5 Steps to be a Strong – and Connected – Project Manager

As a child there was a phrase that my father loved to use. Any time we reported back that we had tried something, hopeful that the outcome would be other than expected, he would shake his head and say, “Well that is the triumph of hope over experience.” When he said that I always felt a little hurt because there was an implication that I had somehow been foolish to even try.

Nevertheless, I grew up as a generally hopeful person. Despite his perspective, to this day I hope for the best and take the steps I can to achieve it!

My hopefulness was challenged when I received my timeslot for the PMI Global Conference in LA a few years ago. Last day, early morning – I admit I was a little disappointed. I know from my own experience that by the last day many of us are pretty tired, and on the last night we often go out and stay out too late! As another speaker said to me, “no one wants to be the only thing between an audience and their journey home.” But in my usual hopeful way, I focused on the fact that I would have an entire weekend to drum up support for the session. I would take the opportunity to network and see if I could surpass my own expectations.

Hope vs Optimism

And for those who are interested, hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is that general sense that things will work out, and belief that without taking any specific action things will be OK. Hope involves taking steps –?agency?– to make the desired outcome come to pass. I could have been optimistic that lots of people would show up – and possibly disappointed when they did not! Instead I was hopeful people would come and I took steps to make it happen! I also enrolled others to make it happen too! And things are much easier when you have a team behind the goals. To learn more about hope check out?Making Hope Happen?by Shane Lopez.

A Triumph of Hope

So, imagine how thrilled I was to have about 100 participants at the 8:30am breakout session in just about the farthest flung room in the conference center on the third and final day of the conference. One participant admitted they had come to the wrong room – but chose to stay – and a few others may have given up on the even longer walk to the only other farther flung sessions than mine! My apologies to the presenters of the sessions on?Agents of Change?and?Ruthless Prioritization!

Pleased with the attendance, I was even more thrilled to experience how the group embraced the topic – willingly exploring and experiencing character strengths to engage themselves and others! We learned some valuable information about character strengths, teams and engagement.

Project Managers are more likely to be high in Hope and Prudence

Even though our Social Intelligence may not be where we want it to be, we do have some super-strengths. We tend to be higher in hope and in prudence. Not a bad combination for people who are charged with moving things forward in a disciplined and organized way. My audience agreed that hope and prudence are a great combination. They also expressed a love of learning that helps us to learn about new organizations, new teams, new projects and new goals.

Project Managers high in Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence Can Use it to Great Advantage

We can use that Appreciation to engage team members and stakeholders. We can all use appreciation to identify positives in colleague and love of learning to become skilled in spotting colleagues’ strengths and call them out right away!To demonstrate how quickly we can learn to spot strengths, we started with a story. A young man who had long dreamed of becoming a doctor realized that his direction was not quite right for him and changed path despite pressures from family and friends and his own long held expectations.

It was a story of bravery, judgment, prudence, kindness, love, curiosity, perspective and fairness. The audience saw all those strengths and more in the story. Next, a member of the audience stood up and told a story of a time when he was at his best on a project. Without even thinking about it, he started to identify his own strengths as he told his tale.

Audience members called out the strengths they heard – to him unexpected strengths such as love, kindness and perspective and our friend social intelligence. When we asked him how it felt he said, “I felt seen and appreciated,” and “At first I did not recognize some of those strengths in myself, but once they had been pointed out, it felt good and I could see them myself.” This is a very common reaction – we either don’t realize we have the strengths we see in others or we don’t realize that our special qualities really are strengths.

But what are?character strengths? They are 24 traits that were identified during a research study from 2001- 2004. Led by Dr Martin Seligman and Dr Chris Peterson, a team of 55 experts in a variety of fields researched the traits that across the world, among all religions, locations and ethnicity are recognized as positive aspects of humanity. They are traits that are valued, revered, cultivated and respected.

Research suggests that we all have all 24 strengths, but some of those strengths are more meaningful for us and we use them more. Those signature strengths are directly connected to our sense of engagement and meaning. So, when we tap into those strengths, we become more engaged, and when we tap into the character strengths of others, we help them to become more engaged too. And seeing the strengths of others really is not hard. When asked to talk about the strengths of speakers the audience had seen over the weekend, the list was long and came quickly.

Project Managers can Build Engagement by Raising Awareness of Character Strengths

Many people know that?Gallup research?shows that 2/3 of employees are not engaged. And that includes us! Extensive research shows that character strengths?awareness?increases wellbeing, character strengths?use?increases wellbeing even more and research from?Gallup?shows that the single biggest factor in employee satisfaction is how much the employee’s?manager?helps to identify and cultivate character strengths. That’s us!

Project Managers should know that 2/3 of us are unaware of our character strengths

Is it a coincidence that the same proportion of our workforce are strengths blind as are disengaged? Strengths blindness is very common. In fact, when taking the VIA Character Strengths Survey, people often marvel at their top strength and say something like, “I know that is me, but I have never thought of that as a strength.” They are usually smiling broadly when they make that comment! What this tells us is that if we learn about our own strengths, start to spot strengths in others and then help the to cultivate strengths, we improve employee experiences. Isn’t this the heart of social intelligence? To see people for who they are and acknowledge their best traits? Is it not the art of connecting with people through thoughts, ideas and feelings that are meaningful to them? In just a few minutes it seemed our collective social intelligence score had gone up!

Project Managers only make things better by calling out strengths

The beauty of character strengths is that you cannot go wrong in calling them out! No one ever said, “I don’t want to be thought of as brave” or kind, or prudent, or being a good team player. And as we all have all 24 strengths to some degree, we all use all of them at some point or other. All 24 are strengths so there is nothing negative in the feedback, so what is not to like? Contrast that to appraisal and performance reviews! You can practice spotting strengths anywhere – watching TV or a movie, reading a book, chatting with friends or family. You can even make it a game with your kids! In this one quick session, the audience learned about character strengths, how they can use them, what they feel like, how to spot them and that research shows they pay dividends. And that is the tip of the character strengths iceberg. There is so much more to discover!

5 Ways to be a Strong Project Manager are:

1. Leverage Hope tempered with Prudence to build achievable plans

2. Use Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence to spot and call out strengths in others

3. Build engagement by focusing on strengths

4. Call out the strengths that you see. You cannot go wrong by calling out strengths. What strengths do you see in the people around you?

Be hopeful. Be strong. Be brave. Be Curious.

TAKE YOUR FREE CHARACTER STRENGTHS SURVEY

Want to hear Ruth Speak? On April 14th, she is speaking to the NCPMI Leadership Community of Practice on the Topic of Burnout in Project Managers.

* Ultimately our research discovered that PMs do indeed seem to be LOW in Social Intelligence compared to the general population and HIGH in Honesty, Perseverance and Prudence.

References:

Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E. P. Seligman.?Character Strengths and Virtues: a Handbook and Classification. American Psychological Association, 2004.

Lopez, Shane J.?Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others. Atria Paperback, 2014.

Gallup, Inc. “State of the Global Workplace.”?Gallup.com, www.gallup.com/services/178517/state-global-workplace.aspx.

Gallup, Inc. “State of the American Manager.”?Gallup.com, www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager.aspx.