Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

The podcast by project managers for project managers. If we can identify the reasons why people say no, we can be more effective in getting them to follow our requests. Patrick Veroneau introduces an acronym called GREAT to understand the resistance we may be facing from our team. An offshoot of effective leadership is being able to inspire other people to say yes to our requests. Table of Contents 00:32 … Rise Against Hunger01:57 … Meet Patrick03:39 … Six Principles of Influence05:49 … Signs of Resistance07:02 … Goodwill09:21 … SCARF13:07 … Reactance14:56 … Self-Awareness16:41 … Expertise18:46 … Build Credibility20:55 … Kevin and Kyle22:02 … Apathy24:51 … Trust and CABLES26:16 … Congruence27:22 … Appreciation27:35 … Belongingness27:48 … Listening28:22 … Empathy28:37 … Specifics30:45 … Contact Patrick32:15 … Closing Rise Against Hunger WENDY GROUNDS:  We visited Rise Against Hunger as a company, Velociteach, and we did some meal packing there.  We packed over 1,080 meals that were sent to – I think these ones were going to Zimbabwe. BILL YATES:  Nice. WENDY GROUNDS:  But it was going to people who are not in the position to just be able to get food as easily as it is for us.  Rise Against Hunger is an amazing organization.  They target remote communities with hunger pockets, and they send their packages of food there. BILL YATES:  We had such a great time as a team preparing these, you know, helping put these meals together, packaging them.  And we ended up with all these boxes of packaged meals ready to go.  It was so fun for the team to be together.  It was a team-building event with a purpose.  Those are our favorites. WENDY GROUNDS:  I highly recommend it as a team-building event.  I think that was really fun.  Everybody really pulled together.  We packaged a bit too quickly, almost.  We were so excited about doing this that we got finished too quickly, and then we had to wash dishes; didn’t we. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  But there’s nothing better in terms of bonding than seeing your coworkers wearing hair nets.  It was just... WENDY GROUNDS:  Oh yeah.  Oh yeah. ____________________________________________________________ WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer. We’re talking to Patrick Veroneau today.  And he’s the founder of the Emery Leadership and Sales Group, and they focus on helping employees and organizations bridge the gap between engagement and excellence.  He had his first management position with a division of Van Heusen Corporation, and he spent over 15 years in the biopharma industry in sales training and leadership development.  He continues to develop and refine leadership and sales models that blend evidence-based research and theory with what happens in the real world.  And what happens in the real world is often we’re trying to lead or to manage people on our projects, and we get resistance.  And so we’re going to be talking about that resistance today. Meet Patrick Hi, Patrick.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re so glad you’re here today. PATRICK VERONEAU:  Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity to be on the podcast.  Always great to talk about resistance. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  First of all, tell us about your company, Emery Leadership Group, and what inspired you to start it. PATRICK VERONEAU:  So Emery Leadership Group is primarily an organization that helps other organizations to develop better leaders and really to become more productive.  If you don’t have good leaders, right, if you don’t have people that can inspire other people to say yes to requests, then it’s very difficult to, I think, be as effective as you could be.  And there’s a lot of research in terms of what are the things that inspire individuals to want to say yes to our requests.  And that’s all that leadership is.  It’s an offshoot of influence to be able to lead people effectively. And that really is my background was in biotech for over 15 years.  I was a sales rep.  I was involved in training.  I managed.  And the benefit of that, in being in that industry in particular, was that all of the things that we did were focused around what’s the research that suggests that this is the approach that a provider should take with their patients, whether it was cardiovascular or oncology. And I had the opportunity to take that same approach in regards to leadership development, saying that there’s research that backs up why we make certain decisions.  If we leverage that, it doesn’t work all the time, just like treatments don’t always work, but there is a pattern that you can follow in terms of, if you behave in certain ways, the outcomes can be much more predictable.  I took the same approach again to leadership and also sales training, which is what I started at. Six Principles of Influence BILL YATES:  Patrick, we were talking just before we started recording, there was someone early in your career that influenced that.  And when we talk about “yes” versus “no,” it’d be interesting, I think, for people to know that background.  Talk a bit about the person that influenced you. PATRICK VERONEAU:  So while I was in the pharmaceutical industry, again, I had access to a lot of trainings and was always sort of looking for how do I continue to sort of develop my skills?  And to me, I thought, well, we sell science.  Why not understand the science behind influence to be able to be more effective at doing our jobs?  And there was a gentleman out of Arizona State University, a world expert in influence named Robert Cialdini, who’s written a number of books in that space.  And I was able to go through his workshops.  Most of his stuff is best known for the six principles of influence that he identified through all of his research, which are around things like liking and scarcity and authority and consensus, where those are our activators for us.  They’re almost like pulling levers for individuals to get them to say yes to our requests. And what always stood out to me was we talked about it in a way of ethical influence; right?  These same tools can be used either way.  And you see it quite often when people do the wrong things.  Bernie Madoff is somebody that’s probably an example that most know about that, if you were to go back and look at the tools of influence, he used many of those influence principles, but just for the wrong reason. So for me, the challenge that I found was these are great principles, right, the six principles of why people say yes.  But what I was finding and experiencing and I know for myself is that oftentimes I start from the place of wanting to say no; that I needed to get past that hurdle first.  And if I understood the reason why somebody was probably saying no, or what might prompt them to say no to a request, then at least for me what I found and what I was developing in those people that I was working with was that identifying the reasons why people say no allowed me then to decide which of the six principles probably would be more effective to use ethically to get them to follow my request. Signs of Resistance BILL YATES:  One of the things I want to talk with you about is formal authority and informal authority because project managers often have to lead people, even when they don’t have official authority over them.  Those team members don’t report to the project manager.  This can lead to resistance; you know?  I mean, that’s my nature.  If I have two bosses, so to speak, an official boss, and I’ve got somebody that I’m supposed to report to on a project, you know which way I’m going to lean, you know, which way is best for me.  That’s the manager I’m going to listen to.  So how can we recognize the signs of resistance from our team members, if it’s related to this idea of informal authority? PATRICK VERONEAU:  Sure.  So there’s an acronym that I use called GREAT.  And the reason I created that is because, to me, the question that I would ask myself, and still do in the work that I do, is how great is my resistance?  So I’m almost – having to answer that question then tells me where I’m going to go from there because that’s what we deal with is resistance.  So the GREAT model is an acronym for five resisters, the first one being goodwill, the next one being reactance, the next one being expertise or experience, the next one being apathy, and the last one being trust. Goodwill WENDY GROUNDS:  I think this is an excellent model for us to just go a little deeper and to discover what you mean by each one of these.  So let’s look at goodwill first.  Can you give us examples in ways that we can demonstrate that our request is in the best interest of the person that we’re putting that request to? PATRICK VERONEAU:  Yeah.  So goodwill really is about a feeling as though what you’re asking me to do doesn’t just benefit you; right?  If I’m managing a group, and I’m asking them to complete a project for me, if it’s myself that’s going to benefit from them doing all the work and really not showing any type of appreciation for them and what they’re having to do or how this is going to impact them, as well, then that immediately starts to build resistance. So if you think about the industry that I came from where, if I’m asking a provider to use a certain treatment, they’re often thinking first, is this really what’s best for my patient, or is this what’s best for your quota?  That’s goodwill, and we need to be able to demonstrate that; right?  And if I just came in with the “This is what you should use,” oftentimes the providers are going to be thinking, wait a minute, I know that benefits you.  You’re going to benefit from this.  But is it really what’s in the best interest of what my patient needs, or what we’re trying to do here as an oncology unit?

