Donna Fitzgerald“IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.”
Found this quote in a ComputerWorld article a friend sent me (http://tinyurl.com/lm9yb7). While the entire article is well worth reading this one sentence seemed to pertain to the essence of what Project and Program management of software projects is all about, especially since it so perfectly encapsulates the concept of servant leadership.
It occured to me that I write about servant leadership and yet it seems I haven’t really defined it. From my perspective the concept of servant leadership begins with accepting that it is the team or the group or the society that creates the outcome. The role of the leader then is to effectively empower or give “permission” to the “team” to make the change and to remove as many roadblocks as possible so that they (the team) can be successful. And the secret to empowering the team is to respect them as the creative, valuable, talented people that they are.
If this sounds too touchy-feely for some of you let me assure you it’s not. The flip slide to the coin of respect is demanding people live up to their potential. Slackers get booted off the team. Likewise destructive worms (no matter how brilliant and talented) get shown the door as well. Committments are honored by everyone or “contracts” are renegoiated. Everyone owns their own failure (no blame game allowed — EVER).
Now on to another one of my aha moments. All of what it takes to manage this way seemed pretty instinctive to me when I started my career, but that was just youthful arrogance. It was instinctive because I was surrounded by lots of great people who subtly reinforced me for doing the things described above and who boxed my ears every time I did something stupid (bad donna — 20 lashes with a wet noodle). I recently had the opportunity to test some of this out myself with a very large team of Gen Ys and I can now safely say I appreciate how much work everyone put into me, especially when the trick to this form of mentoring is to make it look like benign neglect.
I’ve said to a lot of clients that I think they’ve hired poor project managers but the more I think on it the more I believe that poor choice of people is only half the problem. The Gen Ys who worked for me had great raw potential. Some of them would have made it to become great managers and leaders simply because they had good training from their parents. Some of them will become good because of managers who helped them in their career, and some of them no matter what anyone does will fall by the wayside on their journey to become leaders. My guess is that the born leaders number no more than 10% and all we need to do with them is leave them alone. The ones who can be developed into leaders are probably the next 40% and this is where we should be investing our time in order to keep our profession vibrant and valuable.
Category: PMO Program Management Tags: Career Development, Mentoring, Servant Leadership
1 response so far ↓
1 RickSmithAuthor October 22, 2009 at 11:52 am
So true. Similar to this, in my first book, The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, our research showed that those who had succeeded the most in their careers were dramatically more likely to be seen as “focused on the success of others, even more than their own careers.” Everyone profiled in my current book The Leap shares the same traits.
Servant leadership helps the team win, but also leads to personal success. In the end, you are carried to success on the shoulders of hundreds or even thousands of people who, over time, have become invested in your success.
Rick Smith