You Can't Manage a Secret

When Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford, they were losing 16 billion dollars a year. That's 50 million a day, 365 days a year!

Each week, Alan held a business plan review meeting, as he had always done as CEO at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Each week, the stoplight reports were all green, indicating that there were no problems. Finally, in the third meeting, Alan said, "Folks, are you sure there are no problems? After all, we're losing 16 billion dollars."

The following week, one report showed a red light. When the owner got up to speak, the atmosphere was tense. Everyone was certain he was in deep trouble.

He explained that they were having a problem with the tailgate on a truck. When he finished, Alan applauded and asked, "How can we help you?" At that point one of the engineering managers spoke up. "I think we can help you with that. We've seen that problem before."

The next week, there was a rainbow of progress reports, and from then on, they began methodically working to solve all of them.

You can't solve problems in a climate of fear of recrimination. If you shoot the messenger, the person who tells you about a problem, no one else will bring problems to your attention.

Within two years, Mulally had Ford profitable again, one of the greatest turnarounds in history, and done without accepting any bailout money from the government.

You just can't manage a secret!

Overlooked Uses of Vision and Mission

Everyone knows that you need a shared vision and mission for a project. Otherwise, every team member will take you where he or she thinks you are going, rather than where the project should actually be going. But the vision and mission for a project should go well beyond this. In fact, they should inform every decision and action taken on a daily basis. And what I am about to say goes beyond the project manager. It will apply to every single member of the project team and every single stakeholder.

Every decision and every action taken in a project should be done after asking, “How do I make this decision or take this action step in such a way that it contributes to the attainment of our project vision and mission?” An alternative way to consider this is to ask if a decision choice or action will move you closer to the desired outcome, and if not, it should be rejected.

In the same way, team members should be selected by asking if they are the best candidate to ensure that the project is successful (meaning it achieved it’s vision and mission). And once selected, their performance should be evaluated based on how well it contributed to attainment of the project objective. This assumes, of course that you choose your own team members, but even if you don’t, whoever does choose them should be asking these same questions.

Remember, the vision for a project defines the final outcome you are trying to accomplish, and the mission is always to achieve the vision, so we really only need to ask if we are moving closer to mission attainment, or if we may be taking a wrong step.

As an aside, one reason priorities in an organization change with every change in wind direction is that the executives are not focused on a single vision for the organization. Either that, or they are failing to prioritize their goals, and the proof of this is when you ask for priorities and get the response, “They all have to be done.” That may be true, but without having unlimited resources, they cannot all be done at once. As someone has very correctly said, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. Study after study has found that one of the primary reasons for failure is lack of focus. Don’t let that be true in your projects.

Rethinking People Skills and Effectiveness

For a long time I have said that the most important asset for a project manager to have is good people skills. I still believe this is true. However, I recently realized that Hitler had people skills, and so do leaders of street gangs. In fact, leadership is amoral. There are leaders of every kind, in every walk of life. And most have good people skills.

However, I believe that project managers who use their good people skills to manipulate their followers, taking advantage of them, will eventually find that they are no longer able to do so, as being manipulated causes people to begin avoiding such individuals. So there is a self-protective component built into most people.

What I believe must be added to people skills is a genuine caring about the welfare of others. Most leadership experts talk about this as being servant leadership. Such leaders have the interests, concerns, and well-being of followers in mind and realize that their obligation is to influence followers to meet the needs of the organization (or project) while simultaneously ensuring that the needs of followers are also met.

I know that there are some who don't like the term servant leadership. It almost sounds like a contradiction in terms, and at the very least it sounds demeaning to the leader. So I prefer to say that such leaders enable their followers to perform at the highest possible level.

This is in contrast to those managers who try to restrict the behavior of employees out of fear that they may do something wrong. Such managers also cannot truly be called leaders. 

One point I believe is worth making: you can't fake caring about people. They see right through you. So if you find that you don't have strong feelings of concern for others, my suggestion is that you find another profession than that of leading project teams. You won't be a highly effective project manager for very long!

Learn from Negative Experiences

Nobody likes adversity, failure, or problems that disrupt one's life. Nevertheless, it is also true that nobody escapes them entirely. We all lose family members and friends along the way. We have illnesses. We lose jobs. But the thing that matters, and the thing that separates the winners in life from the losers, is how we respond to the challenges.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Psychiatrist who was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis during World War II. He arrived knowing the likelihood that he would never leave alive, but he set for himself three goals: 1) to find work in the camp, 2) to survive, and 3) to see what he could learn. He knew that if he worked, did something useful, it would reduce the probability that he would be executed, so that it actually supported the second objective. And the third objective was truly that of a winner.

And learn he did. He learned that the one factor separating those who survived and those who did not was that the survivors had some future that they looked forward to with eagerness and this gave them the drive to do positive things that the prison camp officials saw as useful.

Frankl wrote the now famous book, "Man's Search for Meaning," in which he said that human beings need meaning in their lives in order to thrive. Given meaning in life, they can withstand almost anything that life throws at them.

So there are two questions each of us should ask ourselves:

1. Do you have meaning in your life, and if not, how can you find it?
2. How do you react to the trials of life? By complaining, or by asking what you can learn and how you can best respond to the trial?

When you apply this as a project manager, you may want to ask how meaningful is the work you are doing in the project. Will the product or service provided enrich the lives of others? Does it make a contribution to your organization?

And how do you handle problems in projects? Do you respond pro-actively and positively? If not, can you change this by seeing each issue as an opportunity to learn?

I met a project manager once who stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and lost both legs. He was unusually unruffled by project issues, and when I mentioned this, he replied, "I figured after surviving that land mine nothing much worse could happen to me, so I don't let the small things bother me."

Don't sweat the small stuff! Great advice.

Managing the Status Review Meeting

Every project should have a status review on a recurring basis. Generally I recommend that these be held weekly, though bi-weekly may be okay in some cases. However, like most meetings, if these are not run properly, they will not have the intended result.

What is the intended result? To know the actual status of every facet of the project so that steps can be taken to handle problems before they become serious.

Here are the ground rules:

1. Use stoplight reports that are based on earned-value analysis (EVA) if possible. A stoplight report uses red, yellow, and green to signify that a task is in trouble, is making a transition in either direction, and is in good shape. By comparing the previous week to the current week, you can see in which direction a transition is heading. Common sense dictates that seldom does a project have all green lights. The fact of statistical variation says that there should be a few problems with schedule, if nothing else.
2. Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford and Boeing Commercial Airplanes, says, “You can’t manage a secret,” so everyone must be encouraged to reveal problems as early as possible. They won’t do this if they get beaten up for doing so. For that reason, they should be thanked and helped. But don’t try to resolve any problems in the status review meeting. Problem resolution is done in separate meetings, so that you don’t waste the time of people who have no stake in the problem.
3. On large projects or programs, every large segment of the project should be reviewed in greater detail by the manager of that segment.

One of the outcomes of this approach is that the culture of the organization can be changed from a defensive, punitive one to more open and collaborative. I recommend that you read American Icon, about how Mulally saved Ford, and Working Together, on how he managed Boeing before he moved to Ford. Mulally is probably the most Highly Effective Project Manager in the world, and you can learn a lot by studying his approaches.

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