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Selecting contractors and negotiating the terms of a major project is one of the most difficult aspects of project management. In this episode Ed Merrow sheds light on fairness in contracting relationships, for the relationships to be self-enforcing, and how not to unwittingly set your contractors up to fail.  Table of Contents 02:53 … Meet Ed05:28 … Contract Strategies for Major Projects06:59 … Hiring Contractors is Never Easy07:55 … Key Principle #209:12 … #1 There is No Free Lunch10:20 … TINSTAAFL11:28 … #3 Complex Projects Need Simple Contracting Strategies13:03 … Collaboration15:07 … #4 Owners and Contractors are Different17:44 … #5 Large Risk Transfers are More Illusion than Reality19:25 … Importance of Scoping21:29 … #6 Contractors have Shareholders23:14 … Ren25:29 … #7 Contracting Games are Rough Sport27:05 … #8 Assigning a Risk to Someone Who Cannot Control that Risk is Foolish29:07 … #9 All Contracts are Incentivized33:20 … #10 Economize on The Need for Trust36:40 … The Value of Prequalifying Contractors40:13 … Getting the A-Team or the B-Team42:48 … Get in Touch with Ed44:02 … Closing ED MERROW: ...both owners and contractors play games.  Contractors usually win those games.  My advice is try to keep games out of your contracts.  Try not to put in a bunch of complex provisions whereby you think that the contractor will “have skin in the game.”  I want owners to remember that skin in the game is almost always owner skin.  WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This.  This podcast is by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio are Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, as well as advice from industry experts from all around the world.  We want to bring you some support as you navigate your projects. If you like what you hear, please consider rating our show with five stars and leaving a brief review on our website or whichever podcast listening app you use.  This helps us immensely in bringing the podcast to the attention of others.  You can also claim free Professional Development Units from PMI by listening to this episode.  Listen up at the end of the show, and we’ll tell you how to do that. Today our guest is Ed Merrow.  Ed is the founder, president, and CEO of Independent Project Analysis, the global industry leader in quantitative analysis and benchmarking of project management systems.  Ed received his degrees from Dartmouth College and Princeton University; and he began his career as an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He followed that with 14 years as a research scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he directed the Energy Research Program.  We’re talking to Ed particularly today about his most recent major research effort which is centered on the quantitative analysis of how contracting strategies and delivery systems shape project results.  His new book is on this subject, and it’s titled “Contract Strategies for Major Projects.” BILL YATES:  In our conversation with Ed on procurement and contract strategies, Ed is going to share with us the key principles of contracting that all those involved with planning and executing major projects should know.  Here are three things to listen out for on this episode.  One, contractors may make convenient scapegoats, but they are rarely to blame for bad projects.  Number two, we depend heavily on trust, yet trust is not a contracting strategy.  And number three, contractors are almost always more skilled at playing those contracting games than those owners are. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hey, Ed.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for joining us today. ED MERROW:  Well, thank you, Wendy.  I’m glad to be here. Meet Ed WENDY GROUNDS:  We are looking forward to getting into this topic.  It’s not something that we’ve talked about before, and I believe you’re quite the expert and the right person that we should be talking to today.  But before we go there, could you tell us a bit about your story, how you got into project management? ED MERROW:  It goes way back.  After I left UCLA, where I was a professor, to go to the RAND Corporation, that’s really when I started my journey in projects.  At RAND, I started the process of trying to understand why new technology projects overran so much, so often.  That research ultimately led me to start Independent Project Analysis back in 1987; and we’ve been going strong ever since, really trying to understand at a first principles level the relationship between what owners, in particular owners, do on the front end of projects and what we get out in terms of project quality at the end.  The contracting work that I’ve done is really very much part and parcel of that whole picture. BILL YATES:  This is going to be a powerful conversation for us to have for our project managers.  This is an area that just scares the pants off project managers, excuse the expression.  But when we get into procurement, and we get into contract types, many project managers just freeze and go, “Okay, this is scary for me.  The more I can understand, the better, the more prepared I think I’ll be.”  So this is a very valuable conversation we’ll have. ED MERROW:  It’s a very complex subject, that goes across economics, understanding markets, understanding competition, a lot of psychological factors associated with contracting.  You know, I always describe project managers as a pretty hard-headed bunch in almost everything except contracting.  When it comes to contracting, we often come to believe things that just plain aren’t true, in part because what we thought we learned about contracting in a particular project really was the wrong lesson.  I wanted to step back and say, look, can we actually put some data around this issue so that we’re better guided as to what works and what doesn’t? Contract Strategies for Major Projects WENDY GROUNDS:  Before we go into this a little further, I just want to talk about your book.  You wrote “Contract Strategies for Major Projects.”  Now, you have done a lot of research focusing on how contracting strategies and delivery systems shape project results, and you’ve shared those findings in this book.  Can you describe the goals and the particular audience for your book? ED MERROW:  Well, my audience is primarily project managers and, to some extent, business sponsors of projects.  Sometimes my audience will be procurement.  Sometimes the audience is the legal side of projects, both on the owner and the contractor side.  One of my hopes in writing the book is not only to shed some empirical light on the subject, but also to try to bring some sense of we need in our contracting relationships to be fair, and we need for the relationships to be self-enforcing, which is to say that the best contract in the world is the one that you sign, put in your lower left-hand drawer, and never see again.  That’s the perfect contract.  But when things don’t go perfectly, I want that contract to help us sort things out, rather than make things more difficult. Hiring Contractors is Never Easy BILL YATES:  One of the things Ed that we wanted to bring to you, just thinking of some of the great quotes you had in your book, hiring contractors is never easy.  And quite frankly, this is an area of great concern for project managers; you know?  It’s like, okay, we have a project that we need to have done.  We’ve got to go outside of our organization and hire some contractors to complete the work.  Or it could be the owner that’s going about that contracting and seeking those people out. This quote really made me laugh in your book.  You said, “The worst contractor ever was the one on the last project, and the best contractor ever will be the one on the next project.”  I like that.  I can relate to that.  You know, I’m an optimist anyway.  So I might look at it and go, “Man that was a terrible experience we had in this last project.  That’ll never happen again.  This is going to be totally different in this next project.” Key Principle #2 ED MERROW:  You see, I always tell owners, and sometimes it upsets them, I say, “Look, contractors do good projects well and bad projects poorly. You’ve got to understand that almost has to be the way it is.”  And I say that because, if a contractor can’t do a well-put-together, well-front-end-loaded, really strong business case project well, he can’t do any project well.  And the market very quickly eliminates those players.  Point of fact, contractors will do good projects well.  And when as owners you set them up to fail, they usually will.  Plain and simple.  And the fact that they’re easy to blame doesn’t really change anything. WENDY GROUNDS:  That was number two of your key principles of contracting.  I just took a look, and I thought, “I’ve heard that before.”  What we want to run through today, we’ve taken these from your book because we thought they were the most applicable to project managers.  So you have the 10 key principles of contracting.  And you warn your reader in Chapter One, you say, “If one pursues a contracting strategy that flouts one or more of these principles, it’s very likely trouble is ahead.”   #1 There is No Free Lunch So we’d like to run through these.  I’m going to start with number one, which you say, “There is no free lunch.”  Can you tell us what that means? ED MERROW:  Sure.  Contracting always involves some version of what’s called the principal-agent problem, which is to say that a contractor will never perfectly do what an owner wants.  It’s simply inevitable, if only because communication is less than perfect.