Month: September 2019

“What makes a leader” by Daniel Goleman

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Is the project manager a leader? Does he/she need leadership skills? What kind of leadership skills?

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a concept that slowly but surely gets into the pragmatic business world, management quarters and project management. EI is defined by the author as the ability to read and understand emotions in ourselves and in others and to handle those feelings effectively.
It is a valuable book to me also for development management involving international teams spread over many countries.
The book explains why IQ is important to get a management job and why to keep it EI takes over.
I experienced the book the way a novice gets to know the taste of different coffees. Each chapter came with different strengths and flavours for many of a leader’s moments of the day. Simple language explains the affective and social neurosciences behind the EI.
Take away 1: Leaders needs many styles for the very best climate and business performance
The author explains the six styles of leadership he calls authoritative, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, coercive, each with benefits and drawbacks and advice on when to use them either singularly or in combination for best results.
Take away 2: The four competences of EI: a leader needs self-awarness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management to create resonant leadership i.e. match reaction to situation at hand.
Take away 3: Ready to make changes? The author offers a simple and effective five-part process for self-descovery amd reinvention, all based on brain science.
Take away 4: Tools for reflection to regain inspiration. There is quite a choice from reflecting on your past, defining your principles for life, expanding your horizon, envisioning the future to reconnect with your dreams, creating reflective structures to be with your own thoughts to working with a coach.
Take away 5: Followers mirror their leaders. Literally.
Take away 6: the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, a behavioural assessment tool.
Take away 7: the key habit of good leaders is practicing genuine listening.
Take away 8: awareness of different types of focus that makes a person a leader. Inner focus in the 24/7 world, bottom-up relaxed and open attention for creativity and innovation, top-down focus on what is immediately at hand. Outer, Inner and Other focus concepts will get your attention.
Take away 9: to get attention and focus regularly practice meditation or mindfulness, a meditation method stripped of a religious belief system.
Take away 10: our times demand leaders that are not just smart but wise in targeting the greater good of our world beyond the boundaries of one group or organisation.
This book has one shortcoming: it is simply too short. Looking forward to reading more by Daniel Goleman.

“Research skills for policy and development. How to find out fast” edited by A. Thomas and G. Mohan

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I come back from time to time to this book when projects touch upon policy and public action. The book “is aimed at development managers and others who are involved in policy investigation” states its Introduction. In project management, I found it a useful resource when we need to gather information in project design; or we need to learn about stakeholders and their agenda in policy making contexts.

The book is both very informative and an invitation to reflect. It offers tips and lessons learned for example in avoiding pitfalls in research. It covers “thinking with documents” and “thinking with people” for a participative approach. A number of tools such as structured surveys and semi-structured interviews as well as the importance of the subjective and personal are presented.

The book also covers how to bring in data and combine it with qualitative information. Personal integrity and effectiveness in research are brought in as topics of academic debate in the challenge of “trying not to get it wrong”.

In sum, if you are looking at how to inform the public policy-making process and how to communicate the results the book will serve you well both in an policy research and project context.

The beauty of project’s dashboards

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Imagine driving your car without a dashboard. Or flying a plane without it.

Now look at the project you manage. What does your project dashboard show you? Does it give you info and data to know if the project is on track; milestones are achieved on time; costs are under control? Which colours of the traffic lights dominate? Perhaps, it looks like this (for a bit of amusement): img_2099

Many project management programmes/softwares have built-in dashboard functions. A click here, a click there – and you and the project’s sponsor have it all on one page and/or on the screen. Nice and neat.

If you do not have AI to do it for you, use excel to create a project dashboard. It can serve as a monitoring, communication and reporting tool. It will show the up-to-date status of the project and you can take it out of your sleeve anytime needed for a meeting or report. You can even turn some of the data into a nice infographic and place it on the website of the project/the intranet page. This can be very handy as not all sponsors’ (and even project managers) enjoy reading a Gantt chart.

To build a dashboard, determine which data is essential. In development management projects, this data comes from the donor’s reporting requirements and/or project board needs. In internal projects, the requirements for a Project Status Report serve well that purpose. Checking with the project’s sponsor what essential info they need on the project helps as well.

The following elements are for illustrative purposes and need to be adapted to each project:

  • the list of milestones to be completed since the last report and their current status (on time or delayed);
  • the list of milestones due in the next reporting period;
  • commitment of resources;
  • costs to date compared to budget;
  • number of beneficiaries reached/trained;
  • number of deliverables produced;
  • days to go live;
  • any necessary disaggregated data (by gender, regions, products, departments, for example).

I also found the following tips for dashboard’s design helpful:

  • choose 2-3 colours;
  • follow minimalism rather than art nouveau in visuals;
  • keep it on one page;
  • make sure everything is readable (avoid small print);
  • if it is necessary to be descriptive, accompany the dashboard with a project status report.