Episode 125 – Leading Projects: Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Are you learning project management from the school of hard knocks? Listen in for some pragmatic, practice-based insights into project leadership. Hear advice about psychological safety, building appreciation, organizational learning, risk analysis and much more. Tips to boost your project success and encourage self-managing, high-performing teams. Table of Contents 01:18 … Meet Kiron04:53 … Psychological Safety07:15 … Soliciting Feedback09:25 … Building in Appreciation11:22 … An Appreciation Board13:32 … Accountability from Within14:31 … Embedded Continuous Improvement15:04 … Unconscious Yet Effective Delegation16:54 … Translating Lessons Learned into Organizational Learning18:12 … Information Radiators for Lessons Learned19:25 … Psychologically Safe Evidence Based Retrospectives21:50 … Leader Goes First22:57 … Retrospect on the Retrospectives24:00 … When Someone Leaves the Project25:45 … Building Bridges with Functional Managers27:02 … Risk Management27:57 … Risk Management as Insurance30:16 … Delphi Technique on Qualitative Risk Analysis31:54 … Words of Advice32:54 … Get in Touch with Kiron34:01 … Closing KIRON BONDALE: When I started my career in project management, I was obsessed with the process side of it, the practices, the tools, the techniques of project management.  I wanted to build the world’s greatest schedule.  I ignored the people.  And I forgot that it’s people that deliver project outcomes, not the processes, not the practices. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Listeners, remember if you’re claiming PDUs, check out our website for the instructions for the new procedure.  I am Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates. BILL YATES:  Hi, Wendy. WENDY GROUNDS:  Good morning, Bill. BILL YATES:  Good morning to you. WENDY GROUNDS:  Today we’re very excited to have Kiron Bondale joining us by Skype.  Kiron is a senior consultant for World Class Productivity,and he’s worked in the project management domain for over 25 years.  He is also an active member of PMI and has served as a volunteer director on the board of PMI Lakeshore Chapter for six years.  And Bill, you’re going to tell us about his book. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I really enjoyed Kiron’s book.  It’s called “Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice.”  He’s a prolific writer.  He’s been blogging for years.  And he’ll describe what inspired him to write this book.  But this book is really practical, filled with advice for project managers, very topical.  We’re going to poke into some of the examples, but I really encourage people to check it out.  Meet Kiron WENDY GROUNDS:  Kiron, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. KIRON BONDALE:  Thank you for giving me the opportunity.  I really appreciate it. WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to ask you first, why did you write the  book, and what was your thought behind this book? KIRON BONDALE:  Yes.  It really was prompted by a challenge my father had given me almost two decades ago now, where when I told him I was thinking about starting a blog, and he looked at me, and he kind of said, you know, blogs are for amateurs.  And this is in the early days, when there weren’t a whole lot of people in the blogosphere.  But he kind of said, you know, forget about these 400, 500-word things.  If you want to be serious, write a book. And my father and I, we disagreed on a variety of topics over the time we spent together.  But that kind of challenge stayed in the back of my head all of these years.  And when I got to roughly about 500 articles in the blog, I started thinking, you know, rather than having to create something from scratch, there’s enough good content there that it probably begs the question, could I not collate it, curate it, create a book from it?  And having some free time on my hands over the Christmas holidays last year, I decided, hey, might as well commit to doing it, then I buckled down and got it done. BILL YATES:  That’s impressive, 500 articles.  That’s intimidating, though.  How did you pick through it and figure out, okay, what’s book-worthy? KIRON BONDALE:  Yeah, that’s a great question, Bill.  It’s challenging because the articles I had really reflect the evolution in my thinking about project management, Agile, different topics that I write about.  And so I would go back and look at an article I’d written in maybe year one, year two, that was a great article.  But you could tell it was getting long in the tooth relative to current thinking.  And so even though something was a good article when it was written doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good article now. And so actually I would say the majority of my effort in producing the manuscript was actually going through and reading word by word to say, will this article stand up, stand the test of time?  