Transcript: Practitioner Perspective – The Impossible PMO with Kendall Lott

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Laura

Today we’re doing our very first practitioner perspective episode, so I am super excited. I thought that it would be really cool for this first episode to share one of my own PMO stories and if I’m going to do that, there’s no better story to start with than my story as the PMO leader of the impossible PMO. This is the PMO that created the very first ever Project Management Day of Service. Now these events are an opportunity for project managers to come together and scope plan and launch projects for nonprofit organizations in our local communities. That first PMO was a PMO of 40 volunteers that worked seven months straight to bring together over 300 project managers and a hundred nonprofit organizations plus collected $60,000 in donations and sponsorships and had more than a hundred thousand dollars in, in kind sponsorship and support with representation from all five DC area PMI, Project Management Institute chapters, supporting the event.

What ended up being a catalyst for what is now a global movement of project managers using their hard earned professional skills to give back to their local communities, didn’t start out that way. In fact, pretty much everybody was telling us we were not going to be successful. I mean how could we be, we weren’t 100% sure what we were actually going to do, but we knew that we were going to do something and it was going to be big and it was going to give project managers an opportunity to make a huge IMPACT. And that’s ultimately what sold me in the first place. But we were starting with no clear scope or goal. So that was one problem. And then we also had no budget. We didn’t have any funding. We had no idea how we were going to get funding and how could we get funding when we weren’t even clear what the scope was going to be.

And then by the way, we decided that we were going to do this on the United States national day of service, Martin Luther King day. So here we were in May and we’ve decided that we’re going to do a big event that we don’t know what it looks like, how much it’s going to cost or how we’re going to pull it all together and it’s only seven months away. So every side of the triple constraint was completely nebulous. We had no idea how we were going to get from here to there or what that path even looked like, which made it pretty much impossible to get the kind of support you would need to pull off an event like this. And yet we did pull it off in a big way. So not enough time, no clearly defined scope, absolutely zero funding and a lack of support. We weren’t really starting from a place of strength.

I bet that sounds pretty familiar to some of you as you think about some of the projects you’ve been a part of. Since today’s episode is a practitioner perspective and it’s my personal perspective as a PMO leader of this impossible PMO, this isn’t really the whole story of PMDoS or how it has evolved with all of the volunteers and leaders that have made it the global movement that it is today. I would like the rest of the board to be here for that episode and we will do that episode soon, but today’s story is my personal experience as a PMO leader and the interactions that I had with my executive sponsor, the guy that created the idea. It’s that relationship dynamic and how the executive had this idea and the PMO leader brought it home. What’s so cool about this episode is that we get to be the narrators sharing the story with you about our experience as the protagonists in this story.

It’s all about the dynamic between an executive and a PMO leader from our own journey. Through that experience and by sharing this story with you, we’re hoping that you are able to see opportunities to understand the perspective of the executive or the PMO leader depending on the role that you sit in and how that relationship can evolve and strengthen over time.

 All right, let’s dive in. My guest today is Kendall Lott. Kendall is the CEO of M Powered strategies, a change management and project management firm serving public service clients.  He is the host and producer of the long running PM point of view podcast, the monthly podcast that looks at project management from all the angles and earns you PDUs along the way. Kendall is also the former chair of the PMI, Washington DC chapter, the largest chapter in the world and that’s where I met Kendall many years ago now, when I was also on the board of a different PMI chapter in the DC area. Ultimately getting recruited to the PMI WDC chapter myself.  The role we’re talking about today is his role as co- founder and board member of the nonprofit we started together called Project Management for Change. All right, let’s dive in.

Kendall, welcome to the program today. Thank you so much for being here.

Kendall

Excellent. Well thank you for the lead in there, Laura and thanks for having me because I know this is important to both of us and actually has been for coming up on seven years now, that we’ve been working in this space.  So it’s been kind of interesting and I appreciate your advertisement and blurb at the beginning of your podcast related to PM For Change and urge everyone to listen to that one more time and see how they might be able to activate their own volunteer spirit and work with any organization they are around, for example, the PMI chapter, to be able to be engaged cause we know about that and we’ll hear more about that later. I think you said on some other podcasts about that mission-oriented work. But I did get a kick out of us talking today and realizing if you and I were revisiting the history, like there were lessons about how kind of very activated super volunteers, meaning we were giving a lot of time to it, ended up kind of forming and creating the team necessary to create the organization necessary to create something to happen. Right. And that’s kind of the definition of a PMO, is that mixture of the stakeholders who are formed to engage others so that something happens. And far and away our biggest lesson I think as managers in volunteer organizations and even my own company, and working with colleagues is that’s getting others to do things. It’s triggering action in others. So, it’s a great opportunity to talk about it. I appreciated us kicking that idea around a little bit.

