I heard a great anecdote from Ed Brodow that sums up the importance, and power, of listening.

A women in England went on separate dates with two very famous people who had very different personalities, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

Asked about her evening with Gladstone she said,

“he took me to the symphony and by the end of the night I felt like I was with the most sophisticated and smartest man in the world.”

And how about your evening with Disraeli? her friends asked.

“He took me to the opera. By the end of the night I felt like I was the most sophisticated and smartest woman in the world.”

Gladstone spent the evening talking about himself.

Disraeli spent his evening listening to her. Disraeli made her feel great.

This phrase exemplifies the power of exclusion.

I heard it from a successful businessman. He started many projects and companies on his own because he was shut-out from other opportunities. By keeping him out, they created their own competition.

By excluding people, you create impediments to your project’s success.  It affects driven and capable people the most (who are exactly the people you want on your team, the linchpins).

Take the time to listen to people on your team. Make people feel included.

A friend of mine consistently receives negative feedback from a manager.  It is a complete drag on his projects and his daily life. He is not alone.

Many people have managers that use negative feedback to get things done.  Instead of letting it drag you down, here are some guidelines to help.

Understanding negative feedback can help you dig yourself out from it.

There are two types of negative feedback.

• Guilt
• Shame

They both make you feel bad. But they are different.

Guilt is feeling bad about something you did.

Shame is feeling bad about yourself.

Guilt can be a productive tool for professional improvement.  Managers who use guilt are trying to get you to perform at a higher level or pay more attention.  With guilt, there is a way to make things right. The manager who gives these kind of negative comments should provide a clear path to how things should be done differently. To be constructive, the criticism shouldn’t focus on outcomes (”don’t screw up again”) but on techniques and processes (”next time, do x and y, instead of z”).

Shame is a tool of manipulation and control. It is destructive negative feedback. Managers who shame other people want to make them dependent and easier to push around.  With shame, the only way to feel better is to make the manager happy.  And there is no end to that road.

Sadly, there are managers who thrive on destructive negative feedback. It gets them the results they want and the power they crave. If you find yourself with this type of manager, you need to get out.   (Definitions courtesy of Ed Schild.)

Emotions can propel you. Emotions can bog you down.

Emotions hang on a framework of expectations.

Expectations hang on the plans we carry with us. Whether in our heads, in software or on paper.

Understand plans (and how they change over time) and you can achieve growth.

This applies to organizations and to individuals.

Planning is a critical component to being a successful innovator.

It sounds counter-intuitive.

You might think that innovation is all about inspiration and the eureka moment. But its not. Its about executing.  To paraphrase Seth Godin, real innovators ship. That is, real innovators get things done.  And often.  The more often you deliver something, the better you’ll become at delivering more in the future.  Your ability to innovate and implement real change will increase.

The problem with relying on inspiration is that it is often fueled by emotion alone. Soon, those emotions fade. Or, they become harder to generate as problems arise. Then you get stuck.

If everything is on the fly, you are always late.

You can never execute and ship as fast as your ideas come.  Rely on inspiration and you’ll get frustrated when things take longer than “now.”

You need to build project plans. You need to plan the next steps.  That way you won’t get frustrated when things take longer than “now.”  You’ll be able to keep moving forward even when you hit set-backs.

The plan will be in place. You’ll know where to pick up from and where you want to go.

You might have to modify it. Actually, you’ll most certainly have to modify it.  But you’ll have a baseline to move forward on.

The plan doesn’t have to be elaborate. In fact, I would caution against getting too carried away. Many great ideas never became reality due to “paralysis from analysis or over-planning and under executing.

How much planning is enough?

You’ll learn over time as you see one plan be too constrictive or the other too loose, and therefore useless.  Just be conscious of the plan and gauge its success at helping you deliver.  That’s one of the advantages of having a planning. You have something to tweak and improve.

Often enough, whether you can get the idea done or is more a reflection of your plan, and not of your idea.

By consistently measuring the outcome of different plans and tweaking the plan over successive iterations, you’ll find the right plan. You’ll find the mix that allows you to innovate and ship your ideas.

Not every idea you ship will be a hit.   But by shipping, you’ll at least be in the marketplace. You will be executing and delivering innovation. You will have the satisfaction and fulfillment of seeing your ideas through to their fruition.

This, in turn, will give you confidence to try the next idea. And the next. And soon, you will have a steady process to deliver innovation.

Good project management can be the missing piece in revenue growth.

Here is a simple test to know if project management could help you grow revenue:

How long does it take you to generate a list of all projects you’re working on?

If the answer is anything greater than 5 minutes, you could benefit from more formal project management and project management software.

A quick case study that demonstrates this point.

A client of ours targeted a division for revenue growth over the next 5 years. They allocated sales people and marketing dollars to capture the opportunity. They saw a market opportunity to grow this division significantly.

