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Improve Your Leadership Skills with Emotional intelligence

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As project managers, we don’t simply manage work, deliverables, and documentation – we lead and support the people on our project teams. Emotional intelligence (also known as Emotional Quotient or EQ) helps us do that. Here’s how enhancing your EQ can help:

  • Relate to people working from home. Working with others is challenging even when you work side by side. Interacting with people onscreen amps up the level of difficulty. Although some people work from home and love it, others wish they were in the office. EQ helps you relate to and support your team members through their struggles. Your supportive leadership makes all your team members feel more comfortable with their work environment, which means a better chance of meeting project objectives.
  • Deal with people under stress. Stress creates obstacles for project managers and can significantly decrease project success. Stress often arises from business challenges like reactive decisions, irrational or missing responses to project problems, and fear about speaking the truth regarding project difficulties. With solid EQ, you will be able to recognize the root cause of these issues. Work through stressors with your stakeholders to ease their minds and deliver project outcomes.  
  • Manage excessive workload. Many businesses suffer from too many concurrent projects, competing operational responsibilities and being short-staffed – whether in your business or third parties you contract with. Pushing a schedule and managing to deadlines doesn’t guarantee progress. To negotiate deadlines and obtain staff to complete tasks, you need to understand the delivery pressure others are under – and that takes EQ.
  • Work across cultures. Project managers often work with people from different cultures, whether they represent different geographic regions in your country or different countries altogether. We are all human and have the same emotions behind our reactions. However, how emotions are triggered can vary across cultures. The higher your EQ, the more you will recognize these emotional triggers and the signals indicating the presence of emotions. That enhances your ability to work with stakeholders, no matter their cultural background. 
  • Apply change management if needed. Success goes beyond delivering project deliverables. For example, installed software doesn’t represent a successful result if the client isn’t tech-savvy and requires training and support to achieve the desired benefits. You might need to apply change management to achieve business outcomes, which requires skill, leadership expertise, and EQ. Whether you perform change management or depend on change managers, you need to understand what drives successful change management, which takes EQ.

For more about Emotional Intelligence, check out Gemma Leigh-Roberts Developing Your Emotional Intelligence course and Britt Andreatta’s Leading with Emotional Intelligence course.

Are You Leading If You’re Going in the Wrong Direction?

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Have you ever gotten jazzed up listening to an executive talk about what a project or program is going to do for the company? Big things, I tell you! This project is going to jet-fuel the organization! Go team! Then, you’re tapped to manage the project. As the excitement wears off, the realization dawns that you have NO IDEA what the project is really supposed to do.

Precise Leadership, a presentation by Executive Leadership Group at the 2012 PMI Mile Hi Spring Symposium, talked about how project managers can be successful by bringing clarity to a project. The emphasis of this approach is on uncovering the big picture of the project.

The first step is to understand the purpose of the project or program. That makes sense. But, in many instances, executives toss out vague goals cloaked in stimulating words, followed immediately by the directive “Get going!” Then, they revel in the warm fuzzy feeling they get watching the burst of activity that ensues. You probably know how that will end.

What you need are clear results that the endeavor is supposed to deliver. Results-based philanthropy was one example provided by the presenters, Wendi Peck and Bill Casey. Instead of a goal of raising as much money for a charity as possible, results-based philanthropy starts by identifying a desired result, raises the money for that result, and then uses the money to achieve the result.

Knowing the desired results delivers all sorts of benefits. The focus is on achieving results. That focus elevates everyone’s perspective to a more strategic level. Racking up hours or expenditures doesn’t mean squat if you aren’t getting closer to the desired results. In addition, you can prevent scope creep, because it’s easier to determine whether work supports the results. Team members understand why they’re doing work so they can be creative in how they achieve results. They’re also accountable for those results, so executives don’t need to micro-manage.

Bonnie's cartoon about heading in the wrong directionNow, you have a list of results to achieve. Everyone’s feeling pretty good. But you burst their balloon by asking “What is the right result?” Stephen Covey shares my favorite example of the importance of this question in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Someone looks up from their work and says “We’re going the wrong way!” The response is “Shut up! We’re making great progress!” You might run the most efficient project and deliver every result, but if the original goal was off the mark, the project will be a failure.

I liked the presenters’ take on the right result: a sweet spot somewhere between what you do and your lofty ideals. For example, doctors do physical exams. At the same time, they’re lofty ideal may be to make people healthy. The right result might be the middle ground of helping people make informed healthcare decisions.

The third step is to identify success in such a way that the results are indisputable. The bad news: The simplicity of an indisputable result is inversely proportional to the amount of thinking and discussion required. Is your desired result to decrease the cost of customer support by 10 percent, shorten calls to an average of less than 5 minutes, reduce average wait time to less than 4 minutes, or increase customer retention by 25 percent? Another challenge: you don’t want to saddle the organization with bureaucratic procedures for measuring those results.

Finally, you need to define some restrictions on those indisputable results. Some people are known for delivering exactly what you ask for, not what you intended. That is, if they can find a way to weasel around a result, they will. For example, if you’re trying to reduce customer service costs, you might want to specify that the results are achieved without a decrease in customer satisfaction. In most cases, 1 to 3 restrictions suffice to protect the results.  A test that the presenters recommend is to ask whether taking a restriction off the list makes the result easier to achieve. If the answer is yes, the restriction is probably warranted

What is Excellence in Leadership?

