A few weeks ago, in the New York Times, BP took out an advert headlined “Gulf of Mexico – Oil Spill Response”. It read like a lawyer’s statement, desperately trying to avoid any semblance of blame. It provoked outrage, culminating in President Obama attacking the company for trying to finger point their way out of the crisis. This initial lack of taking any responsibility has lead to BP being threatened with criminal proceedings and their shares have taken a 25% hit in value.

A new ad appeared in the New York times last week under the headline “We will make this right”, including sentences such as “Stopping the leak will be a major step but only a start. We know our responsibility goes much further” They seem to have got it (or more cynically want to be seen to have got it!). Absolving yourself of responsibility in a crisis like this just doesn’t work.

Whilst coaching and training, I meet many people who initially won’t take responsibility to solve their problems. I think we all do it to some extent. Quite often people will introduce me as the “person who is going to change things round here”. I have to pick them up on this straight away. I tell them that I am not going to change anything. At first they look slightly startled at this. I explain that in any consultancy, coaching or training work – I can only facilitate a process where THEY make the changes.

Many people try and absolve responsibility by blaming others for their problems. A common target is the boss. Sometimes a coaching client will say to me. “If only my boss would do some coaching rather than me, then we could fix this.” Whereas it could be true that the boss is a difficult person to deal with that’s the reality we are stuck with. We can’t change the boss but what we can do is change how we deal with them. Having this mindset is far more productive.

One useful exercise is to write a problem down as succinctly as possible on an index card. Then on another card write clearly what the current situation is and then on a further one write what you would like the future situation to be. Having done this write all the obstacles, one per an index card, that are stopping you move from the current reality to the future. The last step is to group all these obstacle cards into three piles, problems that arise from your environment, problems caused by other people and then lastly problems ultimately caused by you. What often occurs is the realisation that many of the obstacles we face are ultimately caused by ourselves.

Taking responsibility is a good thing, but it must be down with a sense of realism of what is in your control. Stephen Covey in his excellent, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” talks about the importance of understanding what is and what is not in your control. For example you might worry about green issues, but you can’t control global CO2 emissions. However you could control your household waster and energy consumption. Take responsibility only for those areas that you can control or at least have a significant influence on.

As with all these things there is a balance to be had between taking responsibility for too much and not taking responsibility for anything. One thing Covey suggests is watching your language for a few days. Are you constantly blaming others, the environment, the government, etc for what happens in your life? Successful people realise that much of where we are in our work lives can be blamed on only one person – ourselves.

I thought this post by Bob Sutton was hilarious. Beautifully sums up the frustrations of the corporate org chart!
A Shitty View of the Pecking Order

I ran a training session on coaching last week. Some of the people were new to the ideas, and some not. Afterwards I had a very interesting discussion with them on how coaching might actually run in their workplace. They raised some interesting potential pitfalls that I’d like to share with you.

Some of the group doubted that they could use it in their environment, as it would need buy-in from senior management. If we were talking about implementing a coaching programme, with accredited coaches, regular one-to-one sessions for each individual and maybe linking in to appraisal and other development programmes, maybe I would agree. However coaching does not necessarily need to be such a big thing. If someone in your team comes to you with a problem and instead of jumping in with an answer you ask them some questions to get them thinking through a solution – that’s coaching.

I think that the coaching industry hasn’t helped this perception that coaching is a “big thing.” Nowadays there are lots of grand sounding coaching qualifications dealing with all sorts of areas like cognitive behavioural coaching and emotional intelligence. But any manager who can learn to adopt a more questioning approach with their team and expect their people to take responsibility for their challenges, can coach. And the important thing is you don’t need to have special one-to-one coaching session to do this – it can be done on an ad-hoc basis.

Another objection to the approach was that sometimes it is easier to just tell someone how to do something. This is especially true when time is pressurised. I totally agree. I see coaching as one tool in the manager’s toolbox. There are many other just as worthwhile approaches. It’s good to mix them up depending on the situation. I think you would be a poor manager if you were always using the coaching tool just as it wouldn’t be right to always dictate to your staff how everything should be done.