Laura

Yeah. And that’s the really cool thing is that this was an idea that had germinated, and we’re going to talk about that, about seeing a gap and as an executive looking to solve a business problem and a need that you saw in the space. So what’s really cool is that you are along that whole journey and can also give our listeners a perspective of this is what it’s like seeing that gap, having this idea and knowing what it’s going to take to make it actually happen. So, can we talk a little bit about that? Where did this idea come from and yes, we are going to do a whole episode with the whole board on the Project Management Day of Service and Project Management for Change in the nonprofit and the mission and the history and how you can get involved, and how you can participate, and how you can create your own Project Management Day of Service with our support. But this episode is really the sneak peek behind the scenes of where the idea came from and how that idea turned into action and then IMPACT ultimately in the local communities. So, talk about that a little. Where did this come from and how did this all happen?

Kendall

Yeah, the real reality of how any of it happens are all the people that we will probably have other podcasts on and that are unnamed in a certain sense because they all did work in elements of work. And so I appreciate, we’re not really trying to cover that part of it here, but really looking at it from this position of the executive, the PMO, because I know that’s a lot of what your podcasts are about. I pick up in your IMPACT model, it’s about the responsiveness to an executive direction and the executive need for value. So it’s about that value outcome. And so you and I struggle with some of how that works. Nothing ever from nothing came is the storyline there, right? So as an executive at the time, this goes back to 2014, as managing and running my own consulting and staffing firm around project management, I had pushed my organization to be active in the pro bono space.

As a former peace Corps volunteer. This idea of service has been with me since I started my own career, and I’ve been part of the Project Management Institute, for example, is another way to do service. And those things are kind of important to me. So in my own company, I had a pro bono space and I learned from other nonprofits that there was a real value in organizing kind of day of, done in day things. There was a time when that was quite fashionable. So I learned that from other organizations that wanted to come and explain that to me. And I was like, wow, we do pro bono. So I had that kind of chilling along in my mind rolling along. And at the same time in that year I had become the chair or the leader of the DC chapter of PMI, PMI WDC.

And that was interesting in this connection because I was working with a fairly large board with like 40 members, two boards, and 250 volunteers. And at that time it was about 10,000 members. Now it’s like 11 so it’s grown since I was there. But with that 10,000 members, one of the things that we were facing was this sense of a lot of our services were going stale. So I had a business problem, that was the proximate problem in my brain. Literally driving to work one day in DC traffic, I got stuck and it hit me that there was a whole way of engaging our chapter members as project managers in the role of project managers. And what caused me to that way was, how do we get membership up? That’s what every chapter member of any association is faced with or any association leader, right?

 How do I get more membership? Well, the next step was actually kind of how did we get them sticky? How do we get them to stay with us? And that’s where I realized that maybe others felt the way I did, that when you have an opportunity to serve, that’s like a group you want to be around. So moving past the typical things that are also important, like training and the speakers that come to dinner meetings and allowing people to volunteer inside the chapter was, what if we engaged people on short term projects, short term volunteerism in their own community. So that’s what hit me kind of like a thunderbolt was oh, as an entity we could be grabbing all of this project management power and providing it to a community. And it came from my need to figure out how I could get members to keep re-upping, keep staying with PMI WDC.

Well I was looking for differentiators as executives. Like how will my organization be different in the market? Well, what if we were the chapter that did that thing? So that’s kind of what got me thinking on it. And I think that was important because as much as I care about service and I know you do too and have been doing it, it’s hard to say, I want to do service, let’s go right and get others to do it. There’s almost like you need an organization to work with that, right? We need guard rails and things to hang on to and it came from that business need. So I thought that was kind of interesting to me. In hindsight, I didn’t really think about it at the time, but our role for service came out of that need. So that was the trigger.

Laura

Yeah. And that’s really cool because you can see very clearly there was a business problem that needed to be solved and you had been struggling with it and trying to find the way to get the thing, like what is the thing that is really going to help make this work? And it took a lot of inputs from different parts of the organization that, you know, the people that were working in PMI WDC as volunteers, you were talking to them, you were getting inputs from outside of that. You were just trying to find a way to get enough inputs for the idea to kind of germinate and become what it ultimately became.