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Will your project’s documentation pass the test of time once the project is done and the people are gone? Documentation is at the intersection of information management, organizational design, and personal productivity. Accurate documentation makes teams more efficient and effective. Table of Contents 01:23 … Essential Project Documents03:43 … Defining Information Management04:34 … Adrienne’s Story05:59 … Performing an Information Audit09:19 … Signs Your System is Out of Control11:33 … Dynamic Documentation12:44 … Improve Your Documentation15:19 … Budget for Closing Documentation16:57 … Finding the Right Balance19:12 … Kevin and Kyle20:27 … Strategies for Meeting Notes23:49 … Have a System25:54 … Getting Everyone Onboard27:25 … Documentation No-Nos30:06 … Personal Productivity31:06 … “The 24-Hour Rule”31:41 … Contact Adrienne32:43 … Closing ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR: I actually say documentation is at the intersection of information management, organizational design, and personal productivity.  So documentation kind of underpins these three major disciplines, but the personal productivity is often forgotten. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We’re talking today to Adrienne Bellehumeur, and she is the founder of Bellehumeur Company and co-partner of Risk Oversight.  She’s based in Calgary, Alberta.  She’s also an expert on productivity, documentation, governance, risk, and compliance; and has delivered 15 years’ experience as an auditor, accountant, analyst, problem solver, and independent consultant. Adrienne developed a documentation approach called “dynamic documentation,” and she’s a published author of the book “The 24 Hour Rule,” and she’s going to tell us more about that book, as well. Adrienne likes to talk about processes, tools, and methods, and some of the best strategies to use to maintain effective, efficient, and timely documentation.  So as you may have gathered, we’re talking about documentation and information management.  So Bill, my question to you is what are some essential project documents that project managers should be maintaining? Essential Project Documents BILL YATES:  Oh boy, the list goes on and on.  They’re all essential, every one of them.  Let me start with the legal stuff first.  I think project managers who’ve ever done work with, either with outside contractors or their customers, an external customer, they would agree anything related to contracts, addendums, agreements, even the email threads where those may have been negotiated or key decisions were made, those should be considered mandatory.  You’ve got to have those backed up.  They can’t just be living on your hard drive.  They need to be backed up.  Also things like the project charter, anything with signatures that gives authority to the project. And then kind of going down the list, there’s scope things like requirements, scope statement, the product roadmap, the backlog, change requests, logs that keep up with things, task lists, or issue logs.  These are dynamic.  These need to live.  So you have to document them almost with a date stamp on them.  That’s true with a risk log or risk register, as well.  Major communications, major rollouts, maybe you hit a milestone or something significant, you want to keep those documents.  Think about, okay, could someone who doesn’t know anything about this project take a look at it six months, two years later and go, “Oh, okay.  Yeah, I get it.  I see why you guys made that decision.  I see who was involved in it and then what action took place after.” And then one of the biggest challenges, and I think we’ll hear this from Adrienne as well, when you’re getting ready to wrap up your project, that is one of the most difficult times to make sure that you’re doing good documentation.  It’s like more important than ever.  It’s almost like think about when you move into a house.  You have this checklist, the punch list, the final step before you go sign those contracts to own the house.  Well, for our projects, too, we’re trying to wrap things up, but we’re losing key resources.  The team is starting to get dispersed to more projects, and we have to gather that information out of their head and make sure that it’s been documented somewhere for future, for lessons learned, both for this project and into the future. WENDY GROUNDS:  Thanks, Bill.  That’s a lot to keep in mind.  Let’s see what Adrienne has to say, and let’s get some advice from her on how to correctly manage our information and our documents. Hi, Adrienne.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for talking with us today. ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Thank you.  Thank you so much for having me. Defining Information Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, the first thing is, I think just to kind of put an explanation out there, could you define what information management is really all about? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  So information management is basically the management of existing information.  If I have this piece of paper here on my desk, and I do something with it and put it in the right spot, I’d call that information management.  It’s actually a wide range of things that can be anything from organizing the files on your computer all the way up to an enterprise content management for a multinational company.  So it actually has a wide range.  Information management is a close cousin of documentation, which is my area of expertise, but a very wide discipline that often incorporates a lot of technology and tools and metadata and taxonomy and stuff like that in practice. Adrienne’s Story WENDY GROUNDS:  So where does your interest in information management and documentation originate?  How did you start out? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Oh, that’s a great question.  I mean, it spans many years.  I actually had a bit of a nerdy fascination with notes, taking notes in class.  And I remember having lots of cool notebooks, and looking around the classroom, wondering what are people doing with their notes.  This interest actually spanned throughout my career.  I’m a chartered accountant by background.  And I do remember how important documentation and managing information is in the workplace, and how actually poorly we train people when we enter the workforce.  So I’ve had a big interest in helping people to be better trained because I actually didn’t think the training was that good. And then as a business owner and consultant, I watched so much money being wasted in companies by consultants leaving without anything written down.  People can’t find documentation that they spent millions of dollars on a project, tons of money on resources that we have meetings and no record of what was said, and we can’t remember.  So this kind of threefold reason, it’s actually spanned many years.  I’ve seen so many patterns of a need for students, professionals, the knowledge workforce to have a better understanding of this practice. Performing an Information Audit BILL YATES:  This is so good.  I feel like we’re going to the doctor today.  And you are our specialist.  But let me just start out with this idea of an information audit. For our project managers that are out there, let’s say you performed an information audit on one of their projects.  What questions would you be asking the project manager and the team in that audit? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Often information audits are really tied to a problem you’re going to solve.  So if people can’t find something, or they’re struggling to get people to document, or Larry built your system from scratch and is retiring in two months, or Sally is the only person who knows how to run critical process.  Like I’m often brought in for very specific problems. But if I were running a more generic audit, which I do, I really focus on how users interact with their information.  I ask questions like what information or knowledge do you care about if someone won the lottery?  We don’t say “hit by a bus” anymore.  We say “win the lottery.”  What is actually getting used or not?  Can people follow, I call it the re-performance standard?  Can people use the standalone documents to actually do their job?  Or, and this is applicable to project managers because they often have to hand it off to others, it has to meet that re-performance standard.  Can it meet the clarity standard?  Do people understand what you mean without having to interpret it? The operative word I’m getting at here is “standalone.”  In today’s workforce, we need to build documentation systems that people can use the content and materials.  And this is broad, too.  It covers stuff like video and systems, SharePoint, everything.  When I say “documentation,” I’m not necessarily meaning a piece of static paper, but they have to be able to find things, understand, do their work, basically in the absence of the people who built them.  And this is just a new reality of the workforce. We have a new knowledge-based economy geared to how a project’s documentation and systems will sustain once the people are gone. BILL YATES:  I love that you use that keyword of “standalone.”  To me, I think that’s important to point out because I know I have certainly been a guilty party and thinking, okay, I was in the room when we made this key decision with the customer.  This defined the scope that we ended up delivering.  And I can just make some basic notes because I’ll remember just enough to jog my memory.  Well, that’s not really standalone.  Let’s say I get assigned to a different project.  To your point, it needs to be something that someone can pick up and read without me explaining it or without me being on the other end of a call.  And it needs to be standalone.

