People leave Managers, not companies.

The effectiveness and success to managing people lies in the leadership skills, sense and style of the Managers. When done right, people stay motivated and bend over backwards without complain or regret. The Manager and the Team Member builds a relationship fueled by trust.

According to an article by Business News Daily, a 2010 survey conducted by a career-management agency called Right Management revealed that “84% of workers want to quit jobs, find new gigs in 2011“. The article also quoted the company’s President who said that “Employees’ trust has been seriously shaken and there is a general lack of confidence in leaders.” Almost all the top reasons for why employees leave seem to point towards ineffective Managers and broken trust. If we look beyond the obvious reasons for why that is so, we start to see the trail that leads to a much bigger issue.

A Manager who is mis-managed is almost always likely to mis-manage his team.

Leadership is infectious. Good leadership has a positive impact on the team whereas bad leadership impacts negatively. Whatever the effects of leadership, it surely trickles down from the top honcho to many levels down.

A friend recently told me about his Manager who had begun to show signs of maturity causing a positive change in his leadership ways. Such incidents give me hope that a transition from bad to good leadership is not an impossibility. When experience teaches us how to adopt as well as adapt to changing times and situations, it is not uncommon to see such drastic changes in leadership styles. Most leaders I know strive for that continuous improvement. However, in my friend’s situation, there was one compelling factor that could not be dismissed. The change that he noticed occurred only after a leadership change at a level above his i.e. his Manager’s Manager had changed. So if we were to believe that this is not a lone one-off incident, that mis-management is also infectious, then what next?

We have the power to choose.

Change happes when we are dissatisfied with the status quo. But choosing to change is not the only choice we have. We have the power to choose who we work for. So let’s circle back to the beginning. People leave Managers, not companies. In other words, we change Managers, not companies. And there lies the choice, a rather difficult one because unlike companies the value and worth of a Manager cannot be googled.

But there is an easier choice available to us now, every minute of every day, a choice to strengthen our relationship as a Manager with our Team, and vice versa.  Let’s choose to prepare ourselves for the time when we become ready to leave a company to work for a Manager.

CCPM. Have you heard about this project management framework? What about the concept of critical path? If you have ever been exposed to project schedules, the latter would probably ring a bell. Critical path is the shortest distance to project acceptance and completion. If the project has 10 tasks to deliver, and 8 of them are critical for acceptance, the critical path will comprise of those 8 tasks. Makes sense?

CCPM is a framework build around the critical path concept. To me it is an effective scheduling technique that enables project managers to truly plan a project instead of merely stringing tasks together to an end date. True planning calls fot a great deal of thought that should go into executing a project and steer it towards success. But to do that, we need to first understand project failure.

Why do projects fail? According to Allan Elder’s whitepaper (link below), most projects fail to meet deadlines on time, on budget, and on scope (OTOBOS) due to the following 5 reasons or diseases of project management:

(a) We are victims of “Bad Multi-Tasking“. In short, we have too many tasks on our plate mainly due to a lack of planning from the task assignor/delegator – your Manager or ‘You, Inc.’ – thus leading to bad task prioritization to procrastination to burnout.

(b) Parkinson’s Law i.e. Work expands so as to fill the time available for completion. The safety we’ve built into our estimates with an intent to avoid the worst case scenario somehow transforms into being our best case scenario. And we are not incentivized to do otherwise.

(c) The ‘Student Syndrome’ is in us and we cannot escape it. So, lets accept the fact that due to the above 2 reasons we are not going to work on that task until the 11th hour – the time we need just enough to complete the task and meet the deadline. We dont know how we do it but we do.

(d) Task Dependency for the wrong reasons. Project completion is dependent on all its tasks being completed on time (task completion date) and on budget (resource availability) but when tasks are integrated, projects get penalized due to time wastage and resources being under-committed.

(e) Task Completion != Task Delivery. We tend ignore those sneaky little unplanned and unforeseen events that cause delays in the delivery of completed tasks. Project progress is measured based on the tasks completed and not task hand-offs.

CCPM is based on the ‘Theory Of Constraints’ methodologies and is said to have proven a high rate of project success when implemented right. I have not tried it out yet but am in the process on learning how to. Walk with me on this critical path to success and we’ll find out how to keep our projects OTOBOS.

In my follow-up to this post, I will dive more into how CCPM works. Meanwhile, please do read “The Five Diseases of Project Mangement” (PDF) to understand the above reasons in detail. This whitepaper is a keeper.

It’s the 1st quarter of the New Year and time for us to set our goals for 2008. For most of us its just another one of those documents we need to fill up. We do it because we are asked to; because everyone else is doing it. It’s not that we don’t see the value in it. We don’t care enough about it. I hated goal setting too. I hated it because it made me think about my wishes and wants that I haven’t yet fulfilled, those that I fear to pursue. As we climb that ladder of growth in our organization, setting goals become an integral part of our everyday professional life with a direct impact on our personal life. In others words, our lives have to become goal-oriented. We cannot afford to not care. We must care enough to set Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Result-oriented and Time-based goals – SMART goals.

One of my goals for 2008 is to become PMP certified. It is a SMART goal because I know “specifically” what I want to do. I want to enroll, learn and get certified. I will take mock tests that will help me “measure” my progress towards my final test, which will measure my success. The fact that I am setting it as my annual goal, sharing it with my family and with you, shows “accountability”. It is “result-oriented” not because I will be certified, but because the certification will help me be better at what I do – project management. It is “time-based” because it has a deadline – August ’08.

I’ve always believed that if I wish for something and want it badly enough, then someday that wish will come true. We don’t always get what we wished for simply because our ‘wishes’ don’t turn into ‘wants’. The first step is to convert those wishes into wants because when we really want something, we set our mind to it and when our mind is focused on something, we are thinking goals. So don’t delay. Set some goals. Remember, it’s a simple as making a wish.