I’ve seen it done…so I’m now an expert?
This year I was fortunate enough to be staying with relatives in the south of France for a few days. This, by coincidence, was right when the Tour de France was coming through that area. Pretty cool.
Now I ride a bike. Not brilliantly, but I can keep up with friends over a reasonable distance. I walked along the beautifully smooth roads near the house and watched tourists ride along them with big smiles on their faces. I was able to see in my mind how nice the ride would be.
As a cyclist myself, I can appreciate the fun and the feeling of the ride. Does this mean that I could take part in the tour?
You can all stop laughing now….ok, it is a bit funny to think of me in that event!
Just because I’ve ridden a bit, and seen the course, and even seen some of the riders, that by no means makes me a suitable candidate for a member of the peloton.
Now take yourself to the workplace. You’ve picked up a Prince2 textbook. You’ve even been in a meeting where a Project was discussed. Surely it can’t be too hard to just manage it yourself? Wouldn’t that save a few dollars? I mean, you’re a manager, you can do projects, sight?
Inexperience in actually designing, delivering, and controlling a project is one of the more common reasons why things don’t go to plan. It’s often why benefits aren’t realised and why things take longer and cost more than you thought.
Or why people just give up on the whole thing!
In recruitment for operational people you almost never see an ad without a phrase like “must have so many years experience”….yet people everywhere seem to think that projects are just something that anyone can do.
It will almost always be faster, cheaper, and achieve better results by bringing in someone who has actually delivered projects before and does this a lot. They have learned from mistakes, from successes and know what is important to control tightly and what can be let go. They can also advise on which projects aren’t set up to succeed.
If you want a project done well, bring in someone who has the real life experience in delivering, not just a piece of paper. You can learn to deliver a project, with time, and practice and support.
Just like riding a bike!
Are you really solving the right problem?
People are dissatisfied with their current job, their current work environment or even the processes they follow. They want a change.
Enter the optimistic enthusiasm to change stuff!
The eager rush to quit their current job and find a new one. The excitement of kicking off and working on a new project!
Wow, what a buzz!
Not long into the future from this amazing set of ideas comes the letdown feeling. The dramatic deflation. The “post purchase dissonance” or ”buyer’s remorse”. Things are not all beer and skittles, and the dissatisfaction still seems to eat away at them.
But why? The drive for change was there….the action was taken….I mean, doing something is better than doing nothing, right?
Only if you do the right something.
Only if you take action to solve the right problem.
You see the thing we all seek is a sense of control. We want to know that what we do matters and that we can shape not only what we achieve but also how we get there.
Just a change of scenery doesn’t guarantee that this will happen!
If you are not happy in your current job, try asking yourself why. Be specific. Are you unhappy with the tasks you are doing? Are you unhappy with the way you are doing things? What level of control do you have? The job you are in seemed an attractive prospect when you moved from the last situation you weren’t happy with! What has changed?
Most likely you have created a set of boundaries in your head that tells you that you can’t be satisfied where you are. Most people, however, don’t put in the effort to try. There are often many things that you can change where you are that would make a big difference. Even just a conversation with people you can rely on for honest feedback can open up ideas for new perspectives or even new activities. Just changing the name on your business cards isn’t going to help by itself. Otherwise I suggest you don’t unpack your bag – you’ll be looking for the next job pretty soon too!
If you are happy where you are and want to change the world from there, it’s often through a program to deliver new and exciting benefits. This is where that “action orientation” you were so keen to show in the interview will probably come back to bite you! To achieve a benefit you really need to have paused for a moment to consider what actually needs to change from what you are doing today in order for that benefit to be realised. Just rushing in and changing stuff often leads to more work, greater confusion and wasted effort. You might be lucky and do something useful, but more often than not you’ll spend more time in status update meetings than enjoying the benefits you wanted to see.
To solve the right problem a moment of pause is more often than not the best first step. Consider why you want to see change and how you define the better future state. From there you can work backwards to today. What things will need to change that really get you to that dream of a better future?
The concept of planning the steps of change before you start seems a rare thing these days. Pull together a project team, get cracking!
Without a plan, though, you can spend a lot of time, money, effort and emotion on solving the wrong problem and still be left wanting a change.
Often things are not as dire as you first think. Understand the better future you are after and work on the small changes needed to get there. The rules of program management work just as well for achieving benefits in your life…as long as you are sure you are solving the right problem!
Performance comes from actions to change, not personality tests!
I’ve been fortunate to have had many clients who see the benefit of including contractors and consultants in team building exercises. The status of someone as part of a team has little, if anything, to do with payroll arrangements!
One of the more common group activities is the personality or behaviour assessment. Typically, after an extensive list of questions that we each answer online we are brought together to discuss the new insights into our psyches; sometimes it feels into our very souls!
With the aid of a trained facilitator into the “assessment tool-du jour” we delve into what these characterisations and numerical values could mean for our preferred ways of working, and how this information could make us all a better team.
Overall, this seems a worthwhile exercise and often new inspiration as to effective team dynamics is the outcome!
Then comes the next day.
We all return to the office. We all continue to do exactly what we have always done. Nothing that we learned at the offsite team building and being fed by the company day has been carried back with us.
Confused, somewhat deflated quiet conversations can sometimes be heard in the dark corners and corridors…..
What use is there in these offsite exercises other than the predictable email backlog?
Without action there is no benefit at all. In fact quite often the opposite. Running a session that demonstrates how things could be better if you change things is an implied commitment that you are willing to. If you then don’t work to support change; you don’t take the actions that the new insights drive you toward, then it is reasonable to assume that you simply don’t care about making things better. It is reasonable to assume that these assessment offsite days simply tick a box somewhere on some management 101 checklist.
There is real value in learning how teams can better interact. There is real value in learning how people can be more effective in their roles and their workplaces.
Without action to make use of these learnings, however, at best you’ve not added any value in doing the assessments. More likely, though, you’ve actually taken away the current level of enthusiasm and effectiveness by showing everyone that this stuff doesn’t matter to you.
And if learning to be a more effective team doesn’t matter to you, then how can you possibly expect that it will matter to your team?
The value is in the actions that you take, not in the taking of a test.