The podcast by project managers for project managers.  Ren Love is the newest member of our Velociteach team and the Manager of Curriculum Development. Hear about her unique management experiences as she talks about leadership, interviewing, the PMP exam, and coping with testing anxiety. Table of Contents  02:19 … Meet Ren02:53 … Ren’s Project Management Journey06:20 … Memorable Success at Projects10:16 … Mammals and COVID11:34 … Preparing for Leadership14:08 … Routes to Project Management16:31 … Leadership Styles for PMs18:16 … Interviewing Tips19:58 … Be Confident in what You Know22:41 … Encouragement to New PMs24:37 … Ren’s Advice Wish List26:03 … Kevin and Kyle27:11 … When the Job is Different to the PMP Training30:35 … Common Questions about the PMP Exam31:54 … Overcoming Exam Anxiety34:47 … Contact Ren35:56 … Closing REN LOVE: ...be confident in what you know, and confident in how you’ll grow.  You don’t have to know everything about everything.  A well-rounded project manager is a lifelong learner.  ...Be confident that your past life experiences have made you who you are and will make you good at project management in the situation you’re in. And then also be prepared to say, there are things that I’m going to grow, and in this company.  What kind of opportunities can your company offer me to help me grow?  WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We’re so excited that you’re joining us, and we want to say thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We love hearing from you, and we always appreciate your positive ratings.  You will also earn PDUs for listening to this podcast.  Just listen up at the end, and we’ll give you instructions on how to claim your PDUs from PMI. Today we’re talking to one of our co-workers.  Her name is Ren Love, and Ren has a very interesting educational background which is almost as diverse as her professional one.  She has done many, many things in her exciting career before joining us at Velociteach.  She has a B.S. in Environmental Science, she has an M.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Instructional Design and Learning Technologies.  And she has worked in zoos, science centers, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, as well as one of the Big Four accounting firms.  So she’s really had fingers in the pie all over the place, and she has also earned her PMP.  She’s a Certified SAFe Agilist as well, as a Certified Scrum Master.  So she’s got some well-rounded advice. BILL YATES:  Yes, she does.  I can’t wait to have this conversation with Ren.  She joined us full-time in fall of 2022 as the Manager of Curriculum Development, and it’s just been a delight working with her, both as an instructor and now full-time on the team.  And we just wanted our listeners to be able to hear from Ren and hear about her experience. WENDY GROUNDS:  And questions about the PMP exam, as well. BILL YATES:  Yes, yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  She addresses some of that.  So we’re looking forward to this conversation.  Hey, Ren, thank you so much for joining us today. Meet Ren REN LOVE:  I’m so happy to be here.  Thank you for having me. WENDY GROUNDS:  We want to jump right in and ask you what your current position is. REN LOVE:  So here at Velociteach I am the Manager of Curriculum Development.  So I started off as an instructor for Velociteach for about seven months before being hired full-time.  And I’m in charge of updating and maintaining all of the course materials that we have here at Velociteach. BILL YATES:  That’s all.  There’s not much to that. REN LOVE:  Yeah, it’s a lot more than what it sounds. BILL YATES:  Yeah, never a boring moment, that’s for sure. Ren’s Project Management Journey WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us a little bit about your career background, just some of your story and how you got into project management. REN LOVE:  So my road to project management was very unusual.  My early career, what I like to call my past life, that was in the sciences.  So I’ve got an undergraduate degree in environmental science.  My first master’s degree is in biology.  And I spent about 10 or so years working in the field of zoo, aquariums, science centers.  One of my first jobs ever I was working at Disney’s Animal Kingdom doing science education.  Then I worked at a local science center in South Carolina before moving into the role of education programs coordinator at the Greenville Zoo, where I was for a long time. So I think for a lot of people, we rethought our career choices when the pandemic hit.  And during the pandemic, a lot of zoos across the country were closing, and a lot of education departments were downsizing.  I got very lucky.  The zoo I was working for was owned by the city, and the city had made a pledge to not lay off anybody during the pandemic, which is just amazing.  But it did cause me to think to myself, what’s my future going to look like?  What’s my future career going to look like?  Not a ton of growth opportunities in that industry, just because it’s also very saturated with a lot of people.  You tend to retire out of those jobs.  People don’t just leave them. So I sat down, and I was chatting with my mother, Margo Love, who was a project manager for years and years and years and years, and talked a little bit about that as a potential career path.  And so she introduced me to project management.  We talked about the PMP exam, and I remember telling her, “Well, I’ve never done project management.”  And she convinced me that I had been doing project management this entire time.  I just wasn’t called a project manager.  And she said, “This is totally a possibility for you.  Look into it.” And so I did.  I started studying for it.  I passed the PMP exam in December of 2020.  And then I was hired by one of the Big Four firms by February of 2021.  So it was just a quick turnaround time from certification to becoming an official project manager.  That’s where it all kind of began.  I still sort of miss zoo life, but it’s been really exciting to try something brand new, very challenging, and also a little bit more lucrative.  That’s worth mentioning, too.  Leaving the zoo field to go to big business, for sure. BILL YATES:  There are so many correlations between life at the zoo and life as a project manager. REN LOVE:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  Life in the circus and life as a project manager. REN LOVE:  Yes.  So similar.  Though I will say I get bitten much less in this line of work.  The number has drastically declined. BILL YATES:  That’s one of my funniest stories of you, Ren, is I think you were showing some kind of creature to some elementary school kids, and you got bitten on the finger, and you were bleeding.  What was it that bit you?  I can’t remember what it was. REN LOVE:  Oh, it was a rooster named Fabio. BILL YATES:  A rooster. REN LOVE:  Yeah.  And I was just trying to play it off and be like, “Oh, this isn’t happening.”  And kids don’t let you do that.  They do not. BILL YATES:  “Miss Ren, your finger is bleeding.” REN LOVE:  Yeah. WENDY GROUNDS:  I’ve told you before that my brother works in a zoo, and he was bit by a hippo on the knee. REN LOVE:  Wow. WENDY GROUNDS:  Did a lot of damage. BILL YATES:  That’s going to leave a mark. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, yeah. REN LOVE:  That is significant.  I’ve met hippos before.  Usually they like to have their tongues rubbed.  And so that puts you in a very dangerous situation.  It takes a lot of trust. Memorable Success at Projects WENDY GROUNDS:  So looking at projects that you’ve done in the past, do you have some that are really memorable?  And what has led to their success? REN LOVE:  One of the most memorable ones, again, was very COVID-inspired, COVID-19 global pandemic.  But for the Greenville Zoo specifically, and lots of zoos across the country, one of their biggest sources of revenue is their summer zoo camp.  And so when I talk about a zoo camp project, it sounds very low stakes as opposed to something for NASA or something like that.  But when you consider the fact that these zoo camps bring in 50%, sometimes up to 75% of a department’s revenue for an entire year in just this 10-week cycle, it becomes really high stakes.  So having a successful zoo camp season can be a really big deal for kind of the survival of a zoo in general. And so during COVID you’re facing these regulations that were imposed by municipalities and things like that where no visitors are allowed on zoo grounds, just zoo staff.  And so we spent months waiting to hear what was going to happen because, if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of waiting.  There was a lot of, how long is this going to last?  Turns out a long time. BILL YATES:  Couple weeks, just a couple weeks. REN LOVE:  Yeah, just a couple weeks, and then a couple weeks, and a couple months.  And we finally heard back in the very beginning of May that zoo camp, if it was going to exist at all, had to be completely virtual.  And that was very challenging for us because all of our zoo camps, they started June 1st, and they’re all in person.  They all get to see animals and touch animals and get engaged.  And so we decided that we needed to maintain that revenue.  We would have to turn our zoo camps entirely virtual.  And that was a ton of moving, interlocking parts that had to happen. So I was one of the people who was in charge of contacting everybody who had registered for the in-person and keeping track of if they wanted a refund, if they wanted a spot in the virtual, or if they were feeling really kind and just wanted to donate that money to us and not want a refund.  We had a lot of those, which was just really lovely.

Sometimes a project can feel like a circus when you're having to manage time, cost, and scope as well as stakeholders, team members, and the organization as a whole.