Management, though, was worried that the division wouldn’t be handle to handle the growth. They were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to fulfill all the new orders.

Why were they worried?  They asked a simple question.

They asked the head of the division to show them a list of all current projects.

The head of the division said she’d get back to them in a day or two.

That’s when red flags started to go off.

If it took the head of the division one to two days just to compile a list of what was going on, there was clearly no process in place.  They were flying by the seat of their pants. Without process, the division couldn’t scale. That’s why management was worried.

If growth came, they might get lucky at the beginning, like they have been. Key individuals and long-standing relationships could be relied on to push the work through.  But longer term, things will start to break. There are only so many items those key individuals can do. Tasks will fall through the cracks. Deadlines will be blown. Customers will be upset. And all the money spent acquiring new customers will go down the drain.

Project Management is a Foundation for Growth

Management knew they had to create a more mature and uniform process. They needed to formalize their processes into projects and implement project management software to keep things together and provide instant access to information. This initiative became part of the overall investment in revenue growth for that division, as critical as sales people and marketing dollars.

Once complete, the head of the division was able to generate a list of projects in one to two seconds, instead of one to two days.  The division was on firm footing to grow revenue.

So if you want to see if a lack of project management is holding back growth, see how long it takes to put together a list of all ongoing projects. If its anything longer than 5 minutes, you have a problem.

I had the pleasure of speaking to a group at the Shifting Gears program this morning in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

These are motivated individuals in mid-career who saw the world change around them as the auto industry in Detroit underwent its massive transition.

They are taking courses on re-learning how to compete and shine in a world of entrepreneurs, small businesses and risk takers. To use a phrase from Seth Godin’s Linchpin, they are being taught how to fight the lizard-brain.

One of the key messages I conveyed was the need to constantly be innovating. The group  has the basic skills to do this, but need to learn how to reapply those skills to generate innovation.

Most of the people in the group are engineers or worked in environments geared to engineers.  They are very accustomed to thinking about and structuring formal processes.

This is wonderful. You can create processes that generate innovation.

The problem is that most of them have been taught to build processes that eliminate costs by standardizing output.  What needs to be taught is how to develop processes that maximize innovation.

The way to generate innovation is to build processes and standards that measure output for its value to the customer.  And by value, I don’t mean providing widget x for the least money. This is what they have been doing for 20 years.  By value, I mean providing a good or service that the customer truly appreciates.

Its great programs like Shifting Gears that can help drive this re-learning in Michigan and help harness the talent that’s here.

Its also this kind of mindset shift, particularly in project management, that can foster a flurry of innovation and lead the economy forward.

Fusion Authority published an article of mine describing a road-map of process improvement.

It puts project management in the context of the overall way an organization delivers its product.  Basically, project management changes depending on how “mature” an organization is and how much of their processes they’ve standardized.

By understanding where your organization is on the map, you can know how to improve your products.

The road-map is one developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. Despite the name, though, it can be applied to almost any work and not just software projects.

I came across a great question asking about using email to manage issues or tasks.

The short answer is that email is terrible for managing issues and tasks.

Sending or forwarding emails may make the sender feel like the issue is being handled (particularly if its a long email, with many threads and lots of names on the cc line). But in truth, sending or forwarding emails is just a fast and easy way for the sender to get the issue off their plate without investing themselves in the resolution of the issue or accomplishment of the task.

Not Enough Information

1. A forwarded email often does not have enough information or context to convey how the issue should be handled. Even though there may be a ton of discussion in the email itself the sender is assuming

• a) that the recipient will understand the discussion in the way that they do and
• b) that the recipient will understand the senders intent and come to the same conclusion as to how the issue should be resolved.

It is also extremely time consuming for the recipient to troll through the entire email, rather than get clear direction from the sender.

Who is Responsible?

2. Forwarding email has no clear way for the sender to see who is supposed to be handling the issue or task. They just know who they forwarded it to.  The next person in line (or all the people cc’d on it) may turn around and forward it to other people.

No Feedback. Just More Email.

3. There is no clear feedback loop on the status of the issue or task with email. While the email might contain a deadline or language conveying urgency,  the sender has no clear way of seeing how close to being done the issue is nor does the recipient have any way of updating the timeline on the issue -other than sending more email that then needs to be sifted through to get to the status information.

No Reports

4. It is cumbersome and difficult for the sender to see the status of all issues or tasks at any point in time. They need to search their inbox/outbox issue by issue or person by person.

Incidentally, the same things that are wrong with using email can apply to open-ended project collaboration software or task management systems that work like message boards with multiple posts.  Like email, these are easy for people to use. But, they provide limited information for project managers. A manager often needs to spend a lot of time sifting through posts to find information they need to make strategic decisions or to update clients.