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The leadership theme continues — mainly because I attended the 2012 PMI Mile Hi Spring Symposium, whose theme was “Leadership: Winning strategies for achieving project success.” I didn’t yawn once, not even after the great lunch buffet. In fact, I got goose bumps a couple of times.

Pat Williams, Senior VP for the Orlando Magic, gave an inspiring keynote speech about leadership based on his book, Leadership Excellence: The Seven Sides of Leadership in the 21st Century. Although I can take or leave watching professional sports, I admire performers of all ilk — from actors to Cirque du Soleil acrobats to professional athletes. These folks have to perform their best no matter whether they’re injured, didn’t get enough sleep, or face crises in their lives. In team sports as in projects, the team has to perform as a, um, team and that means someone has to lead.

Now, I’m pretty good at getting myself motivated, unstuck, out of ruts, past obstacles. Which is pretty important for someone who’s self-employed. I have had some success motivating teams as I mentioned in an earlier post. However, I am in awe of leaders who can inspire teams to beat overwhelming odds, come back from demoralizing setbacks, and achieve more than they even dreamed possible. I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it.

So I thought I’d summarize what Mr. Williams says are the seven things that leaders in the 21st century must do to excel.

What are these characteristics of leadership excellence?

1. Vision. No surprise there. What is surprising is how often vision is missing. Vision helps everyone focus. It gives you energy, enthusiasm, and passion for the project at hand. Vision helps you finish, because you know what you’re trying to achieve.

2. Communication. A leader doesn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of succeeding if he or she doesn’t communicate well with everyone involved. One of Mr. Williams recommendations is a favorite of mine: Speak to an audience in their language. (If I want my dog Maia to do something, I better be talking duck jerky.) Be clear, concise, and correct. Leaders must be motivational and inspirational. They communicate optimism and hope.

3. People skills. Some people think leaders are in charge. In reality, leaders work for the teams they lead. Leaders must be visible and available. They listen, ask questions, and do what they must to empower people to deliver.

4. Character. Integrity and honesty are crucial. Leaders with character build up their emotional bank accounts (a Stephen Covey concept) with their people. When the going gets tough, teams are willing to work through the issues. Another aspect of character is humility. To me, this links to the idea that leaders work for their teams. Excellent leaders make sure their teams shine.

5. Competence. Although leaders are humble, they must be good at what they do. They build teams, solve problems, sell themselves, and sell their ideas. They are life-long teachers and– so they don’t run out of material– are also life-long learners. Mr. Williams talked about being a life-long reader. He talked about how much reading you can do simply by reading an hour a day.

6. Boldness. Lots of people make decisions. Leaders make the best decisions they can and don’t look back.

7. A serving heart. Leaders gave authority in order to serve. You’ve heard the saying “Power corrupts.” Excellent leaders have power, but don’t fall into using if for their personal gain. They use it to achieve others’ goals, to better the world around them.

Learning Lessons on Leadership

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The first thing I think of when I think about leadership: I was a bad employee. I wasn’t a bad employee because I did bad work. On the contrary, I did great work and customers loved me. But I always had problems with the management in the companies I worked for. I was told I had a bad attitude — and I did. (Since I’m a terrible follower, I had better learn to be a good leader.) Then, I read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and realized the source of my “problems.” Many (not all) of the managers and executives I knew didn’t think win-win. They focused on making sales and making money, not on making sure customers got what they needed. Covey talked about treating employees the way you want them to treat customers and I typically don’t see that happening in companies either.

A long story shortened, I have had my own business since 1997. When I quit, a good friend said “Well, now, your boss is an *$$hole, but at least you know what to do about it.” He was right. But I digress.

I used a quote on leadership from Dwight Eisenhower in my book, Successful Project Management:

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

How do you get people to do something you want because they want to? My two cents, give them something to believe in: a mission, if you will.

Not long before I quit to start my company, I was promoted to manage a customer support group. Making the company a success wasn’t exactly something I could believe in. But making our customers successful so they would remain our customers was. So, without really thinking about it, I worked on a win-win with customers and my team to deliver a win for the company.

I fought for training and raises for my people. My previously demoralized team became re-energized and customer support improved. As it turns out, the training also helped the members of my team keep their jobs or find new ones. And the raises set them up to obtain higher salaries at their new jobs. The company didn’t survive, but I couldn’t do anything to turn that around. Having something to believe in seems to work.

Jumping ahead to my writing career: It is a success, but my leadership style hasn’t been. My standards are very high. My clients love my work. But I have taken to warning potential co-workers about my great expectations. Pushing too hard reminds me of another great Eisenhower quote:

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

I still have something to believe in: providing engaging, clear guidance and instruction to my readers. So why have I failed to lead people who work with me on writing projects? My first thought is deadlines. Books, articles, and other writing projects are rife with tough deadlines. But all projects have deadlines. With my writing, I willingly flog myself to meet deadlines because I’m the one who accepts them. (See what my friend meant about my boss being an *$$hole?) I turn to other people for help only when I have deadlines I can’t possibly achieve by myself — when I’m stressed, when I’m at my least nurturing. It isn’t pretty.

I won’t change my high expectations. But instead of beating people over the head with them, I’ll set those expectations as a goal. I’ll use projects with less challenging deadlines as a training ground. That way, I have the time to train, guide, coach, and support to my teammates, just as the end result is a book or course that provides training, guidance, coaching, and support to my readers.