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Transcript: The Career Limiting Mistake You Might Be Making

This episode is sponsored by:

Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers!

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This is the perfect way to start the new year because we’re talking about the number one career limiter that might be holding you back in your career, your ultimate satisfaction with your job and your personal success and progress in your organization. We’re going to hit the reset button and cover the new year’s resolution you should be focusing on if you want the career of your dreams. This episode is sponsored by my PM career accelerator workshop. Learn what it takes to stand out as a PMO, program, or project leader and work  to create your 2020 career development plan for increased career success, recognition, influence, and growth. Let’s make 2020 your most successful and high impact year yet. Just go to https://PMOstrategies.com/workshop to check it out and sign up now.

Let’s dive in to the biggest mistake I have been seeing for the last 25 years with my peers, my colleagues, and of course my students and my clients. What you need to be on the lookout for and how to avoid this mistake or if you’re experiencing it already, let’s figure out how to shift directions immediately to get you back on track. Now, when you sat down to think about what you wanted to get out of 2020 what was on your list? Did you make a list of new year resolutions? Did you think about eating healthier and getting more exercise? Did you think about reading more or picking up a new hobby?

How about crushing your fears and doing something big and bold? Or are you one of those folks that doesn’t believe in new year’s resolutions at all and works hard year-round to up level your game, personally and maybe even professionally? Whether you make new year’s resolutions or not, the new year is often a time where we sit back and reflect before charting our course for the next year. Part of that often includes the things we need to do in our personal life to better ourselves and ensure we’re living a healthy and happy long life. Now my question is, are you giving your career the same attention? No matter where you sit on the new year’s resolution scale, this really isn’t about setting resolutions as much as it is about shifting the mindset that you have about taking care of your own career. Here’s what I see happening again and again, whether it’s talking to colleagues or speaking to my audience at a conference or with my own students or online community, I am always hearing stories about frustrated PMO leaders, program managers and project managers that are utterly exhausted and frustrated with where they are in their career. They feel stuck. They feel run down. Some of them are even worried about whether or not their position will be on the chopping block come next budget season. And if they’re running a PMO, they’re worried that they’re not even going to get the funding they need to put the services and capabilities in place to finally create that impact they’re trying to make.  This needs to be done before their executives and leaders just get frustrated and fed up and ready to move on to that next, something shiny that’s going to help them accomplish their goals.

Now if you’re looking for help in figuring out how to get your PMO up and running quickly, there are at least a couple dozen episodes before this podcast, talking about things related to PMOs and the mindset shifts you need to make and the path that you need to take to help you build and run a high impact PMO. So definitely subscribe to the podcast and download those episodes. Make sure you take the time to listen to them when you’re in the shower or on your commute or getting some exercise because they will help and give you tons of ideas on ways to shift your mindset and to help you build and run a high impact PMO. This episode though, is about you and your career, specifically. I want to talk to you whether you’re a PMO leader, program, project manager, or frankly anyone that’s feeling a little stuck in their career.

This episode is all about the mindset shifts you’re going to need to make, the current state of career development and improvement that is being seen across industries and around the world.  What you need to do to put yourself in the driver’s seat of your own career success. So what specifically is this biggest mistake that I’m seeing so regularly? Not investing in your own professional development. And I know I’ve heard it time and time again and maybe you’ve been one of those people that has said it, well, my company won’t pay for this training. My company won’t let me go to this class. My company won’t give me the time to develop myself. Therefore, I’m not going to do it. And here’s my question. When exactly was the point in time when you decided to hand over the keys for your career success to your employer?

When did you decide that it was not within your own control to have the career you want? To have the career of your dreams, to take hold of your future and own it? When did you decide that it was okay for your employer to have that? Because you see that’s what you’re doing, when you decide that you will not develop your own career because your employer won’t pay for it. You’ve decided that they own your career, not you. And to make matters worse, you might be waiting a long time if you’re waiting for them to pay for your training, to pay for your self-development, because this is what the data is actually telling us. Now when I went to the PMI PMO symposium late last year to give a talk on shifting our mindsets around the PMO and agile, I attended a lot of other sessions and there were some really important themes, but the most relevant and important one that I think we need to be thinking about right now as we go into this new year is continuous improvement, both of people and of systems and processes.

