Episode 25 – Alpha Project Managers

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we meet to have a conversation about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We may talk about certification.  We share stories of success and how we can improve.  And we draw on the experience of leaders in the field. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are a couple of those leaders, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, we are ringing in the New Year and, at the same time, celebrating our one-year anniversary here at Manage This. ANDY CROWE:  There’s a lot to celebrate, Nick.  So Happy New Year to you. BILL YATES:  Happy Birthday, Manage This. NICK WALKER:  That’s right, that’s right.  And what better way to celebrate the New Year and our anniversary than to sort of step back, maybe take stock in ourselves, make some resolutions, set some goals, and talk about what makes a top-tier project manager.  And Bill, we are fortunate to have the guy who literally wrote the book on that. BILL YATES:  That’s right. NICK WALKER:  Our own Andy Crowe has a book titled “Alpha Project Managers:  What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not.”  And Bill, this book has made kind of a pretty big splash in the world of project management. BILL YATES:  It really has.  I remember our delight when we saw that, in the exposure draft for the Sixth Edition PMBOK Guide, we actually have – the book is cited; the study is cited.  And it’s early on, even.  It’s in Chapter 3, when they’re describing the role of the project manager.  And it’s very exciting to see that they’re referring to the research that Andy did in the Alpha Study to describe what makes a project manager successful. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, sometimes ideas and concepts take a little while to work and wind and wend their way into the PMBOK Guide.  And so we were really happy to see this show up, and gives it a little bit of gravitas, perhaps. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And, you know, to add to that, I know it’s been referenced many times.  I think it was two summers ago Chip and Dan Heath actually mentioned it as a must-read.  They have – they’re prolific writers and well-respected authors, and I was really impressed by that. NICK WALKER:  So tell us a little bit, Andy, about the Alpha Study.  Give us an overview of how this came about. ANDY CROWE:  Well, the Alpha Study was a look at 860 project  managers.  And we looked at who the high performers were.  And the way we did that, Nick – so in order to go through this study you had to do a few things.  You had to participate in a couple of very lengthy surveys.  That was part one of what they had to do.  But then also the project managers had to provide access to at least five stakeholders.  These stakeholders were team members, senior manager, customer, and they were all current people.  So these stakeholders, these five or more stakeholders, five to eight stakeholders, would take part two of the survey, as well.  But they weren’t taking it for themselves.  They were taking it for the project manager. Then what we started to look at is, okay, here’s the way the PM answered questions about his or her performance.  But here’s the way the stakeholders viewed that same person’s performance.  And what we found was there are some interesting gaps.  And it’s the gaps that make this interesting.  What everybody agrees on is only mildly interesting.  But where there’s a big departure, and where they view the same thing very differently, becomes a lot more interesting. BILL YATES:  There’s a book by Malcolm Gladwell, it’s called “Outliers.”  And what I love is he states clearly the purpose of the book, and it relates so on point with the Alpha Study.  Gladwell says, “This book is about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary.  Over the course of the chapters ahead I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another – geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars and software programmers.  We’re going to uncover their secrets.”  Well, that’s what Andy did in the Alpha book and in the study.  But it’s for project managers. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, yeah.  Is that how the idea got started? ANDY CROWE:  Well, not exactly. BILL YATES:  I think Gladwell got the idea from Andy. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, probably so. ANDY CROWE:  I would be happy if that were the case.  The reality of it is, you know what, Nick, this started off in the very, very early days, before it ever formed into an idea of a real survey of project management practices, was to do a marketing survey and to start looking at project management preferences, what they prefer, what they’re looking for out of their careers, what they’re looking for out of their organization, what they’re looking for in training, rating, things like that.  And so round one of that was more marketing related. Then we started looking at it, saying, you know, there’s some really interesting questions about project management in general.  And so that came out as really part one of the Alpha Survey.  It was a very exhaustive, well, not exhaustive, but very lengthy, probably exhausting and lengthy survey, asking a lot of questions that we were just trying to understand.  And then taking that data back, we collated it, and now we were really on target to understand better for part two of the survey and ask some really pointed questions that were helpful. BILL YATES:  And that gets to the gaps and answers the question of why, which that’s so fascinating.  And that’s really the beauty of the study in the book is looking at why are these 18 out of 860 identified as top performers?  What is it about the way they managed those projects that set them apart?  And I need to just put in a quick word.  Some people don’t know Andy quite as well as I do.  This guy’s very metric driven.  He’s a Black Belt Six Sigma.  He is all about measuring in order to determine if something is improving in terms of performance.  If you cut him, he bleeds data. ANDY CROWE:  Nothing speaks louder than data. BILL YATES:  There you go.  So when he went about this study, it was very rigorous in terms of treating the data with integrity, making sure that we had a diverse group.  Even if you look at the profile of the 18 top performers, they’re from all different industries, all different ages, male, female.  So truly the data has a lot of integrity. NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  The thing that jumps out at me initially is just the amount of research and the time it must have taken to put all this together. ANDY CROWE:  Yup.  It really was.  It took a long time to do the survey.  And there were parts of it we had to do more than once because perhaps we didn’t ask the question correctly, or we didn’t get back what looked like a statically valid response.  And I got very acquainted with theories and statistics like the  central limit theorem and other fun stuff. BILL YATES:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. ANDY CROWE:  Understanding standard deviation and distribution and all of this good stuff.  But it was a lot of fun.  And honestly, Nick, it was a labor of love. NICK WALKER:  So what did you find?  What did you discover? ANDY CROWE:  Right.  You know, what we discovered early on is there’s sort of eight high-level groupings that we found that made sense to organize the data around.  And so those were really attitude and belief.  That’s one of those soft skill things that – do successful PMs view the world differently?  I think the answer is yes, they do.  They do view the world differently.  But how?  How do they approach their job?  What’s their attitude?  What are their beliefs about their profession?  About themselves?  So that was one of those eight. Another one was focus and prioritization.  And this was really based on the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote this amazing book called “Flow.”  And I would encourage any of our podcast readers, especially the ambitious ones, those of you who like to read, read this book.  It is absolutely amazing.  It’s not a quick read, not an easy read, but it’s a wonderful book that talks about the psychology of optimal performance.  And it’s how to get into this zone of flow, how to get – now, the research that we did was really based on his theory of distractions. And Csikszentmihalyi claims that we’re really being bombarded with bits of information all the time that are competing for your attention.  If you’re driving right now while you’re listening to this, then you have distractions there, and hopefully we’re not going to be a distraction; if you are sitting down at home or at your office.  You know, you may have your phone buzzing.  You may have people competing for your attention, or things worrying you about your job.  And those types of things can compete for your attention. How do the top 2 percent focus and prioritize on the things that matter?  Because we all know, you know, you remember the Covey “Urgent & Important” quadrant that he made.  And it’s so easy to get dragged into the urgent, the things like the ringing phone, and to miss the important things that are going to really move the needle in our job and our profession.  Communication looks at how do the top 2 percent, what strategies do they use, what techniques, and how do they communicate more effectively than everybody else?  That turned out to be a really important dimension. BILL YATES:  That was fascinating.  One of the gaps in there I thought was the most significant gap in the entire study. ANDY CROWE:  You know what, it was one of the most interesting.  We’ll get to the one that I found the most significant.  But it was a huge gap there, and that is how the top 2 percent – not how the top 2 percent – how the 98 percent view their communication effectiveness and how their stakeholders view it.  And it’s shocking.  It’s just a shocking gap there between the two.