Inspired Project Teams

Announcement: Below are links to the first four of 12 Inspired Project Teams posts to be made available in MP3 (audio podcast) versions.

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Audio: Celebrate the Chaos Within [Time - 5:41, File Size - 5.3 MB]

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” – Elbert Hubbard

Some of the most creative people I have worked with were filled with chaos! Yet the contributions they made to our projects were frequently surprising… unique… even beautiful. Their internal chaos really could give birth to some amazing “dancing stars!” Among my most difficult challenges as a project manager is to figure out how to handle this chaos without destroying their creativity.  Early in my career, when I was too scared of losing my job to take many risks, I worked pretty hard to rein these “crazy” folks in. As the years rolled by, however, I began to look back longingly on some of the missed opportunities that these chaotic souls had pointed  out to us. And I regretted not giving these people more room to move… I regretted not pushing their “wild ideas” to the limits.

So today, with the confidence of success calming my fears, I’ve developed this personal rule of thumb:  Give these outside-the-box thinkers a little more room to move than I’m comfortable with… let them push us all (the whole team, if need be) beyond our comfort zones once in a while. And watch what happens!

Greer’s Challenges…
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Audio:  Let Go of Perfectionism [Time - 7:49, File Size - 7.3 MB]

“The idea of perfect closes your mind to new standards.. When you drive hard toward one ideal, you miss opportunities and paths, not to mention hurting your confidence. Believe in your potential and then go out and explore it; don’t limit it.”  John Eliot, Ph.D. in Reverse Psychology for Success

“If you give me 90% of what you call ‘perfect,’ we can make a profit, you can have a life, and you won’t burn out.  But if you keep trying to close that gap and get it ‘100% perfect,’ you’re gonna drive yourself crazy and screw things up for both of us!”  -  Anonymous Senior Executive, my first consulting firm

Years ago, when I was just starting my career with a top-notch training consulting firm as a writer and developer of training materials, I was fairly intimidated by my job and by the high-quality work of my co-workers. In response, I tried and tried to get things “perfect,” putting in lots of extra hours, frustrating my family by my late evenings, and developing so much energy around my work products that I frequently engaged in long arguments defending my stuff and why it was “perfect.”

The introductory quote above is from the one of the most senior executives of that company. He delivered it one evening around 7 o’clock when he found me, once again, at my desk working late. He already knew what I came to learn years later, when I was managing my own teams of training developers and media producers:  “Perfection” is a fiction… even an indulgence. There are many, many ways to get results in a project. And, rather than achieving a “perfect” result that reflects the vision of one individual, the best project teams generate results that come from collaborative, synthesized, and shared visions – visions that meet the needs of many stakeholders and of  which those many stakeholders can be proud!

Greer’s Challenges…

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Audio:  Embrace the Work Itself [Time - 4:08, File Size - 3.8 MB]

Projects are the most goal-oriented of human endeavors. And if you spend most of your life working on projects, as so many of our project team members do, you can develop an uneasy, ever-present sense that you are never really finished. There’s a continual nagging feeling that you’ve not completed your work because the next goal is endlessly popping up in front of you, demanding your attention.

So where’s the joy in the work itself? What about the intrinsic value of our chosen profession? The beauty and fascination of the field itself? What about the practice of our profession?

Consider this from George Leonard’s Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (my  bold added for emphasis):

“Goals and contingencies… are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring…”

Greer’s Challenges…

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Audio: Train Yourself to be Happier [Time - 8:40, File Size - 8.1 MB]

” …scientists now believe happiness is a skill that can be learned, just like skiing or playing a musical instrument: With daily practice, you get ever better.” (from Willing Your Way to Happiness,” DenverPost online)

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“For much of its history, psychology has seemed obsessed with human failings and pathology. The very idea of psychotherapy, first formalized by Freud, rests on a view of human beings as troubled creatures in need of repair….A watershed moment arrived in 1998, when University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, urged psychology to “turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage…That speech launched today’s positive psychology movement…The University of Pennsylvania offers a master’s degree in the field… focusing on people’s strengths and virtues as a point of departure…Their lab experiments … define not the conditions that induce depraved behavior, but those that foster generosity, courage, creativity, and laughter.”   – from The Science of Happiness: Psychology Explores Humans at Their Best by Craig Lambert in a Harvard Magazine online article:  http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/01/the-science-of-happiness.html

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“I became interested in the Science of Happiness as a result of banging together three ideas that, for me at least, were fairly compelling news. These ideas are:
1) Researchers using MRI have been able to isolate the portions of the brain that are related to happiness and watch them in operation, in real time.
2) We’ve learned that the brain is plastic. Throughout our lives, we can make actual physical changes to the brain’s structure depending on how we use it or what we ask our brains to focus on.
3) The new Science of Happiness (based on Positive Psychology) is developing some science-based tools and methods to enable us to train our brains to help create more happiness in our lives.”

- Michael Greer in “The Science of Happiness: Part 1, A Little Theory” from The Best Free Training blog.

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OK. So we know that you can train yourself to be happier. But what are some practical ways you can apply this stuff to a project team?

Greer’s Challenges…

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Audio:  Listen, Understand, Collaborate [Time-6:19, File Size-5.9 MB]

“Habit 5:  Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.” – Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”- Jimi Hendrix

Professionals… especially the energetic, creative people you want on your project teams… can sometimes develop a mental image of themselves as essentially knights in shining armor, riding in to save the day! Unfortunately, this can sometimes mean that they jump to conclusions too quickly, seeking little input and assuming that the problem to be solved is just like one they solved the week before.

On the other hand, the best professionals employ a more consultative mental model: They see themselves as creative solvers of unique, challenging problems. They listen, question, and try to understand the customer’s needs. They test their understanding by rephrasing the customer’s statements. Then they formulate one or more potential solutions and present them carefully. In short, they “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

Greer’s Challenges…

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Audio:  Get Excited… and Let It Show! [Time - 4:05, File Size - 3.8 MB]

“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson – The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

So, is your team enthusiastic about your project? Are they energized and eager to come to work each day?

Greer’s Challenges…

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