Best Practices (part 7): Self-Management
And you thought we had finished at Part 6! The best things often come in ’sevens’ (Seven Wonders of the World, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “The Magical Number Seven”), so I could not resist adding this “Step 7″:
Project Managers are also Project Stakeholders, and therefore have a responsibility to improve themselves.
You must be self-directed under changing and unclear conditions. You cannot hope to stabilise the world around you, but you must stabilise yourself. If you are constantly overstressed, anxious, lacking in self-discipline and without vision then you are out of control and will have little credibility with those around you. You might be able to get people to comply by virtue of your position, but will not be able to motivate under stressful conditions, like the project progress illustrated below:
For a variety of reasons, you will probably not receive effective feedback from team members, customers or functional managers. So give feedback to yourself, like this:
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Find out your core strengths and weaknesses.
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Be introspective (”look within yourself”), and determine your ‘Personal Value Profile’ (which values are most important to you?).
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Shift your focus from tracking individual tasks to completing deliverables.
After a meeting, take some time to reflect on what happened. Did you create a positive environment or was everyone arguing? Did the team members leave the meeting feeling positive and encouraged? What could you have done differently? Do you have some personal biases that may be influencing your behaviour?
A great way to improve yourself is to find a Mentor. This is someone who provides their expertise in order to help you advance your career, enhance your education, and build your network. Many of the world’s most successful people have benefited from having a mentor.
- Take training and coaching
- Join a relevant Professional Association
- Attend Seminars and Personal Development Events
- Read books on self-motivation and success strategies, and TAKE ACTION
PM being self-directed is really insightful. In my environment, which is unstrutured ( because people are just too busy to do some planning), PM can be easily engrossed in that environment, and lose some key project management principles, such as team building activities, planning. If you follow what is being practiced, you won’t show your value as a Project Manager, a project management professional. So, we should stick to our disciplines, showing people around that you act differently, yet professionally, thus you can insert influence and get your credibility.
01 Aug 2008 at 10:13 am