Be kind to yourself.

Would you push your project team until they snap? Of course not, you believe in sustainable pace.

Would you expect them to consistently sacrifice family time to achieve unviable targets? Of course you wouldn't, you'd rather they delivered consistently over time while maintaining their work-life balance.

Would you have them work when they're ill? No, you're not a monster.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.

Unless you're an appalling relict of an aggressive 1980s management style, you protect your team. You realise they're humans with individual lives and needs outside work.

But do you apply the same standards to yourself as project manager?

There's a tendency in our roles to pick up any slack ourselves, to look after the team and the project as a priority. After all, who gets hauled over the coals if things fall behind? Whose career could be stalled (or ended in case of a contractor) by one catastrophic deployment?

The longer hours and calls with fire-breathing stakeholders is why we get a couple percent more pay than the rest of the team, right?

Sure. And we love it. It makes us feel useful.

But burned out people make mistakes. Even seemingly unstoppable beast-mode project managers.

So take your own advice. Learn to say no (politely), take your holidays (all of them), and if you're ill, recover (no logging on to check on things). The world won't fall apart and you might just enjoy life a bit more before the job inevitably takes you out in your 50s.

Comments

Continuous (Self) Improvement

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” - Leo Tolstoy Introduction: Most people talk a great game about continuous improvement. And as a group, most of us truly agree with and see the benefits of, the concept as applied to our projects and teams. Sprint Retrospectives, Post Implementation Reviews, 5S, DMAIC, PDSA (not the dog people) and so on. But... Do you practice it personally ? I don't mean training courses, formal development plans and all the other bureaucracy that people step through stoically every year in a bid to get a pay rise. I'm referring to the small (but meaningful) improvements we can make every day. Or to work in an Agile principle: "At regular intervals, the team (of one in this case) reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." Step 1: Feedback (aka input to the CI process): Of course, all improvements need to be identified i...

Fear and blame.

Hands up if you've ever heard someone say: "We don't have a fear-and-blame culture." And keep them up if the reaction of the 'doers' was to roll their eyes and mutter something sarcastic. It's a nice phrase to trot out at a senior leadership conference or to write in your 'best employer of 2020' application, but if you have to say it, it's probably not true. And repeating the mantra won't make it any more true. In fact, people might respect you more if you were honest and admitted that there is blame and where the boundaries lie. At least in that scenario, the individual knows where they stand. Instead, we often have the jarring dissonance of hearing our leaders say one thing and seeing them act entirely differently. As a leader (especially a senior leader): When you stand at the front of a room and tell the assembly that there is no fear-and-blame, look at their faces. If they mostly appear too scared to dis...

Agile Armchair Generals

If you're an Agile practitioner of any sort you will understand what I mean by Armchair Generals (if not, it may be an idea to check if you are one..). Apropos of nothing an email arrives that questions the management of your project in terms of whether it is properly 'Agile'. Feedback is, of course, a great tool. But it must always be understood within the context of the person providing it. So when the email lands questioning the type of contingency you've built into your project or the depth of analysis performed on your requirements set, ask yourself: 1. Has the questioner spotted something you and the team have missed? It happens. That's why independent reviews can be helpful. 2. Has the questioner misunderstood something about your project? If so, maybe your communications weren't quite clear enough or they've missed something - it happens, we're all busy. If the questioner has understood the topic correctly and is simply disagreeing ...

IT Project Management - life on the front line

Search This Blog