That was a very big theme and if you’ve attended conferences over the last year, I bet you heard that theme as well. It’s not so much about big bang and one-time investments in changes or upgrades or even training. It’s all about continuous improvement, continuous skills development, continuous systems improvements, continuous process improvements, so that we can keep up with the pace of change going on around us in the industry and in the marketplace as a whole. Now, while that theme was really big and I’m sure you saw it as well, here’s what the data is telling us. Unfortunately, employers are paying for less and less training. They’re expecting employees to come to the table with all of the skills they need to do the job they were hired to do.  That means if you’re hired as a PMO leader or a project or program manager, you’re expected to have all of the latest and greatest skills or certifications or techniques to be able to get the job done.

And I’ve talked about this before and I know we’re going to talk about it more in the future, but having  experience does not necessarily mean you can get off the hook of actual education and training and continuous skills development because things are changing so quickly. The PMO of 10 years ago for example, is not the PMO of today. I can tell you when I built my first PMO in 1999,  there were some resources out there for PMOs, but frankly most of them were telling me to do things that when I put them in place did not go over well with my leadership team.  It was a whole lot of theory and a whole lot of templates and tools and process talk without a lot of talk about impact. Now fortunately, I paid attention to what my leadership was saying to me at the time, which was in the middle of the dot com insanity.

Anything we do is late before we’ve even started. We have all of these e-commerce projects we have to get done. We got to make sure we have happy customers and by the way, we need to get paid and we’re getting a return on investment for every one of our projects. So, to me it was quite simple and quite clear that ROI was King. However, many of the books I read or courses I took early in my career in the PMO space all talked about how you first you create a bunch of templates. Then you create a bunch of processes and then maybe a year from now you start showing value and that just ain’t gonna fly. It didn’t fly then and it’s not gonna fly now. So even if you are in a situation where you were able to get away with taking a year to build a PMO and set things up before you started showing value, that level of patience no longer exists in organizations. Therefore, we’ve got to find better ways to do something. So if you rely solely on your experience, you’re probably going to be missing the mark of what your leaders today are expecting. They want things better, faster, cheaper, and they want things to happen yesterday, right? So, we’ve got to make sure that we know the latest techniques and the latest skills and have the latest resources to help us figure out how to do just that. So, experience won’t be enough to ensure that your keeping up with the pace of change and the requirements in your organization. Now, of course, this doesn’t just apply to the PMO leaders listening, this is all of us. We all have to make sure that we’re getting the right training and support to help us do our jobs and sadly a lot of leaders and companies aren’t paying for it, which means we’ve got to find a way to get that knowledge and those skills on her own.

I know that many of you are saying, but they should pay for it and I can shoulda, coulda, woulda you all day long, that doesn’t mean they are. In fact, according to Peter Capelli, director of the Wharton school center for human resources, companies want workers they don’t have to educate. His research found that employers don’t train workers like they used to. In fact, his research found that in 1979, workers received two and a half weeks of training per year, but by 1995 that fell to just 11 hours. Now, more recent comparable data has really been hard to find, but what he has found, said that by 2011 only a fifth of employees reported receiving on the job training from their employers over the last five years, only a fifth and that was in 2011. Now, here we are almost another decade later and the data’s really hard to find.

Actually, most of what you find out there if you searched now is tons and tons of articles telling business leaders why it is a huge mistake not to train employees, but I couldn’t find very much evidence that they’re listening. In fact, you’ll see shorter and shorter lists of employers that are paying for company training needs and even if they are paying for training. They’ve usually narrowed it down to one or two vendors that have some pretty generic courses and they’re not going to have specifically what you need. Now, this isn’t across the board. If you work in one of those organizations that still pays for all the training you need, Awesome. But according to my own survey of my audience of thousands and thousands of PMO leaders and project managers and managers around the world, my survey showed that only 20% of that total audience says their company pays for all their training needs.