When it comes to problem solving or innovation, the goal is to generate ideas, make those ideas better, and then implement them. But what if we are skipping some important stages of the creative problem-solving process? Dr. Teresa Lawrence, an expert on the integration of Creative Problem Solving into project management, joins us to illustrate the importance of understanding our cognitive diversity, knowing our preference to the stages of the creative problem-solving process, and recognizing how our preferences influence project team interactions.

The podcast by project manager for project managers. A great leader strikes a balance between warmth and strength. If it’s time for you to conduct an honest assessment of your leadership style to connect better with your teams and understand your stakeholders more effectively, take a listen to hear how to connect, then lead. Table of Contents 02:47 … Meet Matt04:44 … Social Power and Personal Power06:38 … Knowing your Likeability09:17 … Strength and Warmth12:12 … Strength and Warmth Matrix15:04 … Changing Your Impact17:51 … Make a Stronger Team Connection.20:02 … How Not to Compromise Warmth21:54 … Snap Judgements and First Impressions24:23 … Kevin and Kyle25:20 … Connect with Your Audience27:25 … Preparation is Vital29:44 … Be Your Authentic Self33:03 … Connecting Remotely36:26 … Keeping Energy Levels Stable37:33 … Communicating to Highly Skilled Professionals39:18 … Using Analogies40:05 … Speaking Truth to Positions of Power42:13 … Contact Matt43:57 … Closing MATT KOHUT: Some people tend to go with their strength first, and they backfill on the warmth.  Some people lead with warmth first, and they backfill on the strength.  And it’s sort of like being left-handed or right-handed.  Everybody’s just got a dominant hand.  And as long as you can pick up objects with both of them and not drop them, it’s okay. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, and advice from industry experts from all around the world.  Our aim is to bring you some support as you navigate your projects.  You can also claim free PDUs, Professional Development Units from PMI by listening to our show.  At the end of the show we will give you advice on how to do that. Today we’re talking to Matt Kohut.  Matt is a co-founder of KNP Communications, and he has 20 years of professional experience writing and preparing speakers for both general and expert audience.  In addition, he has served as a communications consultant to organizations including NASA, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Harvard University. Matt is currently a fellow at the Center for Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, and he’s previously worked at Harvard University as research specialist to the dean of Kennedy School.  Now, this is an interesting conversation, and we are very excited to bring it to you because it follows on so well to our conversation we had with Vanessa Druskat on emotional intelligence. BILL YATES:  Yes, this is an area that I think because of my own experience, I feel like this is an area that a project manager, certainly me, should and can grow in throughout their career.  It’s amazing talking with Matt.  He knows so much about social science.  That’s the background experience he has.  But the advice that he gives is so practical.  Not only did he write speeches, he coached those who were delivering the speeches as to how to make a good first impression, how to connect with their audience, how to not overpower them with too much information.  These are things that project managers struggle with.  These are things that we have to be aware of.  So the advice that Matt gives in our conversation is really going to help us be better at our jobs, connect better with our teams, understand our customers better, and amp up our performance. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Matt.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for being our guest today. MATT KOHUT:  Thanks for having me. Meet Matt WENDY GROUNDS:  We are excited to talk to you about communication and leadership and all of those good things; but I am really intrigued by your other career, the side of you that is a professional bassist.  Can you tell us a little bit about that and your passion for music? MATT KOHUT:  Sure.  I started playing music as a kid, like a lot of kids do, just picking up instruments.  And it was in high school I really hit on bass playing as something that was my instrument.  I had started down a path as a freelance writer and a teacher.  And around my 30th birthday I realized, you know what, if I don’t take the leap now, I’m not going to do this.  So I spent about seven years working more or less as a full-time professional musician.  And that doesn’t mean I didn’t have little day jobs here and there; but my primary focus was performing, recording, touring.  And it really has informed the work I do now as a communications professional because music is a language, and bands are teams.  So no matter what setting you find yourself in, there’s a lot of overlap. BILL YATES:  That’s good.  I know many times I’ll hear people make the reference of a conductor to a project manager.  It’s a nice analogy, bring out the best from each instrument and knowing the right mix and that kind of thing.  That’s fantastic.  You know, I’ve come across others in project management who have something like this that really informs them. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, I’ve listened to your podcast.  To our audience out there, Matt has a podcast called Sounds Out of Time.  And he talks to musicians, talks about music, and it’s really interesting.  You have this great NPR voice. BILL YATES:  Yup. WENDY GROUNDS:  Here’s the jazz section from Matt; you know?  It’s really good. MATT KOHUT:  I didn’t know that until somebody told me that.  I had no idea. Social Power and Personal Power WENDY GROUNDS:  All right.  Let’s jump into talking leadership and talking communication.  One of the first things we wanted to talk about was there’s a difference between having social power and personal power.  Those are two very different leadership terms.  Can you define them for us? MATT KOHUT:  Well, social power, as the word “social” suggests, has to do with being with other people.  And to a certain extent I think that it all comes down to the idea that, if you have power in a situation, ultimately you’re getting people to do something they might not otherwise do.  And there are a lot of different ways to do this. I’m actually a fan of an old boss of mine, a guy named Joseph Nye, who is an international relations theorist, a foreign policy expert.  And he was the person who coined the terms “soft power” and “hard power.”  And I actually find these really almost in some way the more interesting way to frame power.  Hard power is coercing people, that is, you have to do this; and soft power is attracting people.  And he always made the point that it’s much cheaper to attract people than to coerce them.  They’re going to want to do what you want them to do, and they’ll do it even willingly. And there are a variety of different ways you can do that if you’re a country thinking about trying to attract others to your agenda.  But then I think it’s a really interesting metaphor for project managers and for anyone working in teams and professional settings, as well. BILL YATES:  Certainly.  And there’s so much fallout when you do have to use hard power.  It just doesn’t last, and especially if you want to keep your team together.  And, “Okay, we had to push hard to finish something up.  I’ll see you guys next week and we’ll start the next project.”  Some of them are looking at you like, “No, you won’t.  I’m out of here.” MATT KOHUT:  That’s right. Knowing your Likeability BILL YATES:  There’s a big price.  There’s a quote from an article that we wanted to reference with you.  “Before people decide what they think of your message, they decide what they think of you.”  It’s such a key to being an effective communicator, understanding how other people judge your character.  So how important is likability, not only in terms of good leadership, but also when managing other project stakeholders? MATT KOHUT:  Well, there are a couple of things to that.  I think that, first off, that point about the fact that people are judging your message through their feelings about you is really important, and that can have to do with likability.  It can also have to do with their sense of your legitimacy or of your credibility, as well.  So likability for sure matters.  It’s one of the things that matters.  There are other things that matter, as well. So let’s just take the idea, though, first, of the importance of your message being filtered through how people feel about you.  Right now we’re having a conversation.  You’re figuring out how you feel about me at the same time you’re figuring out how you feel about my message.  And you can’t really sort the two out.  It’s not like our brains say, “Well, I dislike the person, but I like the message.”  Generally speaking, it’s just not that conscious on our part.  More often emotion leads, and logic follows.  And we feel some way, and then we make up a rationale for why we feel that way.  It’s called “motivated reasoning” in the political world where people choose their candidate based on a gut sense, and then they come up with all these reasons why they think that person is the perfect person to be governor or dog catcher or whatever. And that’s largely true about the way we interpret messages from people, too.  We filter them through our feelings about the person.  And sure, sometimes once we know someone, we can have some nuance about it and say, “Well, I really like him even though we disagree about X.”  But by and large there’s a gray area there.  So when you get to likeability, it’s a lot harder to disagree with someone you like.  Think about this in your own life.  