Mentoring experiences

An important part of my role is working with people in day-to-day interactions, but also to help them grow on the long term.

It's always motivating to see how people can change and evolve in the right direction when the right feedback is provided - when the dialogue is open, when the sender is open and honest in the comments and observations, and when the receiver is also interested in what others have to say.

It's not that when somebody tells you did something wrong, that you have to immediately agree with them - I'm the first to be against. Still, when two or more people tell you that you are drunk, you definitely go to bed.

I've had one guy who was always gloomy, never satisfied by anything, and always expressing his concerns and reasons to be upset with loud voice. After two years of working together, although he did not become the most positive person, he learned how to listen to others, how to contain his anger, and how to express his ideas in a way that favors listening and understanding. Moreover, he managed to be seen as a valuable contributor to the team he was part of, and - although keeping his "grumpy" title - to be listened to.

Now I'm on for a new challenge: a really strong technical person, but with whom people don't like to talk, and whose advices are not sought after - because he is too hursh, too direct, sometimes even arrogant and mean to the poor guy that doesn't know a thing.

Did you have this kind of people in your team? How did you manage them? What worked best?

Key to success: preparation

I've watched today "The Mechanic" with Jason Statham in the main role, as a paid killer. As always, ingenious ways of making the most well guarded people lose their defence, and get them killed, and a lot of action and muscles.

One quote though raised my attention and was a guiding line throughout the whole action: "amat victoria curam", or "victory goes to those who prepare", or... in order to succeed, you must first prepare. It is not a new discovery, just a restatement of something that we've known since ever, and that we always forget about in the rush of our lives. So I am not going to teach you how to leave your life...

When we try to apply this principle to project management, it becomes obvious that this is what we have to do, and this is what the theory states so boldly. When preparing for the PMP certification, for example, the topic where you spend most of your time is on planning: you have to plan everything: your resources, your communication, your financial, your procurement, the quality, the acceptance, and of course the risk.

It is important to leave nothing to chance, and try to foresee almost everything about your project. You also need to find the right balance between planning and execution, of course - if you spend most of your time in planning, and thinking about what might go wrong, it's not good - but rushing into execution is as dangerous.

But... what is the right amount of time to spend in each phase of the project? There are many answers to this question, and - depending of the project type, domain, business needs, clarity of objectives, existing expertise - you might spend anything between 10% to 30% in drafting your plan.

What I usually do is plan the major milestones of the project, and go down into the details of the first phase, and maybe the second one as well, and the rest stays a little bit in the fog. As the project progresses, you will uncover more details, you will better understand the project environment, your stakeholders, the expectations, and you will be able to detail each phase.

During the project plan development (and as the project progresses), it is important to review your assumptions, and make sure that they still hold true - or re-assess them. You should avoid being too over-confident about your plan, as circumstances can become deceiving. Use the incremental development method, in a rolling wave style, and your project will be a successful one.

Coming back to the movie, you might believe that finally the son of McKenna has accepted that Arthur has killed his father and he's fine with that - but the end proves it completely wrong. No, I won't spoil the ending, I let you watch it first.

Oh, one last point: you should not confuse planning with scheduling: you should start the scheduling only when you are done with the planning, and you know WHAT you want to schedule. You need to decide WHAT your project is about and HOW you want it done, before scheduling all steps.

What are are success factors, from your point of view?

Motivation Reward Compensation

We talk a lot about what are the best ways to keep our employees motivated, and which would be the most appropriate way of rearding the good and top performers, in a manner that continues to be attractive to them year over year.

In order to better understand the motivators behind each of my team members, I've started with an open discussion about what motivates them. One or two told me that indeed salary is a motivator, and as we digged further more we have uncovered that money was actually only the means to attain some of their objectives.

Returning to my initial question, we have uncovered quite a few interesting motivation drivers for each of them, quite unique from one individual to the other, and not so much related to money as you might think.

Here is what made it to the list from some of them:
- travel opportunities (for job purposes)
- access to knowledge (technical trainings or materials, time to do self-study)
- formal recognition of their performance (email to officials, some internal prizes, just a pat on the back)
- team members (the atmosphere at work, collaboration) and the ability to choose them
- pleasant environment (although ranked quite low overall by all employees)
- career development opportunities and options
- fairness in conversations
- constant feedback
- work-life balance
and the list continues.

I was quite amazed to see what was actually important to each of them - as this has also helped me in re-directing my efforts into creative ways of recognizing their achievements in a way that was actually meaningful to them.

There is also a downside to this approach, if you as manager fail to take into account their motivator factors, and do the same things after having discussed with the employee about it. One approach that I've used was to let them know immediately if something was not really possible, now or never, so that we were aligned.

Another thing to take into account: the motivators may change over time, and you should re-check their relevancy after some while. Many factors can be "blamed" for this, to count only progress of the individual (maturity, personal life changes), changing needs, other opportunities etc.

What's your approach to motivation and reward? What worked, what didn't?

Is this IMPORTANT? or just URGENT?

