This is a story about Linda, the project manager who saw tremendous success and disastrous failure.
Her failure was so severe that she got fired from the company. Read on to learn about what cost Linda had to pay for over-trusting her abilities.
Linda was a successful project manager. In past two years, Linda had delivered two huge projects in a row. Everyone in the organization thought that Linda had a magic wand. The projects she managed used to get successful.
Past two most successful projects from the most credible client of the company. Successful, with Linda as the Project Manager.
Top management of the company had also noticed that. Linda was invited for dinner with CXOs and once in the board meeting also bypassing her reporting hierarchy to present about her project success.
Soon Linda was given one of the most complex projects the organization had ever taken. The project was of multimillion dollars. The organization’s reputation was on stake on the project’s success. Also if the project gets successful, then organization would attract more business from the business network it had recently entered.
Linda’s confidence was all time high. “I’ll be able to deliver any damn project that I undertake,” She used to think.
But soon after six months, Linda got fired. The reason? She could not handle the project well and the COO of the organization had to take charge of the project bypassing every other middle managers.
What did she do wrong? What points she missed in the most important project of her life?
Here they go:
- She used to speak about her past successes so often that she compromised her ability to listen attentively.
- She did not spend lot of time interacting and building rapport with the client.
- In part of project meetings, she was not whole-heartedly convinced with several points but rather than confronting, she kept quiet.
- She delegated project reporting task to her assistant, Ramit, who was extremely detail oriented but did not have distinction about what piece of information matters to the client and what does not. The result? The status reports were never given needed attention.
- Two project sponsors got changed in the period of just six months.
- The client organization was huge and there was fair amount of red-tape in the environment. Many people are concerned about saving their skin rather than making the project successful at any cost.
- …and more of similar points.
All in all, Linda could not give her 100 percent to make the project successful. Why it happened? Linda had over-trusted her abilities.
The habit of over-trusting your abilities is a disease. You better get it fast.
Your past success is good but there are no guarantees that it will translate into making your present project successful.
No chance.
The reason? Many external factors that were in favor of your past success may not help you in your present project.
Your past project success might have included favoring industry trends, extremely competent and on-target project sponsor, outstanding project team, organizational process assets that work positively for the project, enterprise environmental factors and more.
All these things count. What counts more? The project manager’s ability to harmonize his or her project execution tasks with all these factors respected and expectations met. How the project manager does it? By identifying success factors and ensuring that they’re leveraged correctly.
You might have conducted “Lessons Learned” exercise at the end of each successful project but there is a possibility that you might not have a holistic view of your success patterns that would have caused your project success.
Taking a holistic view of your success patterns will not only help you to know thyself better but will provide you insights with new possibilities of influencing your project.
Trusting your abilities is good. Over-trusting your abilities is never. [Click to Tweet]
Imagine if you delegate a particular task to your subordinate and it is for the first time that your subordinate is doing that task, you’re acting as if you are a novice project manager.
The problem with over-trusting your abilities is that you stop paying attention to the things that are happening around you and contributing in silently (well, not always silently) making the project successful or failure.
The consequences are tied up with the work that is done, they are not tied up with the past success of years of experience you have as a project manager.
Project success (or failure) is a consequence of a series of steps that are taken for the project. And you, the project manager, is solely responsible for it.
Instead, stay foolish, keep seeking and retrospect everything that’s happening inside the project periodically.
If you choose to be a fool and inquire everything, then you become more aware, more wise, more knowledgable about the project and its surroundings.
Being a fool and choosing to be fool are two different things. Choosing to be a fool is actually the wisest thing that a project manager can do and over-trusting your abilities are exactly the opposite.