One attendee had tried coaching on a one-to-one basis with one of their team who perceived it as a therapy session and started going into detail about their bi-polar disorder. It is very important to be clear to the coachee that the scope of the session does not include personality, emotional and mental problems. The session must focus on their workplace behaviour and performance. Of course, as my attendee pointed out, there can be a grey area, where the two can mix. For example, a manager who suffers from nerves when he presents. The coach has got to use common sense. If at any time it is clear the conversation is leading into the area of psychotherapy, the coach must stop this and insist the coachee seeks professional help.

One individual worried that if he coached rather than offered answers, people might perceive him as an idiot who was trying to cover up a lack of knowledge. This is a common worry, particularly when a manager’s identity is strongly based on expertise. I worried about this with one of my first coaching assignments. After a month of sitting in meetings spending most of my time just really listening to what my clients were saying I wondered whether I was adding any value. But in a business world full of people talking, the listener can be like gold dust. Also there’s no shame in spending time listening, to do it well is actually really hard, it’s far from a passive activity.

Are You Waiting for the Weekend?

I saw this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson and wanted to share it with you all. Firstly Ken is a brilliantly funny, thought-provoking and erudite speaker – so his talks are always worth watching. But in this speech he talks about something close to my heart – finding something you love to do. I spent many years in jobs I either hated or was incredibly bored with during my twenties and early thirties.  It was when I was 32 that I realised this couldn’t go on and managed to turn my life around and start Orgtopia. Now I love what I do – and I think that comes down to the fact that I feel real purpose in my work which is always about helping others to reach their potential – something which has far more meaning to me than what I did before and thus is far more motivating.

In the talk Ken discusses how we need to change our mind sets in how we live our lifes and educate our population so that more of us can find meaning and motivation in our work.

I was running a course last week on management skills. One of the topics we discuss is how to lead. We came up with many of the usual ideas – developing emotional intelligence, creating inspiring and relevant vision statements for your team and understanding motivating factors for your group. All good ideas. However I really liked a recent article in the Conversation Blog at Harvard Business Review called How to Lead without Saying a Word It goes some way in explaning the intangible presence all good leaders have.

Developing Strong Relationships

Improving productivity by building strong teams is a management approach as old as the pyramids – quite literally. Archaeologists studying the Great Pyramid at Giza have found inscriptions of worker’s team names such as the “Drunkards of Menkaure” and the “Friends of Khufu”. There is evidence of competitions between the different groups to see how fast they could put the massive stones in place. The ancient Egyptians must have recognised the importance of creating strong team identities to help them manage and boost productivity. This principle really hasn’t changed much in the intervening 4,000 years!

How do you create strong teams? One useful approach is to split up team building activities into three levels:

• Level One – Creating strong relationships. This is the foundation activity for all teams, without this the other levels are difficult to achieve
• Level Two – Creating excellent communication. Facilitating timely transfer of information between the group
• Level Three – Delivering tasks efficiently and cohesively. To do this well you need the other two levels to be in place.

In this article I will focus on the foundation level, developing relationships within the team. In later articles I’ll look at the communication and task levels.

In my experience great work relationships do not necessarily lead to great social relationships. I would say that although it is hard to work with someone who you really don’t like, you definitely don’t have to be their best buddy. Good working relationships are built on respect and trust for each other. Just like any friendship this takes time and continuing effort to achieve.

One of the challenges of working in a modern office is that we all tend to sit and stare at a computer screen for much of the day. We can quite easily sit next to people that we hardly talk to. To build relationships amongst the team we need to get them to take time away from their computers and interact face-to-face. It’s hard to build relationships through emails. How do you do this? Well of course there’s a variety of methods from simple things like regular team meetings or going out to lunch together, to the, sometimes dreaded, “team building away day!”

Regular meetings work at all three levels of the model, helping us to get to know each other, improving communication and co-ordinating tasks. Too many long meetings can be detrimental, keep them short and focused. Maybe you could borrow some ideas from Agile development approaches like SCRUM and have stand-up meetings to keep them quick.

Management approaches they get the group working face-to-face rather than on a PC are great at building relationships. I always find the post-it pad a great tool for this. For example rather than writing a plan using MS Project and emailing it around for comment, I quite often run planning workshops where everyone writes tasks on a post-it and we all start creating the plan on the meeting room wall. Little things like this change the dynamic of the group, build relationships and facilitate easy communication.

