Leading the Unleadable

by Alan Willett

  If you know how to start projects correctly, and most people do, those are just excuses. They are not the real root causes behind starting projects poorly. The following are the real root causes.

  Root Cause of the Excuse List #1:

  LOW SELF-CONFIDENCE

  Many leaders do not have sufficient self-confidence to say with great assuredness what the right thing to do is. They have irrational doubts such as “Maybe this time, starting early even with the wrong people and with insufficient resources, will have really great results.” If they said it out loud that actually would help them!

  Root Cause of the Excuse List #2:

  FEAR OF UPSETTING PEOPLE

  Starting new projects correctly sometimes means that you must take time and money and resources from other projects. This often means either delaying the start until key people are done with existing projects or delaying the new project. Both of these call for making trade-offs and dealing with a number of people who may be very attached to the status quo. Fear of causing this conflict stops many people before they even ask.

  Root Cause of the Excuse List #3:

  FEAR OF FAILURE

  If a new project is worthwhile, it is likely to be a project with risk. There is a possibility of failure. The proposition of a new project is saying “Let’s start this new project with benefits that may never come to fruition while upsetting the current projects that might be doing just fine with a bet on the future that we might lose.”

  There is some reality to those problems. But they can be overcome with the right mindset and with mastery over the proper sequence of steps for an exceptional start.

  The Mindset Required for Starting Projects Exceptionally

  Changing the mindset changes the actions taken. The following are the key mindsets to fully acquire that will make starting projects exceptionally natural and as expected. Doing so will make you exceptional among leaders.

  MINDSET #1:

  A Commitment to Excellent Results

  The first critical mindset element is committing yourself to excellence. You may think you do this, but re-examine this. Commit yourself to be part of projects that will have a positive impact, projects that will provide great value to those who are part of them and the customers of the products or services provided. This commitment means that you will consider closely how to start these projects well. This commitment will be true for your thinking if you are a sponsor of the project (you’re paying for it!), or the leader of the project, or even a team member of the project. If you have this commitment you will be ready to speak and have your voice be heard!

  Consider the TopShelf executive team from the previous chapter. If you asked any of the team members if they were committed to excellence, their answers would have been “of course!” The results betrayed that commitment, however. They had to change not just what they did but how they thought to get the great results they achieved by the end of the chapter.

  MINDSET #2:

  A Focus on Realistic Expectations

  The next critical mindset is to be realistic about the situation. In being realistic, there may be many challenges. Do not let the challenges define your response. Do not let the challenges you face kill the effort before you begin. Face the challenges realistically. Choose to start small with a focus on a simple, powerful value as opposed to starting with all the ideas you have.

  MINDSET #3:

  No Is a Powerful, Positive Word

  Accept in your mind that no is a powerful, useful, and actually positive word. The lack of ability to say “no” is what drives many projects to start so poorly. The leader did not say “no” to other projects. The leader did not say “no” to starting a project with incorrect expectations or resources. By not saying “no,” leaders are saying “yes” to trouble. By saying “no” to other projects to enable a new project to start well, you are saying “yes” to building rapid momentum to success.

  MINDSET #4:

  Commitment to a Learning Journey of Starting Well

  Commit yourself to learning how to start projects well. This whole chapter provides many ideas. I am sure you have many more ideas. Each person’s style and situation is different. Develop your own process for starting projects. Be like a scientist and observe the results and adjust your process to achieve better results.

  Accept that this is a learning journey, a journey of mastery. On this journey, you shall have bad starts with bad results that are fodder for learning. You shall learn how to say “no” in ways that will make people say “thank you.” You will learn the starting process that works best for you. You will learn how to teach others the benefits of the starting game, and how to master it themselves.

  Clean Starts Versus Restarts

  It is exciting to start projects from scratch. Often, we do not have that opportunity. It is much more likely that leaders are involved with long-term projects or long-term teams, or that they inherit projects already in motion.

  Many leaders find it rare to start a project from scratch. It is even rarer that you get to start a brand new project and have that be your sole focus.

  Also note that even if your project started well, it is likely there will come a point when the team’s plan and also the team itself may begin to deteriorate and even fail. It is not just about starting. It is about keeping it fresh and alive and driving toward an exceptional finish.

  Here are some typical examples in which situations may need a restart.

  • You inherited a project under way, and it is behind expectations.

  • You are given a new project, but it is supposed to use old technology, perhaps even a defective base to build on top of.

