Project Management, initiative, leadership

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 fa...

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 ...

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 ...

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 r...

"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 hap...