Doug Russell, Principal, Executive Team Leadership, LLC, was a speaker at Knovel’s webinar Generate Better Project Results – Learn what holds projects back and how to succeed. Mr. Russell is author of the book Succeeding in the Project Management Jungle published by AMACOM. He has held a variety of team leadership roles including project engineer, project manager, and Director of Programs. He holds an MBA, a BS in Electrical and Computer, and holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. We recently spoke with Doug about project management, and about the webinar he participated in.
K Exchange: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with project management after studying Electrical and Computer Engineering?
Doug Russell: As a kid, I loved the feeling of connected accomplishment that was possible in team sports. Then in engineering school I enjoyed making team projects successful more than my classmates, who generally were more into the technical details.
Also cooperative education during college, and rotational assignments at my first full time job convinced me that the excitement of project management–much like the excitement of figuring out how to win a basketball or baseball game–was much more interesting to me than designing a circuit for a radio or a level shifter for a microprocessor cell family.
I constructed a team my senior year. The electrical engineering department held a yearly softball game with the students, and the professors prided themselves on being pretty good. They always won, as they did my junior year.
So I spent the entire next year looking around at my classmates, talking up a softball team, figuring out who could play what position best, and strategies on how to beat the professors who were all–let’s face it–older and geekier than we were. Students should win those games! And we did win. The feeling of satisfaction was immense when the game actually had to be ended on the mercy rule. I don’t know if the students ever won again!
KX: During the session you talk about seven characteristics of successful teams (transparency, accountability, communication, trust, integrity, leadership and execution), how did you come to select these seven?
DR: When I actually committed to the insanity of writing a book in the Spring of 2008, I devoted a couple of introspective sessions to thinking about what influenced me and how my projects were successful when they succeeded and what was lacking when they didn’t.
Among my influences were sports coaches like John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski, and Phil Jackson. Great coaches are above all things great leaders. I worked a lot with the Army, so I was aware that they have great leadership training. Army generals like Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton were important. In the business world, Frances Hesselbein, Bob Galvin, Patrick Lencioni and numerous others influenced me.
Pretty much all of these people write about a core set of beliefs that they fall back on as needed. These core beliefs, along with talent and hard work, help drive their success.
Next, I thought about the concepts that enable success on projects, as well as how to define those concepts in a project management context. I started with integrity, transparency and accountability which are actually on my business logo. Communication was a given. Many people write about that.
Finally, trust is the one word that has to be there for a team to succeed.
From there I added leadership to drive needed change and the ultimate goal of execution results to create an acronym (TACTILE) that gave the whole thing an action-oriented feel.
KX: In one of the polls given to the audience, 20% of attendees responded that they meet with their project sponsor only quarterly or almost never. Is there a minimum frequency that you would recommend to be successful?
DR: This really gets into the definition of who is the project sponsor. Meeting with a corporate VP responsible for a large entity of which your project is a small part once per month is probably ok. Once per quarter is asking for trouble, because if yours is an important project, they are going to get information from somewhere. And there is no way of telling what they might be hearing if it is not coming from you.
30 minute 1:1s should occur weekly with the next level down executives who have skin in the game, but aren’t involved in the day-to-day project. Not doing so gives their anxieties, worries, needs, and fears no outlet and you aren’t able to do a good job of expectations management. And needless to say they can cause you a lot of problems. This is so important I probably should have found a way to make this the eighth key characteristic of successful projects!
KX: During the webinar you talk about the different expectations of the project team, the customer, and management. In your work, is there one group that you’ve seen to be the most challenging to manage?
DR: All three have their challenges, of course. Customers who have another agenda. This is rare, but it happens. Teams that don’t feel like they need to do anything different. There are groups that have such strong cultures and arrogance that they struggle to change even when shown good results, if those results are achieved in a way unknown to them.
But, for me, the management team’s expectations is the hardest to manage. The whole management expectations thing requires some competent interference from other senior managers. If that isn’t present I have found the effort to be much tougher. It’s just so political.
KX: Finally, for Project Managers looking for ways to ensure more successful projects, can you recommend resources that you think would be most helpful in getting started?
DR: First of all understand yourself. Take Strengthfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. Understand your Myers-Briggs preference. Take an emotional intelligence instrument. The Emotionally Intelligent Team TESI instrument by Marcia Hughes is unique for the team angle.
Read good books about success and failure in teams. Start with Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni and The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Then move on to PeopleWare by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister and Up the Organization by Robert Townsend.
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