Emotionally Effective Project Management

I'm putting the finishing touches on a status report that looks like Fyodor Dostoevsky or Edgar Allan Poe might be its author; a dashboard that is a narrative of decay, despair and impending collapse. My manager is nervous and hovering, and is slipping into the pit of micro-management, as the pendulum of budget cuts swings closer and closer to his chest. It's not a good Friday afternoon.

The three-year strategic initiative I'm leading has to complete successfully by the end of this quarter, only 3 weeks away. It just turned red, and the Board of Directors has been asking hard questions since it turned yellow, 4 weeks ago. The get-to-green plan is a work of science fiction, a necessary fiction, intended to give people the illusion of light emerging within a dark red fog. Red! Fall colours indicate sickness in a project, where I work. The dashboard reads like an oncologist's diagnostic image for Stage 4 cancer.

The executive sponsor was just walked out the door, and no surviving VP wants to take the risk of accepting responsibility for fixing a failing project, with a huge amount of sunk cost. Key stakeholders, disciples of Sun Tzu, are now at war, searching for the most precise language they can find to fix the blame for the project's troubles on everyone but themselves. Emails that had been ignored for weeks are being meticulously mined for evidence of personal innocence by various stakeholders, some seeking to justify their chronic inactivity and unresponsiveness throughout the project's lifecycle.

The more complex, and hierarchichal an organization is, the more common stories like this seem to be. In Control Cultures, classical hierarchies where predictability and risk aversion drive organizational, process and policy development, delivery is hard. It is compromised by the web of interlinked procedures generated by well-intentioned, internal process factories, all trying to manage and lower risk. Nothing moves quickly, and PMs and their teams can get caught in the web, immobilized by sticky processes. Morale and productivity plummet.

For my fictional project, the team is exhausted, demoralized and, as the team's emotional climate erodes away, the quality of their work is slipping. Our EVP is about to pull the plug on the project, declaring it a failure. The team knows.

Rumours of a coming re-org, a merger with a competitor, outsourcing of jobs and layoffs are creeping like some kind of angry sludge across the floor of our department. And now, I am swimming in a sea of fear, disappointment and shame. And I want to run away as fast and as far as I can. Sound familiar? You're not alone. Thousands of project management professionals travel this road with you around the world, daily. It is the darker edge of change, the one that happy clappy self-improvement slogans or employee engagement jingoism cannot burnish away. But somehow, in spite of it all, we walking wounded have to deliver, and my job as the PM, is to lead the team, to manufacture hope and provide a safety net over it so that some semblance of the project scope and its intended business benefits can be delivered, if at all possible. Like Ernest Shackleton, I have to override my fears and anxieties and those of a team desperately in need of compassionate leadership and lead them to a safe harbour. I am not just a delivery lead now. I am an emotional climate manager.

This hypothetical situation highlights the need for a set of competences that we have to develop, something outside of the technical skills and tools we use as practitioners. And that 'something' can make or break a project, a program, a portfolio, or a career. There are competencies that need to augment the ones we have traditionally focused on as PMs.

Delivering project benefits as a Delivery Pilot is and has always been our raison d'être as practitioners. What has not always been as clear a requirement is that we become better Team Builders, deliberate developers or enrichers of individual and team competence.

People and teams should be growing in their ability to positively impact our organizations by working with us. The Financial Analyst, just out of her internship, who shows talent in developing a schedule for her tasks should be given the opportunity to deepen that talent by you as her PM. Give her more scheduling responsibility and push past that when possible to further enrich her experience. As PMs we are not just scanning for progress on and impacts to delivery. We are also scanning for dormant or under-utilized potential that can be pushed to flower in the context of a project.

Organizational Change Management has emerged as a new profession that remediates the persistent deficiencies we demonstrated in the last mile of delivery. We focused on delivering scope, within budget, and on time. We regularly threw the project at its completion over a wall to Operations and would walk away to the sound of broken glass on the other side of the wall. OCM developed to fix that problem. We cannot shirk our responsibility to manage the organizational change our projects are triggering as they are executed. It is a fundamental requirement today. No more broken glass.

As Emotional Climate Managers, we need to adopt a new approach to managing our teams. Whatever the state of the organization, whatever its struggles. We have a critical role to play in managing the team's emotional state, its emotional climate, its morale. But to do this, we need to understand Emotional Intelligence and to increase in it ourselves. What exactly do emotions affect?

Clearly, emotions affect everything. To become Emotionally Intelligent Project Managers we need to do some research on the subject, reflecting deeply and identifying where, when and how we can apply EI principles to enrich our project management tool box.

Understanding and working with our emotions and the emotions of those beside us is key to effective project management in the Age of Agile.

So what does Emotionally Intelligent Project Management, a practice that leverages emotional data to achieve better outcomes, look like in action?

When Emotionally Intelligent Project Management is at work, Project Delivery, Organizational Change Management, Team Development and the Emotional Climate of the team are informed by the PM's deliberate consideration of the effects of emotions on delivery. Teams with low morale do not deliver, or, they deliver with a diminishing degree of effectiveness over time. Today we have to understand that and to develop techniques for managing these realities better.

Perhaps we thought that people have to manage their own emotions, and that this should not be of concern to PMs. Today, we ignore the impact of emotions on delivery at our own peril.

Will you pull off a miracle, and turn a Red project into a Green one through Emotionally Intelligent Project Management? There's no guarantee that you will. Shackleton's project failed. But like Shackleton, you might save a beleaguered project team, and deliver them to the closest thing to a safe harbour, when all is said and done. And that's something.

Shackleton and his team - A Study in Emotionally Intelligent Team Leadership.