  • You are given a new project, but you are given it with a customer base that is shrinking while the expectations are to grow the base.

  • It is not a new project but one you have been leading and no matter how well it started, there are problems cropping up.

  • It is a project you have been leading and it has been going fine, but now you are ready to add forty people to the team and that should be treated as a new start.

  • The project is actually going very well, and it is simply time to shift into a higher gear. This too is time for a restart.

  Consider, for example, a project that had started exceptionally. The team was doing very well at the two-month point. Team members developed small, usable products, which they tested with a number of ideal customers. Some of the ideas they tested were considered great by the customers, while others drew big yawns. They were also ready to add team members. Meanwhile, outside their control, the marketplace the organization was targeting had added a new competitor. It was time to accelerate the timescale.

  The team executed a number of steps to restart the project. Because every situation really is different and calls for your judgment to be applied, you should customize the steps to your situation.

  Put dedicated days on the calendar for all the steps that follow. For many organizations, this is harder than actually undertaking the steps. It is difficult for teams in motion to stop and engage in these planning steps again. Nonetheless, this planning is work that must be done. If you watch team sports on television you know that calling a timeout is one of a coach’s most strategic methods. Use it!

  1. Have the executive team revisit the goals with the project leadership. What has changed? Are the goals still valid? What needs to be changed?

  2. Determine whether the leadership of the project is still appropriate. This is a critical step that is often overlooked. Some leaders, for example, are perfect for the start-up stage and not so good at the detailed work needed to take a product to production. This pause to restart a project is the perfect point to consider this.

  3. Analyze where you have been and where you are. This is typically a day-long event with some pre-work and post-work. I like to engage as many of the involved executives, project leaders, and team members as appropriate. What were the accomplishments? What were the disappointments?
What is the data telling us? Oh so many questions to go through. Done well, this leads perfectly into the next step.

  4. Do a restart with more detailed planning sessions. At this point you may have different team members, you may have different goals, and, certainly, if you are more than two months into a project, your short-term plans are either finished or now just wrong. The sessions to make plans will reinvigorate the team and give it a clean start. If the team was behind before, it no longer is. It can now start with a fresh opportunity to win.

  The Case of the Problematic Diva Solved by Starting Exceptionally

  Josh worked in what I shall call the Bridge the World organization. It is a midsize organization with about 5,000 people. It builds projects for the government that need to be sustainable not just for a few years, but for a few decades. Josh had worked on a number of what was called “team of one” projects in which he created custom solutions as quick wins for the customers. No one knew it yet, but by working in isolation on those projects Josh had become a diva, and he was about to be a problematic one.

  The organization was preparing to kick off the Hot Metal project, and the leaders were going to start this one correctly. They had recovered from the “Case of the Team Divided,” discussed in Chapter 10. After discussions with me they were ready to try a different method to starting projects as a way to set the stage for excellence and as a way to see trouble early.

  Set Project Goals

  The members of the executive team spent two hours to put together their goals for the project, both the long-term goals and the goals they had for the initial stage of the project. They were ready to invest in a new product suite, based on new technologies, to provide value to their existing customers in an unprecedented way. They believed that this new product could result in millions of dollars of additional revenue. The executives put together an idea of when they would like the final product ready for market and an initial set of ideas of what the product would do.

  However, they did not stop there. They also set out objectives for rapidly building some prototypes so that they could test the premise of their product ideas with customers as quickly as possible. They also wanted the team to discover if they were realistic or unrealistic in their schedule ambition for achieving a full feature set delivered to the customers.

  Select Project Leadership

  This step was a significant challenge. The leaders examined their existing project portfolio and looked hard at how important this was compared to the existing projects. They forced themselves to rank them by comparing income from the projects for both today and the future, based on projections. They also looked at projected investments to keep the projects alive for the future.

  The challenge they faced was that the projects were all important. However, most of the other projects were important tactically. They were to keep today’s customers happy. This project was to create a new marketplace and future revenue to replace what they expected would be diminishing revenue in other areas.

  They also talked to many of the project leaders and technical experts in their organization. They soon realized that to build the right project leadership team, they would have to take the most experienced team leader from their previous most important project and get her to become part of this project.

  They made the hard decision and reassigned her to this new project. They knew that this would have immediate detrimental effects on the existing projects. They planned for this and put supports in place, and they did not do the denial they did in the past that they would have “no negative effect.”