You have good close friends, and then they say something.  “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe he just said that.”  But it’s your friend and you like them.  You don’t want to hurt their feelings. So likeability makes you more influential with people,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Transformations fail because we are failing to transform our people. In a successful transformation project, it is crucial to manage human behavior and pay attention to aligning culture and strategy. To lead a successful transformation project cultivate a healthy environment that inspires people to follow. Table of Contents 02:06 … Ricardo’s Story04:40 … Transforming Passion into Profession06:20 … Brightline Initiative10:44 … The Failure Rate on Digital Transformations15:54 … When Strong Leadership is a Liability20:18 … Effective Team Collaboration24:32 … Kevin and Kyle25:37 … Aligning Culture and Strategy30:39 … Diversity is More Effective33:26 … Cultivate a Healthy Culture36:17 … Getting Stakeholders Onboard41:33 … Contact Ricardo44:16 … Closing RICARDO VARGAS:  So what happens on digital transformation?  The company say, “We are doing this.  We are transformed.”  And the employee that is there saying, “And so what?  What is in there for me?  What is in there for me?”  And if I don’t see that, what I do?  I will say, you know, “I don’t want to be part of that.” WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love having you join us twice a month to hear about project stories and leadership lessons, as well as advice from industry experts from all around the world.  And we want to bring you some support as you navigate your projects.  We have one such leadership expert with us today. BILL YATES:  We are fortunate to have Ricardo giving us the time and sharing his experience and knowledge with us.  It’s going to be phenomenal. WENDY GROUNDS:  I’m sure many of you have heard of Ricardo Vargas.  He’s an experienced leader in global operations, project management, business transformation, as well as crisis management.  He’s the founder and managing director of Macro Solutions. And he’s also a former chairman of the Project Management Institute, as well as a PMI fellow.  He also tells us a little bit about being the director of project management and infrastructure of the United Nations, leading more than 1,000 projects in humanitarian development projects.  And we talk to him about the Brightline Initiative.  Ricardo created and led this initiative from 2016 to 2020.  He has the Five Minutes podcast, and he gives some excellent project management advice on his podcast. BILL YATES:  Wendy, it’s going to be great to talk with Ricardo and get his input on the human side on digital transformation projects, complex projects, where sometimes we get a bit fascinated with the technology.  And as Ricardo points out, it’s all about the people. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Ricardo.  Welcome to Manage This. RICARDO VARGAS:  Thank you very much.  I’m very glad to be here with you today. Ricardo’s Story WENDY GROUNDS:  We are really honored to have you.  I think it’s been a long time coming that we wanted to talk with you, so we’re honored to have you with us today.  Can you look back and tell me how you got into project management?  What’s your story? RICARDO VARGAS:  No, that’s very interesting because you know my background, I’m a chemical engineer.  And when I was a student of chemical engineering, this was in the early ‘90s.  One of the disciplines I was studying was operational research.  So how do you put things in order, you know, on the production line, on the project.  And that was the first time I met the concept of critical path, of you know, resource leveling. And coincidentally, at that exact time I was working with Microsoft.  I was owner of a partner of Microsoft in Brazil.  And Microsoft was putting an effort on a new tool that they want to roll out in Brazil that was called Microsoft Project.  And they didn’t want anyone to say, “Okay, who can help us to leverage that?”  Because, Excel has mathematics, Word has the language, but Project is something different.  It’s not mathematics.  It’s something like planning.  And at that time, I was fascinated about that at the school.  And I said, “Look, do you want me to step in and try to study?”  At that time, Microsoft was not the size of Microsoft today.  Microsoft Brazil was tiny, tiny, tiny organization at that time. So what I did, I started studying the Microsoft Project, and I started going to clients with Microsoft to explain what was this new tool.  And this was how I got into that.  And then I said, “Wow, this is fascinating.  Microsoft is investing a lot on that.  So I think I can benefit with my engineering background.”  And with that, I looked on the Internet, and I found PMI.  I became a member.  Yeah, and then everything, I always tell that I start through, I would say, the back door; you know?  I start to use the software, then to see the potentiality of the discipline.  This is how I started, long time ago. BILL YATES:  That’s amazing.  Yeah, that’s a long time ago.  And it’s so interesting.  Fast-forward in 2022, you’ve been recognized as a PMI Fellow.  And that’s just, that’s fantastic.  It’s amazing, you go from, dabbling with Microsoft Project and introducing that and influencing that in Brazil.  And then fast-forward to where you are today.  That’s phenomenal. Transforming Passion into Profession RICARDO VARGAS:  Sometimes when I try to look back, everything that happened with me was, of course, I had a very strong direction of travel because I like, since I was very young, to build things, to transform ideas into reality.  For example, I remember when I was a child.  And I come from a simple family in Brazil, and we did not have resources to buy things, to buy toys.  So I used to build the toy.  And most of the time, I spent most of the time having the idea to build a new car with, you know, cans, and doing this.  But when the car was ready, I didn’t have too much fun on playing.  For me, the fun was to build the car and not to play with the car.  And this is how things start. So I am fascinated about getting things done.  And I transformed this passion into a profession.  And this is how things were, I would say, a little bit easier for me on my journey.  I also love to help people also to move forward, you know, this collective sense.  And this is why, for example, I’m doing this podcast.  This is why, for example, I struggle to say no when people invite me to talk because maybe out of hundreds of people that may listen, you know, you can touch on one person, and we can make something different to him or to her.  This is what is my passion about. BILL YATES:  That’s terrific.  And we’re definitely aligned with that.  Just the thought of, if just one project manager takes away something from this conversation today that improves their work or their work-life balance, then that’s success. Brightline Initiative You know, one of the career stops that you made that we wanted to ask you about involved Brightline Initiative.  You launched that, and you worked with that for four years.  Just for our listeners, can you give a description of the Brightline Initiative, and then what your role was in that? RICARDO VARGAS:  Yeah, the PMI Board of Directors between 2013 and 2000, I would say ‘15, was trying to understand why project management was so powerful, so strong on the mid-level management, but very much disconnected from the top management.  So the senior, the C-level executive, the CEO, he or she did not think that project management was something to think about.  They think about, “Oh, I need to envision the future.  I need to see how the future will be.”  And then I just put this on a piece of paper, and I throw to someone and say, “Now just deliver it.”  And what companies start seeing is that, “Oh, this is not working very well, you know.  This is not working.” So what was the idea?  The best way I want to explain this, and I will explain extremely informal, imagine that you have one mountain in one side with the project managers, and this group has awareness of the value, has awareness of the profession.  I would say PMI and other associates have a good influence on that.  On the other side of that mountain is the senior exec, the leadership that does not necessarily recognize the other side of the mountain the way it is. And PMI tried for many times to build this bridge through one side, going from the project management and trying to build this bridge.  But as far as you go away from the initial mountain, your bridge does not have too much strength to be kept.  So what I tell everybody, Brightline Initiative was like a special force, you know, operation.  So what we did, we suddenly appeared in the middle of that mountain with a name that was different and why it was different, to reduce the resistance.  When people say project management, “Oh, then it’s the other mountain.  It’s not with me that you talk.” So we create Brightline, and we connected in a coalition with other institutions.  And what was the aim of Brightline?  It’s to convince these people to help us to bridge this gap from the other side so we can connect.  It means this will increase the power of the profession.  So project manager, most of the time the profession has a ceiling.  It means you go project manager, senior project manager, then you go maybe to program, program director, and that’s it.  For you to go up, then you need to shift a little bit, then you can go up.  So why not have a Chief Project Officer, something like that. And this is exactly what we did.  This is why, for example, the circles that Brightline was navigating were different.  And this was why at the beginning this was not very much disclosed because we want to build that relationship with the World Economic Forum.  