Another 30% said that their employer pays for some of what they need, AKA a some of those more generic courses, but not everything. So really 80% of my audience said that they are either having to pay out of pocket altogether or they’re paying for that supplemental training that’s actually giving them what they need to do their jobs. And here’s the saddest part of all of it, that’s 80% that’s either having to pay out of pocket for things they need because their employer doesn’t cover it all or they have to pay for all of their training themselves. Many of them are skipping out on it altogether, meaning they’re just not doing the training because their company won’t pay for it. But the data’s telling us that most companies are not paying for all of your training needs. And in fact, in my audience, only 20% of you said that the company is paying for your training.

So does that mean you just don’t get any training? Does that mean you don’t continuously develop your skills? Does that mean we are going to skip out on this training altogether, therefore positioning ourselves to have a very stagnant career? If you’re waiting for your employer to pay for all of your training needs, then you might be missing the whole point, which is that employers are expecting you to come to the table with everything you need to make that huge impact for them. You see, when I talked to a lot of these executives, CEOs and C-suite employees at different companies, they’ll tell me that that’s what they’re paying for. When they hire you, they’re expecting you to come to the table with these skills and to continue to maintain those skills because it’s a part of your career, not theirs. And that’s what I mean about turning the keys to your future over to your employer.

Frankly, they don’t really want the keys to your future. They want you to own that and they want you to come to the table and invest in their future in making sure that their company is a success. So, over the last 25 years or so of being in this space, I’m seeing a big shift and it’s happening at an even more accelerated pace over the last several years. It’s happening all over the world and in organizations of all sizes, shapes, and with different budgets. If you get all the training you need, count yourself Lucky. But know, it may not be like that forever. And what truly breaks my heart is sometimes my students come to me when they’re desperate. It’s so frustrating to me because for every single one of those students that’s desperate or concerned or afraid they’re going to lose their job, it’s because they haven’t prepared themselves for something like this.

Now, of course, we hope you never end up in this situation, but you could. And if you did, would you be prepared? Would you have the skills you need? Would you have the latest techniques, the latest resources, the latest know how on how to ensure that you manage projects most effectively or know how to set up a PMO or the right leadership skills and techniques so that when it’s time for that next promotion? We’re not just talking about what if you lose your job. This isn’t a doom and gloom meant to  scare you. I’m not. I get my heartbroken regularly when students wait until they’re desperate to come to me and I’m trying to prevent that. So when you think about not just would you be prepared if there were budget cuts and you needed to find a new position, what about when they come looking for that next person to promote into an open role?

What if your boss leaves and goes to take another job or gets promoted? Who are they going to be looking at to fill those shoes? Or what if you want to expand your horizons and take on a bigger challenge, a bigger program or running a bigger PMO, would you be ready? Do you have the leadership skills, the influencing skills, the organizational change management skills, not to mention the latest techniques in various implementation methodologies or methods for building and running PMOs or managing projects? Think about your skills inventory now and what you might need to do to up-level to be ready when that next opportunity comes your way. Or what about the situation where you’re fine in the role you’re in, but maybe you just like to be taken a little bit more seriously. I’ve had countless project managers and PMO leaders and others come to me and say, I really wish people valued me for what I bring to the table.

I really wish that they appreciated everything that I do for the organization. And you know what’s interesting when I deep dive with these folks and have conversations, I asked them what have they done to take care of their own self development and their own training.  What have they done to make sure that they’re really spending time and energy investing in themselves to improve their skills and stay on the cutting edge of the latest practices or the latest information that’ll help them continue to accelerate in their jobs and in their career? And again, I often hear, well, my company won’t pay for that training. And I say, okay, but then why aren’t you paying for your own training? Aren’t you worth the investment? You see, if we’re expecting our employers to invest in us, then we’re saying we are worth the investment, yet we don’t make that investment in ourselves.

So what’s the gap here? Is it that we’re only worth the investment as long as we don’t have to pay for it? Well think about that from your employer’s perspective. Think about what you’re saying there. If you’re saying, well, it’s only worth it if you pay for it, but if I pay for it, then I’m not worth it. Now, of course you’re not actively saying that, but your actions might be, and I know I’m giving you a little bit of tough love here, but there’s a reason for it. I don’t want another person to have to come to me when they’re desperate, when they’re worried about not having that next job or when they’re worried that they’ve got to scramble and improve their skills now because they’re getting ready to lose their job or they’re just frustrated because they’re not being taken seriously at work.