Our life is inevitably assaulted with urgent, important or both urgent & important requests. Nothing is no longer unimportant, almost nothing can wait until tomorrow, everything has to be done TODAY, NOW, IN THIS SECOND. Like reading this post :-) You just couldn't stop clicking on it.

And you did well, as I'm going to share you the secret of sorting out between all these concurrent requests, separating Urgent from Important, putting them in the right order and making everybody happy. And if there are still some guys mumbling, it's just because they did not know the most important thing: what's important FOR YOU.

Yes, it all starts with YOUR priorities, with what you want to achieve, and not with what others want from you. But how do you distinguish between the two?

You might want to classify as IMPORTANT what helps you reach your own goals, and as URGENT what helps others.
IMPORTANT is also something that has to be done at some point in time - maybe not right now, but you would better give it enough time or otherwise will fall under IMPORTANT & URGENT.

It happened to me just this week: I had to do an analysis to evaluate some options, and - while I knew it was IMPORTANT - I kept postponing it (due to more urgent requests), until my boss said it's becoming URGENT... not great, as I had to work longer hours just to finish it.

Also, IMPORTANT does not mean it will take a lot of time - but it might require some focus, and some careful thinking about the best approach to do it.

On the other hand, URGENT is something important for the others - just like the above IMPORTANT in my example was suddendly urgent for him.

URGENT is also when it has to be now or never, like a fire burning, or child crying, or a birthday you forgot about :-) and you need a present.

My suggestion for you on how to manage this delicate balance between URGENT and IMPORTANT:
- make sure you keep an eye on your priorities
- maybe the urgent can be: delayed, delegated, changed
- understand the why's behind every request - you might be solving the wrong problem
- put some deadlines (or intermediate milestones) on your IMPORTANT. When deadline is there, the IMPORTANT becomes both IMPORTANT and URGENT. With no deadlines, you might procrastinate, and never get it done.

I have also learned that no matter how well you plan your time, the impredictable will happen, so save some time in your calendar for the unknowns.

What does your system look like?

Decision making

"A wrong decision is always better than no decision". Yes, this is well-known to everybody, it's no innovation, I did not invent the wheel - yet, we tend to sometimes forget that it's better to make a step into the wrong direction, and assume that decision, than stay foot and wait for the time to go by.

What happens if you take no decision?

Will the problem get solved by itself? NO. Will it be easier to take the same decision tomorrow than it would be today? NO. ok, most probably no. Will you get more data tomorrow if you wait long enough? Maybe, but it may also bring more questions than answers.
Instead, when no decision is taken, your image as projected outside will suffer a lot. You will be seen as a weak person, not able to make a move without having all the information, not a risk taker (so why give to you the big project?), not a leader (why should we follow you when you only wait?), usually creating a mess by letting problems linger around.

What happens if you take the wrong decision?

There will always be someone blaming you for doing it this way or the other way, and it can actually be the best way given the context and the information at hand. So why bother?
A wrong decision will also mean eliminating one (wrong) option from your pool of solutions, so... one thing to worry less about.
If you know that with that amount of information, that was the only logical decision to be taken - then you should be fine. If it was wrong, recognize the error, try to correct it, and move forward. People are more appreciated if they took a wrong decision, and then admit the mistake.

So, what do I do, in the end? Of course - you make the decision.


Still, it would be great if you could minimize the errors, and if you could take the right decision upfront. There are a few techniques that could help you achieve this. And while there is no error-proof solution, using these simple ideas will help a great deal.
 
Step ZERO: define the problem. Define it fully, and correctly, and as accurate as possible.
 
1. Write down what you know. These are called "know what you know"
2. Write down what you don't know. the known unknowns
3. Keep in mind there are also some unknown unknowns :)
4. Agree on a few key criteria that your decision should meet.
 
For example, if you want to buy a new laptop, what would be the main criteria to decide on? Size, weight, performance, pre-installed software, privacy etc.
If you need to choose between a few candidates, what are the must-have of the final choice? Good-looking (yes, if it's for modeling :)), smart, good potential, or already has all the knowledge?
 
 

5. Identify solutions, and for each of them, weigh in all the criteria - put some relevancy to each criteria (some might be less important than others)
6. Use the objective (or less objective) criteria to make a decision.
7. Implement the chosen alternative.
8. Evaluate its success.
9. Modify the decision and the actions taken based on the evaluation did in the previous step.
 
Where does the gut feeling come into play? you will ask me. Nowhere, if you are a rational person. Everywhere, if you are at the other extreme.
While a lot of written literature writes against using gut feeling when making decisions, to me it did wonders - so I encourage you to listen to the gut feeling, and look for arguments to sustain the feeling. There usually exist quite a few, you just have to look for them.
 
Well, this is how I do it - or at least try to, especially if I have enough time to measure all factors. Usually, you also have to move fast, and take the best decision within the limited time you have, with little to no information. Funny enough, quite often it proves to be the right decision. :)
 
Anyway, if you need more materials to go in-depth in the decision making process, here are a few references:
 
Harvard Business Review on Decision Making 
Harvard Business Essentials, Decision Making: 5 Steps to Better Results