And this was basically my task because I have experience as, for example, the company in Brazil that I told you that was the partner,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. The need for optimal emotional intelligence is even more pronounced in project management and Dr. Vanessa Druskat, who is married to a project manager, shares insights on emotional and team intelligence on how to improve your own EQ. If we can get in touch with an emotion, we can manage it, and the more emotionally and self-aware we are the more we can build emotionally intelligent teams. Table of Contents 02:37 … What is Emotional Intelligence?05:43 … Developing Your Emotional Intelligence07:07 … A Work in Progress08:25 … EQ and Cognitive Intelligence09:20 … The Need for Emotional Intelligence in Projects11:03 … EQ Research Study of Project Managers12:48 … Self-Confidence15:50 … Kevin and Kyle16:54 … Emotional Intelligence Starts with Self-Awareness19:09 … The Brain Science behind Emotional Intelligence21:03 … The Emotional Brain at the Unconscious Level23:53 … No Motivation without Emotion25:59 … Managing Oneself29:44 … Social Harmony34:45 … Find Out More36:42 … Closing VANESSA DRUSKAT:  And so the kind of norms that create space for people so that everyone can have the synergy, the kind of habits you create build an emotionally intelligent environment, and are more likely to have harmony and synergy and really produce.  You can produce results without that, but they’re not going to be synergistic.  They’re not going to be as good, WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love to have you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories and leadership lessons and advice from industry experts from around the world. And just one of those industry experts is Vanessa Druskat.  Vanessa is a multi-award-winning behavioral scientist, and she’s an internationally recognized expert on leadership and team development.  She has a research program examining the differences between the behavioral strategies of high- and average-performing work teams.  And this led her to pioneer the concept of team emotional intelligence. Vanessa has a popular Harvard Business Review article with S. Wolff on emotionally intelligent teams.  She’s a member of the board of directors of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, and she talks a little bit about that at the end of the podcast.  And she’s also an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.  So you may have gathered we’re talking about emotional intelligence. BILL YATES:  Yes, we are.  This is such a critical skill for project leaders, for project managers because we all know it.  We can’t do this on our own.  We’ve got to work with a team.  Sometimes that team, each one of the team members brings their own issues to the table.  We’ve got our own issues.  You bring in the issues of our customer, the issues of our contractors, and there’s just a lot to manage. WENDY GROUNDS:  There’s a lot of issues. BILL YATES:  There’s a lot of issues.  So we need to be more emotionally intelligent and figure out how to get things done. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Vanessa.  Welcome to Manage This. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Thank you.  It’s wonderful to be here with you, Wendy. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re very happy to have you as our guest, and this is definitely a topic we’ve wanted to talk about again.  And I think you bring such a fresh perspective.  And Bill and I were very excited when we found out your husband was a project manager. BILL YATES:  Yeah. WENDY GROUNDS:  So you definitely speak with some authority on this topic. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yes, indeed.  I’ve heard plenty of stories from my husband. BILL YATES:  I’ll bet. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Some difficult times. BILL YATES:  Yes. What is Emotional Intelligence? WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  So to get started, let’s just talk a little bit about what constitutes emotional intelligence.  Could you just describe that for us? VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Sure.  So two things about emotional intelligence that I’ll start off by saying.  In the field of psychology, we never really knew what social skills were.  We didn’t know how to measure them.  We couldn’t define them.  And so early on in the 1950s and ‘60s, the most well-known psychologists said let’s just not deal with social skills.  Let’s focus on what we can measure easily and define, which is, you know, IQ, cognitive intelligence.  And once we started learning more about the brain, we started learning about the importance of emotion in social interaction.  We started to really understand what social skills are all about. And so essentially emotional intelligence is a great way to define social skills.  We now know that every social interaction involves an exchange of emotion.  And so emotional intelligence really is using emotion as data.  It’s recognizing that emotion, recognizing that this is an exchange of emotion and managing that emotion.  Often it’s really managing yourself in order to help manage the other person. But let me give you the formal definition that most people agree to.  I’m going to have to read it to you, but I’ll explain it once I read it.  It’s a personal and social intelligence – because it is really about yourself, but it’s also about the way you interact with others – that enables us to monitor our own emotions and the emotions of others, to discriminate among emotions.  So, for example, you can discriminate between anger and anxiety, which is something a lot of people confuse, and then to use that information to guide your thinking and your decision-making, your actions, your interactions.  And so really it is using emotion as data to improve your interactions. BILL YATES:  That’s good. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  And your decisions, by the way, because every decision involves emotion, we now know. BILL YATES:  To me, there are two significant pieces to that.  There’s the self piece, self-awareness, self-management; and then looking at a team or looking at another person and recognizing what’s going on with those other people, and then trying to influence that.  Like you said, you know, there’s cognitive.  There’s, “Okay, how do I do on an IQ test?”  That’s one thing.  But now I’ve got to work with people and get things done.  So let’s look at EQ and see really how effective can I be. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Exactly.  Once you’ve got to start interacting with others – because, you know, we can’t do these things alone, especially project manager.  You’re not supposed to be doing it alone.  As soon as you’ve got others involved, you need to really think about who they are, their emotional world, how you impact them emotionally, how you’re coming across, because it impacts the way they respond to you. BILL YATES:  Yeah, that’s tremendous. Developing Your Emotional Intelligence WENDY GROUNDS:  Can a person develop emotional intelligence and these interpersonal skills, if that doesn’t come naturally? VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yes, absolutely.  That’s been one of the great things about the field of emotional intelligence.  I can tell you there’s been a lot of research in the last 30 years.  First, we spent a decade trying to define it.  Then we spent a decade trying to say, “Well, what’s its link to performance in all different kinds of areas?”  We also look at it in school systems, by the way.  Originally, a lot of the research was focused on kids and their emotional awareness.  But the business world, organizational world just clung onto it and said, “Finally, there’s something that can help define what differentiates really high performers from people who are good, but not really superior in their roles.” So the last decade has been all about how do we develop it, and in fact we can.  So there’s been a lot of really good research done.  Some of my colleagues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio have done a lot of that.  They’ve tracked MBA students over time.  They’ve helped develop skills.  And they’ve seen which ones last, you know, how you develop them and which skills actually last for, you know, a five-year period.  So yes, it’s not easy to develop in the sense that it requires practice. BILL YATES:  Yeah. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  So you can’t just read about it.  You have to do it.  And that requires some risk, especially if you’re an introvert. A Work in Progress BILL YATES:  Yeah.  This is so important to me, and this is an area where we’ve got some other building blocks that we’ll cover.  But then we’ll get into some practical advice that you can share with us for those who need to grow this ability.  But I just want to hit the pause button and say to the listeners, this is great news, right, for those who struggle with this.  And man, I just have the hardest time connecting with my team, or I have the hardest time getting along with my customer, or my contractors.  There’s hope, right?  There’s a whole body of study behind this, and there are practical steps that you can take.  So we’ll go into that deeper, but that’s just really good news that you shared.  Yes, this can be developed. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yes, absolutely.  It’s always a work in progress. BILL YATES:  Sure. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  And I’m, you know, I’ve been working on it myself, so I can tell you some of my own stories.  And my husband, as well. WENDY GROUNDS:  I think we all take a look back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, look back in our youth, and we think, “Oh, my gosh, the things I did.”  I was so emotionally unintelligent. BILL YATES:  Yeah. WENDY GROUNDS:  Not that I’ve got it all together now; but, man. VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yeah.  