The Fifth Most Ugliest Project Management Challenge

© 2007 All Rights Reserved 

Does your director reward you for responding to urgent needs? ……And the problem is that all their needs are urgent. You have sympathy for your manager since you know how your company needs to keep up with the competition. But responding to constantly changing management needs causes your project plan to have more holes than Swiss cheese. (more…)

Project Team Diversity

A while back, I watched the PBS production “A Class Divided”. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. It was especially interesting when applied within the context of project teams. The video hinted to some of the quality and productivity loss that can be associated with a segregated environment of any kind, which probably applies equally well to the project world. (more…)

3 practices for smartly building trust

Smartly building trust is a key activity for successful collaboration. There is a lot of complexity involved in working successfully with others. And fortunately there are specific practices which can get you much better results. Here’s what works for me.

1. Build connection through a “hearing and being heard” process.

2. Commit to clarity, in yourself and in others.

3. Develop the skills and courage to take on important conversations.

The more I work on mastering these core trust-building skills, the easier and more productive my collaborations get.

Paul Konasewich, connectleadership.com

© 2007 Paul Konasewich

Important conversations: no guts, no glory

In business school I took a class where we worked in a team of four to do a strategy project for a local company. I partnered with a friend and two other classmates who I knew less well.

We worked hard work and met frequently throughout the semester, resulting in a successful presentation for our client. And it seemed that all was well until our final team meeting, when it came time to divide the points for the project.

Generally in a group project, everyone gets the same grade and so the points are evenly divided. But for this particular class, our professor had a system intended to (more…)

Committing to clarity

One evening I was in Rochester, NY for business and I went looking for Indian food. I decided to check out a place that someone recommended as being “very authentic.” I went in and ordered, and the waitress asked me how spicy I wanted my meal. My generic answer is “mild” but she offered “medium, or spicy?” I thought “well, medium is the less spicy option; I’ll just go with it and hope for the best.”

Bad idea. On this evening, authentic Indian food meant (more…)

Connecting: Hearing and being heard.

To me, a key ingredient for a productive meeting is connection. Otherwise, why meet at all? But how many meetings have you been with someone who was physically there, but mentally… elsewhere? Or perhaps you’ve been that person who isn’t really present?

Thus I wonder, “How can I establish connection upfront, to set the stage for a great meeting?” I’ve discovered a simple yet extraordinary tool to do just this: Lee Glickstein’s Relational Presence Five and Five process.

In a nutshell, here’s how it works: each person gets five (more…)

Trust Week 2: Smartly building trust

In January I did a series of blogs on “Getting Smart about Trust.”

Laying the Groundwork for Trust. I talked about the initial stages of exploring trust, and told a story of how doing so helped me through a tough situation.

The Critical Trust Question. I recounted one of my corporate adventures where I didn’t do enough work upfront to explore how much I could trust someone, and nearly got burned. And I discussed what I now consider before moving forward. (more…)