Kendall

Yeah, cause there’s a couple of parts here, right? So the business need drove the idea that we should do something like this. Right? So now it’s like great. So we should have more volunteers doing something. And then I started to realize that this might be something others wanted to do. So it was time to announce it. Right. So this wasn’t even close to a how yet. It was just an idea that comes from the need and then I had this idea, so I think that’s something that the path that executives have to walk is how will we be different? What is it we have to think about? What are the actual main business drivers? Membership is a major driver for associations. It’s kind of that plane and sad in a certain way, right? It’s very, very coarse in a way, but having said that, now is the time to frame the idea and I did a couple of things.

You were actually there at one of the dinner meetings, we went to the lobby outside in a hotel where their bar was and I literally stood on a bar and said, we’re going to have this day of service and it’s going to be whatever it was, seven months into the future. It was Martin Luther King day 2015 so this was like in may or something and I’m like, we’re going to do this thing now. Of course, I wasn’t sure what the thing was. I knew the kind of connection I saw, project managers doing skills-based volunteering and project management with nonprofit managers that had the need. So I was finding an actual need that would make it happen. And that’s important, except that there was no how yet. Right. And that requires other voices and that requires other hands. Most importantly other hands from the first perspective.

You know, I mean, I stood on the bar, you were standing in the room and I said, look, we’re going to do this thing or I’m going to do this thing, who wants to go with me? And again, reflecting it in hindsight, now there’s a famous video about this, but frankly, I wish we had filmed that room because then we would have the famous video. The one of the dancing man, everyone’s watching about change where the guys dancing kind of all wild and crazy. And then one guy comes up and then more come up and eventually everybody comes up and dances.  They talk about the role of change and of leadership, it’s actually not being the first person, it’s being the second. And then the third through the fifth. This idea that it’s one thing to have an idea, but until someone starts activation, you got nothing.

And so I would say that the unit of activation is something like a PMO, the one that has kind of multiple ways of engaging with stakeholders to deliver. But the gap between the idea and the PMO is the PMO leader. This concept that somebody has to step up and say, I’ve heard what you’ve said and I’m going to legitimize it with real action. So as they show in that video, right? The crazy man, you know the dancing man, the guy that stands on a bar and says, hey PMs, we’re not going to just do a fun ride to raise money. We’re not going to fill food kits. We’re going to go act as PMs in our community to cause something to be different. Pause… who will join me and now I don’t know what I’ve just said. You know, where are we going to go from there?

And you literally raised your hand first and you were there from that night all the way through, you yourself, which is why we make good for this podcast. You yourself were the PMO lead that said fine as the first follower, which now makes you the leader of all that comes behind. Right? You legitimize, this is a real thing. You may not be crazy here guys. There’s a way to do this. That immediacy of the first follower, in your case,  you have an ability, a tendency of bias and proclivity to be able to try and get other people to be in your structure to move forward, which is classic PMO work, right? Okay guys, we have slots. We’re going to fill them and they fit in this way and we’re going to get something done. And that was crucial. Otherwise you just got a guy standing on a bar saying aren’t we going to be wonderful serving our community? And then it goes nowhere then. Right? So you have to make that move forward. So I think that that was like a key second part. You know, the business driver creates a need, the need I saw as fulfillable in the marketplace, but now you’ve got to have the first follower who then themselves is a leader. And I so see that how it lines up with what you’re talking about in PMO Strategies.

Laura

Yeah. Yeah. And from my perspective being there, what got me drawn to this whole, what now has become a movement, was you inspired me, right? So you were the leader that had this need, but you turn that need into something that meant something to me. And what I, not necessarily what you said, even though you said it a little, but what I heard and felt was project managers can do something really big and meaningful here. And those that want to do service, those that want to give back, wouldn’t it be amazing if they could give back in a way that was using their professional skills, that was validating what they do for a living and allowing them to make an IMPACT in their local communities.

 And by the way, many of these PMO leaders and project managers and program managers and people that ultimately ended up volunteering for this, many of them often felt like they were maybe, you know, in this quote unquote accidental profession or that people, you know, their family didn’t really understand what they did for a living or they were treated as administrative overhead. There’s so many ways that I could see that the underdog would get to be the hero of this story, of this journey and would finally be able to say that is what I do for a living. And so that emotionally connected with me having spent so many years working with project managers and building project management teams and running PMOs and serving on PMI boards and seeing all these project managers that were in all of these kind of, not so great situations or feeling stuck at work.  Even in my case, as I talked about on last week’s episode, I couldn’t make an IMPACT big enough for my own taste, for my own cravings serving in my organization.