And also the good news is, typically, the older we get, the more emotionally intelligent we become because we’ve had more emotional experiences.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world. With billions of people tuning in to view the games, we wondered if anyone noticed the grass! In this unique project story, John Holmes explains how he navigated the selection process and became the exclusive supplier of turfgrass for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. We share the planning, logistics, challenges, constraints and lessons learned in this remarkable project. Table of Contents 02:18 … Meet John03:41 … Atlas Turf Production05:22 … Sustainable Solutions06:53 … The Bid for The FIFA World Cup Turf09:23 … Transporting the Turf11:46 … Project Coordination and Planning14:12 … Kevin and Kyle15:41 … Project Budget16:57 … Project Timeline18:47 … Biggest Risk Factor19:39 … Collaborations and Cultural Differences21:43 … Government Restrictions22:38 … Lessons Learned23:56 … Soccer vs. Golf Turf25:52 … Leadership Advice from John27:30 … Find out More28:33 … Closing JOHN HOLMES: I’ve been really fortunate to travel to some very unique places.  And it’s really helped me grow as a person, and meeting folks from different cultures, nationalities, different beliefs than me.  But at the end of the day, everybody’s a human being and has the same struggles, similar struggles.  I try to be very respectful, too.  And I think that’s so important when you’re dealing with different cultures.  Well, at the end of the day in a business deal, everybody’s trying to get to the same point and having a successful project.  And figuring out a way to do it without animosity, without any issues is so important and makes things go very smoothly. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast for project managers by project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and our engineer, Danny Brewer.  We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, and advice from industry experts from all around the world; and we love to bring you some support as you navigate your projects.  You can also claim free Professional Development Units from PMI by listening to our show.  Listen up at the end of the show for advice on how to do that. Now, Bill, we have an interesting conversation with John Holmes today. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  He’s from Atlas Turf.  Atlas Turf produced the grass for some of the world’s premier golf associations.  And I love the story that he was responsible for the turf that was used in the 2022 FIFA World Cup. BILL YATES:  Isn’t that amazing, yeah.  And he happens to be – their company is headquartered here in Georgia.  But he has delivered product and solutions all over the globe.  He’s had a lot of personal travel.  I’d like to see his passport and see some of the stamps in that. WENDY GROUNDS:  And he also has been in places like Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the Maldives, New Caledonia, Seychelles.  It’s all over the world into very interesting places he’s taking his grass. BILL YATES:  That’s true.  He delivers.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, John.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for joining us today. JOHN HOLMES:  So glad to be here and able to share our unique story. Meet John WENDY GROUNDS:  Have you always worked with turf?  What was your career path? JOHN HOLMES:  I have a degree in turf grass management.  But my career started when I was a teenager working on the local golf course in our town.  And in doing so I discovered that you could actually go to college and get a degree in managing turf grass, and I did that and became a golf course superintendent, managing the turf grass on a golf course, almost 32 years ago. BILL YATES:  How about that.  So you’ve been working with grass for 30-something years.  And then how did you come to Atlas, you know, what was that transition? JOHN HOLMES:  My career as a golf course superintendent took me and my wife to Mexico and the Philippines, managing golf courses.  And eventually I landed back here in the United States working for a turf farm as a salesperson.  And we created a unique business of exporting turf grass.  We didn’t invent the process, but we somewhat perfected it.  And then as the recession came along, the great recession in 2008-2009, I essentially bought the business from the company I was working with and created Atlas Turf.  And we set off, took off running in 2011. Atlas Turf Production WENDY GROUNDS:  Where are your turf products produced?  Where do you grow the grass? JOHN HOLMES:  So our core business is exporting turf grass stolons or sprigs.  And they’re grown in South Georgia, in Adel, Georgia; and in Camden, South Carolina at two different turf farms.  And we’ll get into that process, sure, in a little while.  We also have a seed company based just south of Portland, Oregon. BILL YATES:  You are located in LaGrange; is that right?  LaGrange, Georgia? JOHN HOLMES:  LaGrange, Georgia, yup, just southwest of Atlanta. BILL YATES:  For some I think they know it as LaGrange.  Those are for the fancy folks.  It’s amazing to me, I mean, what caught our attention was we started reading about Atlas Turf and the impact that your company was having all over the world.  Your turf is showing up in these huge projects, like the World Cup.  And it really brought attention.  But it’s not all about sporting fields.  You guys have a whole line of different products that meet different needs.  So describe a bit about those different products and how they’re being applied. JOHN HOLMES:  Our company in earnest starting providing turf grass solutions to golf courses in very difficult locations.  And when I say “difficult,” places where water quantity was a challenge, water quality was a challenge.  And we had products that would grow in those conditions.  But challenging for both the customer and us was getting the product to those unique, sometimes far out of the way locations.  And we really started our business hitting those obscure markets and just kind of grew into the business that we are today. Sustainable Solutions WENDY GROUNDS:  I was looking at your website.  I was very interested in some of the products that you do produce.  And I saw that you also, other than golf courses and sports fields and turf for soccer, you also have products that are solutions for erosion, reclaiming land, and those type of issues.  Can you tell us a little bit about that, and the grasses you produce for that? JOHN HOLMES:  Yeah, so we have a turf grass.  The scientific  name is paspalum vaginatum.  Seashore paspalum is the common name.  Platinum TE is the one variety, and Pure Dynasty is the seeded variety.  The paspalum turf grasses are very salt-tolerant, meaning they don’t grow with ocean water, but they tolerate higher levels of salt than almost any other turf grass.  And along with that tolerance comes the ability for those grasses to grow in adverse conditions like mining sites where heavy metals may be mined; and, you know, those mines have to be reclaimed and put back into their natural state.  Paspalum fits into those markets.  And because of the deep rooting of the paspalums, they’re also used in land stabilization, as well.  So we work with a number of companies across the United States on land reclamation projects and erosion control. BILL YATES:  Yeah. The Bid for The FIFA World Cup Turf WENDY GROUNDS:  The next thing I want to get into is the FIFA World Cup.  And for those who are not in the know of the FIFA World Cup, it was in 2022 towards the end of the year in Qatar; and Platinum TE was the turf on all the playing fields.  How did you bid for that project?  How did you get that project? JOHN HOLMES:  Yeah, it’s kind of an amazing story.  So about nine years ago I received an email from a person over in Qatar who was interested in trialing the Platinum TE on one of the soccer pitches at a facility called the Aspire Zone, which is the Olympic training facility for Qatar.  And they were interested in the Platinum TE, again because of its salt tolerance and its ability to grow in harsh climates.  And so we shipped some material over there, and one of my business trips over to the Middle East region, I stopped into Qatar.  I’d never been there before.  And I went to visit the field manager.  And he was just over the moon with the quality of the turf grass.  This was way before Qatar was awarded the World Cup.  And so they were happy with it.  We were happy that they were a happy customer. And then the country was awarded the World Cup.  And FIFA came in, and they started trials on which turf grass would work best there.  So the Aspire Zone folks, FIFA, and a couple of independent parties, STRI out of the U.K., started trialing turf grasses from all over the world in various different conditions, not knowing during the trials that the tournament would actually be in the cooler months of the year, but they also trialed the turf in heavy shade conditions because most of the stadiums are almost completely covered, not totally.  And during those trials, the Platinum TE kept on trialing number one, number one, number one. And so eventually we started getting requests from contractors in Qatar for our Platinum TE.  No one ever picked up the phone and said, “Hey, your Platinum TE’s going to be on the World Cup fields.”  But we kind of made that assumption.  And so we started sending turf grass over to Qatar from the farm in Adel, Georgia with our partners Pike Creek Turf. Transporting the Turf The turf, just a background on how that process works, is harvested by a machine, and imagine squares of sod shredded into small pieces of grass.  And they’re washed free of soil, hydro-cooled and boxed, and flown over to Qatar.  We do that with the majority of our shipments of turf grass.