IT Project Mechanic

Project managers are all too familiar with how to manage their team’s performance and their projects -this is a core skill you quickly learn and enhance or you die as a PM.

Project managers, in large numbers, are either freaked out by or don’t know how to manage their leadership, managers and bosses to get the job done. This skill is just as important as the ability to estimate and manage tasks, but is slippery in its approach. Hopefully these sugesestions will help wipe some of the goop off the subject and help you manage your leadership better.

First and foremost – managing up is all about time and place. You wouldn’t want to try any of this in front of your manager’s leadership, unless you like pink paper. Second, managing and correcting are two different animals. Managing provides direction and reminders; coaching and communication – managing in any direction requires a appropriate sense of what and how you deliver. Correcting is another way to be released or restricted in your position with amazing speed. Telling your boss they’re late for a deliverable or they did something incorrectly isn’t a bright move – even if it’s true.

General rules of thumb I have always used for managing up are to communicate, request assistance and set a deadline.

Communicating the message of what’s needed is the fastest way to achieve the result you are looking for. Any executive is drowning in a torrent of information and demands on their time. By communicating the project needs on their time early and often, you stand the best chance of directing the efforts of your sponsors and executives. As with anything, extremes aren’t recommended; you need to strike a balance between pestering your leader to a response you don’t want and the general cop-out of “They know what to do”. I make it a point to offer two options when communicating a need from the project – assistance in completing the tasks or a request for a better time to bring it back to the leader.

Requesting assistance is something that has a great deal of power to drive your upward management results if you avoid breaking the cardinal rule – asking for help or assistance when you’ve done nothing to attempt resolution yourself. If you have tried (really tried) to resolve the matter your escalating, and can communicate your approach, you are 1000 times more likely to get the help you seek. If you approach your leader asking for help, and you’ve lifted nary a finger to attempt resolution, watch out – and wear your fireproof underwear.

Setting a deadline is another example of working with your leader’s crazy schedule. By targeting certain key items with deadlines, and expressing the negative results if the deadlines aren’t met, your leader can prioritize whether they get you the results needed or accept the negative consequences. This may not be the right direction for the project (in a perfect world) but realistic PMs are happier PMs.

With our current climate of multiple managers and multiple restructuring efforts each year, uncertainty of who your leadership is and how they operate can drive even strong PMs to inaction. It is sometimes perceptibly easier to wait and see what direction reveals itself than to act in spite of a lack of knowledge about your leader. Learning how to approach your leadership and manage the results you need from them is, however, too important to just wait and see what happens. Learn how to lead your leaders and you’ll have results that every PM strives for – and you’ll master the art of managing up in any situation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Communication, Conceptual, General, Leadership, Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.