I believe you are worth the investment. You need to believe you are worth the investment and then if you do, your employer will see that clearly. They’ll see how clearly you invest in yourself and how clearly you believe that you are worth it and showing them that you believe you’re worth it goes a lot further than just saying that you’re worth it. Okay, here’s an example. You find that perfect course or training program and now it’s time to fight the good fight to get your employer to pay for it. You provide all the documentation and all the support to say why you need this particular program and how it’s going to help you be a better employee or have greater success or manage those projects more effectively or really set that PMO up right from the start and you spent all that time and energy convincing your employer that you’re worth it, but then your employer says no and you say, well, I guess that’s it.

I’m not going to pay for that training. And now you’ve just sent the message that all of that effort you put in to convince them this course was perfect for you was actually just a lot of fluff.  You didn’t mean that you were worth the investment because you’re not willing to invest in yourself. This is when you need to decide who gets to own your career and who gets to determine how successful you are going to be. You can leave it up to your employer who frankly may like you today and may cut you tomorrow. Or you can invest in yourself and invest in your future and make a decision that you’re going to take back the keys to your future and your success.  You get to decide what you need to help you grow and develop and ultimately make the impact that you’re meant to make.

Now let’s address some of those yeah, buts that I know you’re probably thinking, and here’s the two biggest ones that I hear and the ones that I used to struggle with myself. I was in your role for a long time and I understand what it’s like to be inside organizations and expect that your employer’s going to pay for you to do the things they want you to do. They’re going to pay you for the work and they’re going to pay you for the skills. Totally get it. I used to have the same mindset and I can tell you that it’s a limiting one, and it wasn’t until I let go of the not enough time and not enough money concept, that I really started to see my career take off and I want that for you, so let’s talk about those yeah buts.

If you’re thinking to yourself, yeah, this is great but I don’t have enough time and I definitely don’t have enough money. Doesn’t that sound familiar? When’s the last time you heard that from your employer when you were trying to get a project approved at work or trying to get more budget for your team. What do you do if you’re following our return on investment mindset and approach to investment decision making? If you’ve listened to prior episodes, we’re talking all about return on investment for projects and making sure that we make that return investment on your projects and on your PMO crystal clear, you show them the pain they will experience by not investing the time and the money to do that project or to set this PMO up, Right? We flip it around on its head completely. We don’t waste time talking to the not enough time and not enough money.

We talk about what’s the pain those decision makers are experiencing that is not going to go away or get even worse if they don’t invest. Now, let’s ask you that question. I know I hear you with the not enough time and not enough money. We’ll get to that in a second, but first, what is the pain you are experiencing at work right now that’s telling you deep down you need to invest in additional training and skills or coaching or other resources to help you better your career and accelerate your career impact this year? Is it knowing that you should be taken more seriously at work? Is it feeling underappreciated or undervalued? Is it not being able to get your sponsor’s attention? Is it having to fight tooth and nail to get resources or funding for your projects? What is the pain that you’re experiencing now that you know deep down could be improved if you worked on your influencing skills, your organizational change management skills, your leadership skills or specific subject matter expertise in managing programs or projects or building and running a PMO?

Give that some thought. Make a list. You may have already started that as you were thinking about what you wanted to accomplish this year with your career, right alongside those resolutions you came up with, with how you were going to improve yourself personally. Let’s make sure there’s some resolutions on how you’re going to improve yourself professionally. Remove those pain points and get over those mindset blocks around not enough time and not enough money. What is your sanity worth? What is your career worth and what can you do to help improve your career situation, accelerate your career impact, and really have that dream career that you’re looking for? It’s totally attainable, but it requires focus, dedication, and getting away from these mindset blocks like time and money. So, let’s talk about those. So, you say there’s not enough time. There are so many ways to get training these days to develop your competencies.