  Negotiate with the Project Leader

  Here is where many projects fail to start properly. Not this time. The executive team expected negotiation and got it! First, the project leader they selected was not happy about the idea of reassignment. She said she would consider it after she studied the project ideas and got some questions answered. She wanted to be absolutely convinced that this project would be set up for success if she accepted the assignment.

  The executives wanted and accepted this dialogue. They worked with their Hot Metal team leader to determine the right team members. She wanted a small team of eight people across three of the other leading projects. She was looking for the right technical mix. They asked her to consider the social mix as well, which led to one adjustment. The executives again were ready to take a productivity decline in these other projects in order to get a good start to the new project.

  They repeated this socialization process with each team member. They wanted each person to accept the responsibilities for this new project. Note that Josh was part of the team the leader requested, and he happily took the assignment.

  The final thing she negotiated or, rather, stated was to make clear that there were no committed dates until her team finished a detailed planning session.

  The Detailed Planning Sessions

  If you haven’t done this in your organization, you really must. This step is the absolute best way to find out what trouble you may encounter on the project later and also figure out ways to prevent it from leaking out in the actual project work.

  The leader put her team in a weeklong working session where they had to do multiple things. The executives kicked off the session with their aggressive product goals and marketing goals. The team now had to respond with a realistic plan on how to achieve this. This meant that the team members had to grapple quickly with concepts of what the design of the product would be, what strategy they would use to build the initial iterations, how long it would take, and who would do what work when.

  I love these planning sessions because they bring out great emotions, conflicts, and, even better, great ideas. Team members debated multiple ideas, confronted each other with challenges for those ideas, and ultimately tried to settle on a plan for how they would accomplish the goals as well as what they would need from management to do this.

  They failed to achieve consensus on an approach for developing the project and how the tasks would be divided. It was a mess, and Josh was in the center of it. Josh wanted everyone to follow the method of developing projects he had been using on his very short “team of one” projects. Even when the rest of the group disagreed, he persisted and persisted loudly.

  This was on day 3 of the session. The problem had first appeared on the second day of the planning session. On that day, the team was dividing up key roles by volunteering who would be responsible for the main areas of responsibility for the project. Josh was certain that either he should have the four key leadership roles or that they were not necessary. The team did not allow Josh to do this. Josh relented, but with some anger.

  This problem was now back in focus again. A team member complained that Josh was being a diva. Josh said jokingly that he would be happy to play the role of diva.

  Josh was starting to get some of the younger team members to gather around him. He was charismatic. Other team members were getting quite angry about the situation. The team leader saw that a schism similar to that of the other project was quickly forming.

  The team leader stopped the session and told everyone to take a one-hour break except for Josh. She discussed with Josh the team goals and that this had to be a team project and not a Josh project. Josh kept insisting that everyone else was wrong. The team leader knew that the group was more important than Josh. She did not see any sign from Josh that he would take the “improve” option.

  She made the decision that he would not be part of the team but would continue on small projects as a “team of one.” The organization did need those projects as well. She asked if he would like to be a consultant on the new project and provide his technical opinions and expertise at the request of the team. Josh wasn’t happy about this, but the team leader was firm.

  The planning session continued without Josh. The team leader quickly put the Josh issue into the past. She explained her decision and said the most important thing was for this team to be a team. She put them right back to work on making a pl
an they believed in. The team members jelled around a plan they believed in. Josh actually did provide input, and the team listened to and incorporated many parts of it.

  It was important to the Hot Metal team leader to get a reasonable plan. What was more important to her was getting a team that was committed to the plan. The planning session turned out to be a model for how the work would be done. It set the stage for how the team members would work together and showed the limits of what the team leader would allow and not allow.

  The team had a fast, exceptional start. If this was a track race, they were off the starting line and running fast.

  REFLECTION POINTS

  1. How often do you start projects exceptionally? To ensure that you are being realistic with yourself, list the projects you believe started exceptionally. If you want to go deeper, rate how well the project started compared to the eight items listed in the section “The Exceptional Start Challenge—How to Start Exceptionally.”

  2. What are the barriers for you starting projects exceptionally?

  3. What steps will you take to raise your success rate of starting projects exceptionally?

  PART

  4

  LEADING LEADERS

  “Leaders live by choice, not by accident.”

  MARK GORMAN

  Lead Leaders: Growing Proven Ability