Going on team building events I think can be successful. However if the managers pay no heed to the principles of trusting and respecting their teams in normal work hours, throwing people on an away day won’t solve the team dynamics. I remember working with a very difficult managing director of a small web development company. She treated her staff with little respect, changing their work around all the time, ringing them up at weekends and making derogatory comments about them behind their backs. She wondered why her team was so badly de-motivated. To fix the problem she sent them on a corporate day where everyone learnt to play a set of drums together – a rather cheesy and Office-esque metaphor of getting people to work together by learning to play together! Of course it didn’t really help the situation when everyone got back to the office.

It’s important to put time aside each week to get to know your team. I remember one fabulous operations manager I worked for who, each week, would take one of us out for lunch. It was a great way for him to get to know his team and for us to understand him better. Because it’s difficult to see the direct tangible benefits from these sorts of activities, they are so easy to stop doing. However good team building requires long-term commitment.

In the early days of Hewlett Packard, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett devised a way of managing their staff which they simply called “management by walking around” They spent some time each week getting away from their computer screen and walking around the office to chat to their team.  I’ve found this very effective. It’s given me a chance to get to know my team members in a way that is not possible in meetings and via email.

Any other ideas for relationship building – please comment below.

Moving beyond training – the principles of coaching

In this series of posts I have been looking at how to develop project management potential in employees. In the previous articles we have seen that project management requires a broad range of competencies and that the current approach to developing them – sending people on accreditation courses such as Prince2 and PMI – is a poor way to improve workplace performance.

In this article I want to focus on coaching as a development method. I think the best way to develop project potential is to send employees on accreditation courses and then back this up with long-term coaching, which supports the individuals in applying the theory to their work place.

What exactly is coaching and how does it differ from training? In everyday speech the two words are used pretty much interchangeably. But in management development they have come to mean something different. I think “training” is more about telling people how to do something, maybe in a classroom, whereas “coaching” is facilitating a process which supports the individual to use their own resources to tackle a challenge.

All coaching adheres to three principles:

1. The person being coached (the coachee) keeps responsibility for their development.
2. Behavioural change comes from a greater self-awareness.
3. Coaching supports the coachee through a period of discomfort whilst they change their behaviour.

Principle 1 – The coachee keeping responsibility for their development.
Imagine you had a problem with your eyesight. You went to the optician, but instead of testing your eyes and finding lenses for them, he took his own glasses off his head and offered them to you! It’s highly unlikely that you would be able to see anything through them. When someone comes to us for help, we can all be guilty of offering up solutions that have worked for us. Also when we go for help to our peers and bosses, we often expect answers. Coaching tries to avoid this. The coach asks questions and carries out exercises with the coachee, to get them to explore their current situation and work out for themselves what is best.

Principle 2 – Behavioural change comes from a greater self-awareness.
I run an exercise in my coaching workshops where I get the attendees to close their eyes and focus on how tense their brow, their jaw and their facial muscles are. During the exercise most of the attendees naturally start to relax. It shows that we are not aware of many of our behaviours. The good news is that noticing these behaviours is all that is required to change them.

Coaching conversations brings this self-awareness to the coachee. By asking the right questions the coach is able to focus the coachee’s mind on what is happening in their work and give the coachee time to evaluate and become aware of their behaviours. This in itself is a powerful way for a coachee to be able to spot new and better ways of working.

Principle 3 – Coaching supports the coachee through a period of discomfort whilst they change their behaviour.
Getting better at doing something is uncomfortable. Why? Because improving implies we are doing something different that we are used to. Any different way of acting, for a while at least, is uncomfortable. A good example is when we are trying to lose some weight. We’ve been used to being lazy in our eating and exercise habits. When we start a new healthy regime, it feels awkward. Going to the gym is not what we want to do after a hard days work. Eating fruit and vegetables makes us crave for some chocolate. But if we stick with it, after a while our new way of living becomes the norm.

With principle number 3, the coach’s role is to support and encourage the coachee through this period of discomfort, until the new way of behaving becomes comfortable.