So I was told to go find a hobby, to volunteer outside of work to fill that craving, to fill that need, while people in the organization caught up with what change I’d already given them.

Kendall

I think you just hit it very big key for your audience in my mind. And so you went and did it as a hobby. But even as an individual, there’s, there’s a very good role for the individual in things. And I believe change starts in the hearts of individuals when we want to start causing difference. There is power in organization. It’s the so called overused word leverage, but it does mean that a well organized short end of the stick can really cause a lot of emotion on the long end of this stick, right? That they’ll get that IMPACT. And in our case, the IMPACT of getting people engaged and involved.  At a minimum, that alone was very powerful to allow project managers who’d felt that they were kind of ignored, as you said.

Or one of the interesting things we’ve discover is that people say, I get paid for this for a living quite well even. I had no idea that people really wanted it. Right? Like this is anything like we’re used to drawing our salary, but we just dis-associate that with value. Another whole theme. Remember all these things are investments of money and time, which are really the same thing and people having their utility so they have to get something out of it. It has to have some meaning. So to me, the idea of having an organization behind it, which is just defined as a PMO was amazing and I think that was the first thing to do was to get that leadership rolling. You know, really from your hand in May, I think I went up and started the advertisement again in July, but you were putting together an organization with actual descriptions and a way they would operate by July as I remember.

That’s when we brought in our third board member who I know we’re going to have on podcasts later because I view him as a thought leader for us on this is Mike Hannan. And he actually gave us the mission that we were after ultimately in the nonprofit. This idea that project management and our organization, which is like a PMO essentially, right? Transforms communities. Project management is a change thing. That’s one of the things that he said and I urge project managers in your audience to think about is we are definitely taking inputs and causing an output that is different and then just at that level there’s transformation. The outputs are themselves supposed to be involved with IMPACT and as they are rolled up in PMOs they definitely have to be part of a portfolio value of IMPACT, right? So that is a change mechanism flat out.

So again, business driver to the first follower who’s actually the first leader of how it will really work, who then sets up the leadership team who then sets up the team that causes others to take action, right? It’s this cascading effect that I think is very powerful on one hand. The other lesson, I got another lesson out of it when, when reflecting on the history that was important for me personally cause it’s not how I normally roll. Well, we’ve had many different leaders who were very effective in their parts of the PMOs and they’ve changed over the years because it’s a volunteer organization and we can’t name them all now. But when I think about the other board member we have here, Mike, one of the powers that he brings in, is the narrative plug to other people and the ability to see things through the interactions of other people’s utility what makes them happy, right?

What could we achieve? So when I think about us in our different rotational roles of the leadership and how we’ve worked it over the last six PMDoS now coming up, and we obviously don’t even have to manage anymore because there’s so many people who are able to continue to make that happen. One of the things that I caught was this idea that we bring a different work style, personalities obviously, but work styles and strengths to the team. Now we hear about diversity of team a lot as a management design. I just got to say I felt it in my bones that another major lesson I would say for both executive leadership but even more the actual organizational level, is that you need leaders who have a different take on things because otherwise there’s no way for us to do it.

We need a durability to structure and engage and get people doing specific things and integrating those things. We needed the market facing, the energizing face I think of Mike. I came up kind of in a sense with the idea, in the sense I triggered the idea, and we’re all able to do the other roles and I think a lot of your more senior leaders have a well rounded ability to step in and do whatever they need. They need to do ideas. They can do ideas they need to do, you know, monitoring control. They can do that. They need to do the customer interface, they can do it. But I really felt it really was like, you know, a jewel, a cut diamond with the different faces, the different facets. Depending on what is needed, we can rotate into the light, right? We could rotate into the focus of what needed to happen. So sometimes it’s about the ideas and the what is, and then sometimes it’s what could we do and sometimes this is what we’re doing, right? So all the answers, and that’s the three of us, right?

 Laura

Oh my gosh, 100%

Kendall

I think in a PMO that’s almost the kernel of the PMO, the leadership, however they’re organized and in the power of hierarchy, whether it’s PMO leader with deputies or however that’s organized for your audience’s experience. I would say the diversity of work style and approach is so important. Because there’s no way that you can engage so many people if you only have one style. So we talk about being able to be a situational leader as individuals. I would say that the team can help build its own situational team leadership by bringing in that diversity.

And that’s a major, major lesson for me that I actually ended up taking over to my own company. And you know, I’m a sinner every day. There are days when I step in when I shouldn’t, and there are days when I’m not paying attention when I should. I bet many leaders are sinners every day. I may not be alone in that, but I think if you have a team of people who are motivated by that “why” that you’ve talked about who seen value, wow. How powerful is the diversity of the management team. Not just the team of delivery, but the management team, the leadership.

