to prioritise physical exercise. But I keep trying. 

7. The Challenges Can Never Be Fully Controlled

Part of being able to manage increasing amounts of responsibility and work delivery is to understand that, at times, there might be constantly increasing amounts of deliverables. You can see them in your mind as small mountains rising to the left and right of your workspace. Although you try as hard as you can, you are unlikely to be able to control all of it and reduce it to neat stacks of data carefully filed away. You will not be able to answer every e-mail and message or follow up on all the requests for new involvement. 

Just accepting that there might always be tons of work should give you relief - don't try to control it all. By accepting there will be a lot of work, you can prioritise the most important first. And then go on from there. No one can turn back an ocean tide. 

If you are hardworking, disciplined, and willing, then anyone would be pleased that you are working for their organisation. And if that's not the case, check out rule 9. 

8. They Won't Stop You Working….. 

As your PM career progresses, you will work on more challenging projects in more responsible roles. This will happen. Because as you lead projects, you will be successful, and the value your team creates will be noticed. Your team's success comes from the work you do to organise the projects using well-defined PM processes. You massively reduce the chance of failure. Your leadership or 'soft' skills of communication, stakeholder management, staying calm under pressure, and using emotional intelligence (look it up) to manage hasty statements from others will show you are one to be watched. 

If this means more focus, more hours and more travel, then it's likely you will take this from the time you used to give to your sport, your hobby, your gardening, attending your children's events, or any outside work activity. Suddenly you're playing less squash, less golf, doing less reading, less running, less gardening, attending less theatre, going to fewer family events, whatever. 

Multinational companies, state departments and groups, semi-state groups, charities, construction, small independent companies, retail, and startups. None of them will stop you from working. All will talk about work-life balance and provide information on how to access it, the importance of it, and their willingness to support it. But none will restrict your hours, set an auto-off function on your laptop for 6 pm, or throw you out of the building after 8 working hours. This they leave to your discretion and decision. You'll do your own internal comparison to your peers around you your potential career path, and decide you need to do a bit more work. 

What you need to do is to set your work-life balance rules and remember that when you retire, your organisation will forget you in about 20 minutes, which is likely the time it takes for the e-mail system to refresh your name. Cynical? Maybe, but on retirement, you will have put in decades of good work on challenging projects, working with other talented people. But you need to actually have that life outside of work that balances with work. So you can continue with that when your organisational life is complete. 

9. Don't Work for a Bad Boss. It Won't Get Better! 

If many of your managers to date in your career have been decent and offered help or experience along the way, that's not special. That's how it should be. And there will be one who is so good you wish you were still working for them. Even though you might not fully agree with, or even like the rest of them, they'll be ok to work with. A lot of the time, we don't get to choose who we report to, but we make it work. 

If, however, at some point you find yourself working with, or reporting to, someone who appears interested, has many things they would like to discuss with you as to how you work, but is actually uninterested in you, and is performing the role of manager or director or junior minster, or whatever because that's one of the boxes to tick to confirm they are a 'good leader', as they move up the career ladder they are so obsessively focussed on, then you need to think carefully. They don't put a foot wrong when interacting with your senior leadership teams and outwardly appear to be talented, interested in people, and competent in the role. 

But if they see that reducing the size of the team will look 'efficient', or if someone has to go to the other side of the country to fill a role for 12 months, or if a significant design effort is unravelling, you start to see a different manager. Suddenly, you or someone you work closely with goes from 'delivering success' to 'needs improvement' in the annual review. The 'opportunity' of a role in another part of the country is described as 'if you don't take this, I can't guarantee your position here won't be the subject of review at senior level'. Or you become the face of responsibility for the unravelling effort. They always appear to be on your side until they aren't.  

Don't go thinking this is happening to you because one time your manager corrected your approach a little sharply. After spending some time thinking it through, you will see this manager is simply bad news for your career. No amount of increased work delivery is going to change their mind. 

There are other jobs out there. Quietly and plan to fully engage a recruiting specialist or two to find your next role. Stay positive about who you are and what you have to offer. Be honest and open. Try not to look back on the poor experiences with a bad manager. My grandmother used to tell me, "What goes around, comes around". It's a universal law. Let Karma deal with them. 

10. Diversity Works….. Let's Move On 

If you're working in a geographical area where you grew up and went to school, it's likely people you work with went to school with you, or know people who went to school with you or are married to people who went to school with you.  

You still work hard, and your project team works for the best solutions that they can think of, but it changes when some team members are from different cultures and geographical areas. Their cultural teachings and upbringings might allow them to look at a problem in a different way. It might only be a little different, but if you have a recurring problem and then you keep applying the same thinking, you are only reinforcing a point attributed to Einstein, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them". (Ironically, it also seems that according to the internet, Einstein was still saying brilliant things long after his death). Anyway, diversity in the workplace is a positive for project management. 

Maybe watching a TED talk by Margeret Heffernan might help. It's called Super Chickens². It's about social cohesion in a team. And how teams work together. You cannot have a team made up only of individuals focussed on their own work delivery. This won't increase productivity or introduce new ideas. Ultimately, the success of the individuals focused on themselves comes from suppressing the success of the other team members. 

Working as a team is about building on each other's ideas. But it's also about diversity. And it's about empathy. The willingness to listen to others, consider other ideas, and be willing to connect to each other. 

In a Galway-based US Multinational Med-Device company I've worked for, all the engineering, scientific, logistics, manufacturing and production teams go to breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea together (at staggered times) in the canteen located in the facility. When I started there, it struck me how disciplined this was. You never went somewhere else, and staying at your desk wasn't an option. Granted, in the first years of the facility, it was site policy not to allow any food or drink outside the canteen. But as the site matured, food at the desk without compromising policy was possible. But still, you went together for a break. 

I'm not sure if management realised that the teams spending time with each other, not talking about work during the breaks (you soon learnt that's not allowed) and finding out about each other would lead to so much empathy for each other. These team members now know and understand each other better. There's a willingness to listen. And new team members have a vehicle to allow them to fit in. 

Suppose this was management's intention; it's genius. It really contributes to output, continuous improvement, innovation and teamwork.  I believe the way teams there work on projects and are so familiar with each other plays a very big part in the success. Yes, the Covid pandemic has threatened to ruin all that. Now, half the teams might not even be onsite on the same days. However, the pendulum is likely to swing back again, and more onsite presence should bring back the cohesion. 

So, teams made up of average and different people are likely to be the most successful. If you work for someone who would vote to go with only the 'super chickens' as a strategy, you might want to think about that. 

A reminder that these are my own opinions on Leadership in Project Management. If any of them are helpful to you, then great. Maybe they might remind you that there really is no textbook answer to what you are doing at work and that no one is coming up with a better idea. What you are doing is right. Keep building relationships and moving forward. 

Reference Literature:

1. Farnam Street. 2023. "Brain Food – No. 526."

2. Ted. 2015. "Forget the pecking order at work."