In this next article I will look at how to structure a coaching session using the GROW technique.

Back in November I looked at some ideas from Agile approaches to project, in particular Extreme Programming (XP). I said then that this approach for managing software projects had many useful ideas for all types of projects. In this article I’ll look at what Kent Beck, the author of Extreme Programming Explained considers to be essential values for everyone to share on a successful project.

Beck distinguishes between practices, telling people how things could be done and values that justify why things should be done that way. For example a stand up meeting is a practice that demonstrates the value of quick, simple communication. Not having an understanding and commitment to these values risks applying the practices incorrectly. Either people follow practices when they are not justified, for example writing out long reports when verbal communication would have sufficed, or miss them out completely, such as diving into projects without proper planning. The first leads to bureaucracy the second to chaos!

Values as Beck says, “bring purpose to practices”. However it is difficult to perceive if someone has a value. The only way of doing so is to observe their behaviour to see if they are following any practices. So practices bring accountability to values.

Beck sets out five core values that every project team should have in order to deliver a successful project.

Simplicity

The simple approach, design or product is always the best. I remember working for a broadcast company in London several years ago. It was common practice there for all project manager to maintain a project plan down to an hourly level. The plans became so complex, that they took ages to maintain each week. The project managers didn’t have time to do much else! The level of detail wasn’t necessary to track and control the project.

Communication

For a project to be successful everyone must see the value of clear and concise communication. I worked with a company recently who insisted they use a large project RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) spreadsheet to show who was responsible for what. It was difficult to read and as a result people were confused as to their role, causing all sorts of problems. We circulated a one slide Powerpoint organisation chart as an addendum to their spreadsheet. It quickly communicated everyone’s roles. It certainly wasn’t perfect but it greatly improved everyone’s understanding of how to work within the project team.

Feedback

Working without regular feedback is asking for trouble. After a few months of hard work you could discover that you misunderstood what was required originally, or that things have changed so much leaving your solution redundant.

I did some consultancy work a few years ago for a company’s IT department who were developing a support system for their business. They were about five months in to the build when we met them. They hadn’t talked to their internal clients since putting together the requirements document and weren’t planning to do so again until it was time to test the finished system. We encouraged them to go and get feedback straight away. They discovered that their contacts had left the department and the replacements had no idea IT were building something for them! The result was a disastrous system that met no-ones needs.

Courage

Tackling problems early, telling people what they might not want to hear, standing up for the team, all these things take courage. Avoiding problems till later on nearly always makes them worse. The best example I can think of is unrealistic deadlines. It’s always better to discuss these early on with the client even if the conversation is difficult. Then you can start negotiating what can be delivered and what can’t, rather than leaving it as a nasty surprise at the end when the project overruns.

Respect

Respecting the project and the people within it enables the team to work together effectively. Quite early on in a project it usually becomes obvious who is for and against the change the project will bring. If there are key personnel with no respect for what is to be done, it becomes difficult to move the project forward.

We worked on the build of a big web project for a UK government department. At first the head of IT had little time for what we were trying to achieve. His new chef executive had forced the project on him, and he had seen several similar projects fail. As time progressed we worked hard to develop a relationship with him. This along with some early successes helped to win him over and he eventually became very useful in helping us deal with some difficult technical problems. Respect sometimes has to be earned.

What other values do you consider important? Let us know by commenting below.

Putting Together a Critical Chain Project Plan

In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the some of the reasons why projects fail to deliver on time. In this article we’ll look at how to use the Critical Chain approach to address these problems.

Most of us, as we’ve seen, will add a safety margin to duration estimates. Then, because of things like Student Syndrome and Parkinson’s Law, we’ll use up this margin when we do the work. The result: the project delivers later than maybe it could have done. Critical Chain attempts to identify these safety margins and strip them out. In this way people will be focused on delivering to a more aggressive target. This minimises the effect of many of the problems we met in Part 1:

• Parkinson’s Law – the work now expands to fill a shorter timescale so reducing the effect on our project.
• Student Syndrome. Even if people leave their work till the last minute, they’ll be starting earlier than before.
• People won’t worry about setting unrealistic managerial expectations of early delivery – as everyone is working to the aggressive timescales
• Other parts of the project that are dependent on you will need your work earlier, adding more pressure to work quicker.