Is it still one that I feel is relevant that way?  So you’re absolutely right.  It was extremely challenging.  Probably the second biggest challenge was figuring out how to categorize the articles that I ended up selecting.  And I kind of tried my best, but some of them just sort of fell into a miscellaneous grab bag at the end. BILL YATES:  Yeah, I liked that at the end of the book, the miscellaneous.  One of my favorites was some of the lessons of project management from the game of golf.  KIRON BONDALE:  Various people have now challenged me, now that I’ve put the book out, to say, “Well, what are you going to do for a follow-up?”  And I just don’t think I have it in me to create a book with original content.  So I think I might just end up going back to the well again, digging up another set of lessons from the archives. But this time I’m really tempted to take one where I’ve used analogies.  So lessons from golf, lessons from baking, lessons from “The Simpsons,” that sort of a thing.  I’ve written probably a hundred articles that are of that nature.  And so once I get to the point where I have enough to choose from, I might just do a book where it’s all the analogies of project management, or lessons that we learn from analogies and metaphors. BILL YATES:  That’s too good.  Yeah, that was one of the things that cracked me up as I read the book was just how many references you had to movies.  It’s like, I don’t think there was a movie that you referenced that I had not seen and could quote a line from.  So that was a lot of fun for me. KIRON BONDALE:  The funny thing, though, is now having been writing for 11 years, it’s funny how many of these quotes I’m recycling.  That famous quote from “The Karate Kid Part II,” Mr. Miyagi’s “Best way to avoid punch, no be there.”  The number of times I’ve gone to that quote in different contexts of articles, I never get tired of it. BILL YATES:  It’s a great quote. Psychological Safety WENDY GROUNDS:  One of the things that we wanted to talk about today. For leaders, they’re not only having to confront psychological safety on their teams, but also individually having to consider psychological safety nets.  So what is your advice? KIRON BONDALE:  There’s a couple of popular models or approaches that have been talked about.  Amy Edmondson works with the Harvard Business Review, has done a great deal of research on it.  Timothy R. Clark’s got a four-stage model that he produced on psychological safety.  I try to really simplify things when I’ve been presenting about it.  Three steps are what I look at.  It’s about plan it, live it, champion it.  As leaders, we need to do those three pieces. Planning it is thinking about things like, well, how do we set ourselves up for success from the get-go?  So when your team is initially together, and you’re putting together the working agreements, those rules of engagement, ground rules, whatever you want to call them, it’s we bake psychological safety into that.  If the team members don’t know what it is, we spend some time educating them about it.  So that’s an example of planning for it. In terms of living it, that’s really saying that as leaders we need to model the behavior we expect from our team members.  And so that means that we need to act in a psychologically safe manner.  So, for example, when a team member brings bad news to us, how we react is extremely important.  We might say the right things.  But if our body language betrays us, and we’re getting red in the face, or it looks like we want to leap out of our seat and throttle the individual, they’re not going to feel really safe about it. We also want to demonstrate vulnerability.  That’s another way of living it, is showing that it’s okay to be vulnerable.  When we make a mistake, fessing up and saying “Hey, I made a mistake.”  When we don’t know something, saying “I’m not sure.  What do you think?”  That’s a method of showing it’s safe to express vulnerability. And then, finally, championing it.  An example of that would be having the courage to speak up when you see that someone is eroding psychological safety, whether that’s someone that reports to you as a team member, or it could be actually somebody that’s superior to you.  It might be the project sponsor.  It might be another senior stakeholder.  We need to start to show that we have a zero tolerance policy for activities or behaviors that are going to damage psychological safety. Soliciting Feedback  BILL YATES:  One of the things that I struggle with is I may recognize something as, okay, somebody just made a statement or sent out an email that could erode the team’s psychological safety.  But you know what, it didn’t really bother me.  I wasn’t offended by it.  I know this person, and I know how they really intended it, so I’m just going to let it go.  And I think for me one of the challenges has always been my feathers are not easily ruffled.  I think I’ve got a pretty high threshold.