Look for ways to develop your skills without having to be out of the office for a week or two at some training program. There are so many more options online and there are tons of things that are free. For example, you can learn a ton from my podcast and from five years of blogging that I have on my website, PMO strategies.com that will give you a lot of skills development. You can listen to the podcast while you’re driving, while you’re exercising, while you’re going through some of your more mundane activities you have to do on a daily basis and that’s the way I listened to all the great leadership books. I had a really long commute for many years and I would just listen to them. Now, this was a while ago because there were books on CD, but now there’s many other ways that you can listen to either podcasts or audio books and many of them are low cost or no cost.

So when we talk about money, the way that training has been optimized, you can get plenty of what you want for free. However, there is a big but coming here, don’t expect to get the really, really good stuff for free. You can certainly piece together things like my podcast. If you follow the framework that I put out in my podcast around the impact PMO leader mindsets or the framework I have for building and setting up a PMO from the start, you can get a good idea of what that framework or approach looks like.  The really, really good stuff, of course that’s going to be in my deep dive course that has over 50 lessons because the actual work is in those details.  The framework, the roadmap, the approach, all of that is in the details of that training program and there’s tons of other resources out there like that.

What I would not suggest, and I know many people that try to do this, is short-cutting everything and taking the free route by saying, okay, I’m just going to pull together all of these podcasts and all this stuff I found on Google, and there was some YouTube videos over here, and now I’m just going to pull this article from here and maybe I’m going to get this book. Poof, I have all the resources I need due to the hodgepodge patching together approach. This will leave you probably more frustrated than actually help you. You want to use the free resources to help you think through the mindset shifts. You need to make the approaches that are out there and then find something that works for you and then don’t stop at the free stuff. Go deep if they have it. If there are programs out there that will help you get what you need, aren’t you worth the investment?

Isn’t your sanity and your career worth it? So go deep. You can get the big picture for free, but this framework, the step-by-step approaches, the resources, the templates, the examples, the workbooks, all that meat is going to be buried inside those in-depth programs. You need to make the investment in yourself just like that teacher made an investment to give you those resources to give you access to something that can be a game changer for your career. You still have to invest if you want to achieve the outcomes. Just like we talk about with respect to your PMO and projects where you need to help the organization understand that it must invest in order to achieve the outcomes that the organization is trying to achieve. So just remember, if you’re not willing to invest in yourself and your career, then why on earth would you expect that your employer should want to invest in you?

The image we project, the way we care for ourselves and our careers, the way we put our career development first will be noticed and it will make your employer want to invest in you. Here’s an example in my signature program, the impact engine PMO training program, some of my students pay for that program out of pocket. Then by the time they start implementing what they’ve learned in module two and module three, they’re getting noticed by their leaders and they start really paying attention to what the PMO leaders are doing that are implementing what I teach them and that’s about the time that my self-payers start getting reimbursed for the course. There’s six modules, but by the time they get to module two and module three and start implementing what they’re learning, my students are saying there are ready moving the needle so much their leadership is noticing.

They love the initiative and the fact that the employee took the initiative to get the training and support they needed to help further the organization as a whole and that’s about when they and reimburse them for the cost of the program. They appreciate that the employee has stepped up, that they see the value and therefore they are willing to invest in that employee because that employee was willing to invest in the company. You see how that works and that’s a really common theme across the industry right now. Individuals are taking charge of their career, taking charge of their own success, realizing that they are worth the investment and if they want the career of their dreams, if they want to reduce the headaches and the overwhelm and the frustration and the uncertainty about where and how to help the organization as a whole and how to get their career on that accelerated path, then they must be willing to invest in themselves.

So as we wrap up with this episode today, here’s what I’d like you to think about. Are you worth the investment? And if so, what are you going to do? How are you going to invest in your career in order to make 2020 your best career success story? Thank you so much for being a part of my community and being a part of this program. I really hope that you take the time to invest in yourself for 2020 and I want to hear all about it. Tell me what you’re doing to make a huge impact in your organization and with your own career and investing in your future. And if you’d like a little bit of help doing that, I am more than happy to help you because I’ve got your back. Make sure you sign up now for our PM career accelerator workshop by going to PMO strategies.com/workshop where you can also see other upcoming workshops on that list, so sign up now and I cannot wait to see you there. Have a fantastic high impact day impact driver.

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