The practicalities of stripping out these margins are not easy. How do you identify how much of a margin each person adds? You could reduce all the estimates by a rough rule of thumb say 30%. There are two problems with this; everyone may now simply adapt their behaviour and pad out their figures by a further 30% and each person’s method of calculating their safety margin will be different.

Another approach would be to ask everyone for two figures, one that they are almost 100% likely to achieve and another that is aggressive but achievable. Probably the 100% likely figure will be higher than a padded normal estimate and the aggressive one will be lower. This will only work if people are open and honest. The only way you can achieve this is to stress there will be no detrimental consequences of not hitting the aggressive figures, although everyone must commit to try as hard as possible to achieving them.

Once we’ve identified the aggressive and 100% likely estimates we can start to create our critical chain plan. We assume that 50% of people will be able to hit their aggressive figure and the other 50% will need their margin. We create our plan using the aggressive estimates and then at the end we add another task called the project buffer. The project buffer is the summation of all the safety margins – but as we’re assuming not everyone will need them we’ll multiply this by 50%.

This method is set out in the slide show below. Probably the critical chain plan will give an earlier estimated delivery date than a normally constructed plan. And because we are now focusing people’s attention to finishing to more aggressive targets – in theory we should deliver earlier as well!

The plan we’ve constructed in this article is quite simple. In part 3 we’ll look at what happens when we make things more complicated by having critical and non-critical tasks in our plan.

I always thought I was a good time manager, but recently I’ve been wondering whether I’m deluding myself. If I was so efficient, how come I haven’t written that book I’ve been talking about for ages or contacted all those potential clients I discovered last year? Maybe I’m not the time management guru I think I am?

So what’s gone wrong? Like most of us I run my business life with a multitude of categorised action lists. There’s one category for each of my clients, one for marketing, one for admin, etc. They all get reviewed each Friday when I plan out my week ahead. It’s not rocket science, but it pretty much ensures that everything urgent gets done. What it doesn’t attend to is lots of stuff that would really help the growth of my business, like networking and book writing. This got me thinking and reminded me of a useful idea from Stephen Covey’s excellent Seven Habits of Successful People.

Covey categorised all tasks into four areas:

1. Important and urgent tasks. For example a pressing deadline on an important project or calling back a critical client. Some time will need to be allocated to this category, but people who spend most or all of their week doing these sorts of things are letting the week run them rather than the other way round
2. Not Important but urgent. These are activities such as responding to phone calls, flicking up your email too frequently, attending unnecessary meetings and reacting to artificial deadlines. Once recognised they should be cut back as much as possible. Some people do lots of these to look more important than they really are!
3. Not important and not urgent. Unnecessary tasks we do to kill time or put off important things we don’t want to do. Surfing the web, shuffling paper round our desk, going into too much detail for a report or fiddling around with spreadsheets for no recognisable benefit.
4. Important but not urgent. These are activities such as training, personal improvement or for me writing books! Life is going to go on in the short term if they’re not done, but in the longer term you’ll suffer. They usually result in some sort of long-term growth. They are not reactionary tasks like the urgent ones but require foresight to understand why you need to do them and discipline in ensuring they are scheduled amongst the other more urgent tasks.

My personal report card for these four areas are:

• Important and urgent. My categorised lists ensure these all get done in a timely way
• Not important but urgent. Once again I’m good at these. I try not to attend meetings without really needing to, check emails only three times each day, etc.
• Not important and not urgent. Thought I was quite good here. I don’t consciously waste time dawdling, surfing or chatting. However I wonder if my perfectionist, slight obsessive traits mean I add too much detail to reports, too many pretty picture for Powerpoints, which don’t really add additional benefit and put off more important tasks.
• Important but not urgent. Book not written, potential clients not contacted; enough said!

So my own personal action plan is going to be to block out time each week to ensure that things like my book and client networking is done and I’m going to cut back on unnecessary detail.

What would your personal report card look like for the four Covey Categories? What would you do to fix any problems you find? Interested to hear any comments as usual.

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