I wondered if I'd be able to keep up the tip writing. Thanks to three readers they made writing these first ten Project e-Tips easy for me. My plan is in place for the next ten. I just need three more submissions from readers!

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

010: Leaders Produce Trust in the Project Setting

Project managers often think their work is having a good schedule, assuring the contracts are at the best prices, reporting status to management, and attending to the customers' changing requirements. While all that is important it isn't what separates a good project from a great project. Great projects occur in a setting of trust. Projects inevitably require learning, innovation, and always cooperation. Many projects are composed of team members who are strangers to each other. Certainly the low-bid subcontractors find themselves on project teams where few people know each other. You even find strangers on project teams in the same company. If you want great project results you must have trust. The principal work of the project manager/leader is to continuously tend to trust. Not the naive trust, rather a prudent trust that turns strangers into friends and friends into team mates. The work of cultivating trust ends when the project is complete. Last Planner is a trademark of The Center for Innovation in Project and Production Management www.leanconstuction.org

©2003 Hal Macomber | weblog.halmacomber.com | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip

I hope these e-tips are useful for you. Don't hesitate to pass them around, post them in your project workspace, or make them a discussion topic at project team meeting. Please let me know how you are using them.

posted by Hal at 8:28 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

I'm sharing this morning's The Listening Leader newsletter with you to go along with my recent postings on (5R) Protocol for a Listening Workplace and Reflections on 5S and 5R. The two paragraphs come from the book Credibility by Kouzes and Posner. While the lesson is geared at leaders, the project situation demands listening from all performers. There is good advice here for project managers/leaders and those coordinating the work of others.

Credible Leaders Listen And Learn

Impressive listening skills have been identified as one common characteristic of credible leaders. A willingness to listen carefully to constituents and, if necessary, to hear the bad news keeps leaders from being isolated from critical feedback. When they can get information from a variety of sources, across functions and levels, they are able to know what is going on. To serve others well, leaders must be in touch with them, listen to them, and respect them. Ever try getting good service at a restaurant when your waiter or waitress is never around, is too busy, or seems to think something you have asked for was too much bother?

Being able to listen to the news, good and bad, is a basic ingredient for staying in touch. When things are going well, it's not all that difficult to hear the good news. It's how we react to news about mistakes and difficulties that may be the better indicator of whether or not constituents feel like keeping us in touch. From the constituent's perspective, the question is always, "Did they still shoot the messenger with bad news?"

How do you react to mistakes and difficulties? Are you inviting those conversations? Are you thanking people for those conversations? Are you clear you appreciate the opportunity to learn from these conversations? If you answered "No" to any of these questions, then you're not likely to be hearing all of what you need to hear for a successful project.

If you like what you read here, then subscribe to Dr. Rick Bommelje's Listening Leader newsletter.

I've written about linguistic action as a theory that does a better job at explaining why projects succeed and why they don't succeed. In three weeks I get to present my case at the International Group for Lean Construction 11th Annual Conference at Virginia Tech. You can still register for the event. Visit: http://strobos.cee.vt.edu/IGLC11/.

I'll offer up the paper in this forum as soon as IGLC publishes it, most likely in the next few days. In the meantime, I want to call attention to an aspect of project management that gets far too little attention and is often not performing for us. You guessed it, project controls. I've never quite understood project controls. Project managers set up a structure for tracking and reporting cost and schedule variances often weeks after the incident and we refer to this as 'control'. I've always thought of control as a mechanism for staying on track. There's no way to stay on track when third parties are accumulating data and reporting on it. The only possibility for control is to have the performers take responsibility for making adjustments in the midst of their action.

Some would call that being out of control. Performers are supposed to execute the plan as it is given to them. Doing otherwise would put the project at risk, or so goes the argument. Our common sense is betraying us.

The greatest untapped opportunity for staying in control is the distributed capacity for observing and making assessments. Performers are scattered all about the project setting, whether physical or not. By simply engaging performers in the planning conversations they will be prepared for for noticing, assessing, and taking actions that will keep them on plan. Without including them in the planning conversation they don't know what to look for, let alone what assessments to make.

So there you have it. The most profound thing Greg and I say in our IGLC paper is to stay in control you have to share it with the performers on the team. You do that first by including them in the planning. Then you hold them accountable for offering up observations and assessments that only they can make. How's that? Only they can make those assessments because they were the only ones present to the events as they work wherever they happen to be and the project management team is not.

We stay in control on projects by sharing the responsibility for control. There's more coming! Hope to see some of you in Virginia.

posted by Hal at 9:46 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

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