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.

1) We had a terrifically engaged audience.  I’ve been speaking at one conference or another for just a few weeks shy of 13 years and hands down I felt that the attendees where there because they really cared about running a program or a PMO or because they actually managed a portfolio.  The Gartner events folks set up quite a few peer networking events and based on my read of the audience there was ample opportunity for attendees to meet and share with others.

2) Everyone wants to be a program manager.  Seems reasonable since we all stood up on stage and said program management is the next big thing BUT there’s a problem — real program management the way Gartner defines it shares very little overlap with project management.  In fact I routinely tell PPM Leaders that only about 20% of their PMs will ever make it as program managers.

One interesting outcome of this interest in program management is that it’s given me a new goal.  I’m sure of the 20% — it’s based on natural selection and skills cultivated from early childhood — but I’m now wondering if there’s a way to increase that percentage just a little.  Or maybe a better way to think about this is what do we need to do to clearly and cleanly identify our future program managers and equip them for success.  Definitely something I will be adding to my research agenda for next year.

3) Personal power vs position power seemed to be a background issue in some of my discussions.  This topic is worth at least a half dozen research notes.  The problem is most of what I want to say someone can misconstrue.  For example a simple statement — do what YOU believe is right for your project, program or company and ask for forgiveness later, is good advice unless you’ve completely misread your management and your company culture.  If you have misread your company you get fired — if you haven’t you get promoted.

Of course this is a hard lesson to learn.  Even I screwed it up royally once and this was after years of nailing exactly how much I could get away with.  In my case I made the mistake of trying to do my job (as I wanted to do it) and NOT covering my boss’s posterior first.  It was naive and arrogant on my part and I paid the price.  I only bring this up because it’s one of the reasons that PMOs and project management adoptions fail so often the first, second and even third time they’re tried.  360 degree servant leadership (with a passionate drive to get results) is the only approach that really works, but sometime it’s easy to take your eye off the ball.

More thoughts from the summit tomorrow.

The 8 factors listed below are the compilation of feedback from Mr. Bock’s students about the work environments they preferred to work in.

1. Supports productivity
2. Provides a sense of community
3. Offers interesting and meaningful work.
4. Provides clear and reasonable expectations
5. Offers frequent and usable feedback.
6. Maintains consistency
7. Values fairness.
8. Offers maximum control possible over work life

There should be no surprise that there’s a fair amount of overlap between this list and the list of 11 elements that I’ve been using to define a project culture. It turns out that in the western world, educated adults define their preferred working environment as being centered around a group approach to solving problems.

I have to admit I was delighted to see that productivity was first on the list. I have always held a world view that most people really want to do a good job. I also believe this makes our jobs as managers fairly easy. All we have to do is remove any road block that stands between what our team members wish to accomplish and success. If we do that they’ll do the rest. I don’t know how anyone else feels about this, but removing roadblocks as a job function works for me. It says that all I need to do is figure out how my team members get the information and the tools they need to do their job. If I give them that they will in turn provide the brilliance and creativity to craft the product that the organization needs.

If you’re tempted to respond that I’m just repackaging management 101, let me take my thoughts a little further. This truth is it isn’t always easy to remove roadblocks. There often isn’t the money to give people the tools they really need to do their job right especially in this economy. To be successful then in our jobs we need to be very good at working the political system and very good at garnering support for the efforts of our team. We also have to be successful at our jobs to make sure that our team members judge the environment as supporting their productivity.

There are so many places I can take this from here that I’m going to just decide to stop. In future entries I’ll be exploring the other 7 characteristics of an effective workplace.