Laura

Right. And so an interesting evolution happened that I actually have turned into part of my signature program and I teach in a few different areas about management styles based on at what I saw as the evolution that we went through with PMDoS and project management for change as a whole. Because it’s interesting that in the beginning there was the idea and then all of the how do we connect to the nonprofits and show the value. And then once we had of talked around that a little bit, I immediately went into my mode of now let’s go get something done. And there are probably several ways that we could have organized and made the work happen. But I come from my rose colored lens, which is a PMO lens, so I saw it as a PMO and you and I talked about, I remember when we went back through with our diagrams and the pictures and how we talked about it with all of the PMI chapters in the DC area of this is what it’s going to look like and operate and all these things.

We had to just start going and to me it was a natural fit for this PMO model because how I see the PMO model is as an IMPACT engine. We want to make a big IMPACT in our local communities and with project management, the engine for doing that is naturally a PMO, right? So that’s the lens I looked through. But the interesting lesson that I have reflected on and now teach in some of my courses is the change in management styles based on where people are along that journey. Because you remember how many times in that first year that we gathered a team, which by the way, it still amazes me. We had a 40 person volunteer PMO that got together to make this first Project Management Day of Service happen. And literally all I knew when we started building all of this and recruiting people was it was going to be a Project Management Day of Service.

That’s it. That’s all I really knew. And so we had a lot of volunteers, mind you, every single one of them was a project manager. So imagine 40 project managers who all want to know what, the triple constraint. They want to know the time, the scope, the cost. They want to know most particularly the scope. What are we building, what are we doing? And I remember so many times saying, I don’t know, but I know that this is the right thing to do. In my core, I know this is the right thing to do, so we’ll figure it out. And so when I talk about my management styles, when I’m teaching, I talk about how that first year I had to be very directive because if we waited until we had all the answers, we never would’ve gotten this miracle, this impossible project, this impossible PMO to execute and create this big thing that we created. If we had waited til we had all the answers, we wouldn’t have been able to do it in seven months. So we had to build the plane while we were flying it. And do you remember all the times that people would say, well, why don’t we just wait another year? Or, you know, we can’t move forward until we know this answer. There was a lot of yeah, buts getting in people’s way of execution.

Kendall

You really hit something there, something you said earlier triggered me. We’re trying to get things done right. Yeah. Ultimately get done what the executive has directed or opened the door for. And as you were talking, I would say this to your listeners. You know, if there ain’t no do, there won’t be no done.

So somebody has to pick up and do and I so remember how many times we couldn’t answer and you were in the line of fire on that.  Could not answer how it would be, but it’s going to be something, we’re going to get there. We knew what it would look like when it was done, but we didn’t know how all the parts fit and you had to drive forward. Now the flip side of that and where I’ve had to engage myself a few times, not this year, but in the past sometimes as people are working along is, there is a certain sense when people said, well you know, let’s delay a year. Something doesn’t seem to be working, right. No, it’s an investment and it has a deadline. And one of the things is you do what you have to do to bring it online. And there’s that certain sense, you know, the historical analogs of burning the ships.

There is no retreat. Saying no guys, we’re going all in, let’s do this. So one lesson is deadlines matter in the sense of getting people to focus their attention. We know that as project managers, that’s even more so as a PMO and even more so as a PMO project managers, right? As we’ve said, project managers are lions. So it’s not like herding cats, it’s like herding lions. And everyone’s an expert in their space. No, actually we have, we worked with people who knew what they were talking about. So talk about your volunteer collaborative, you know, nightmare cause you have to collaborate. But everyone has an idea and everyone’s ready to deliver. But there was a sense of getting focused on a deadline, would be another lesson I had. It says no, it’s back kinda to the Mike issue of well what could we do? 

So if this is all true for me, I call it, that may be true and yet and yet it’s still required and yet we will get there. And so that’s another lesson that I got out of it. Then as you were talking to go on with that. I would say another lesson for PMO, be ready to adapt. Okay. We know that that’s a nice set of words, but I want to be specific. You had a style and a structure, that at its core is still in place. But at its outer shells, had been ripped and torn and pushed and pulled because as PMOs, we can over-process, we can over-design, but you only know that in hindsight having gone that far. If there’s no do, there ain’t no done. Right. So you have to engage at some parts. So one of the things we have experienced as I’ve looked at it as an executive with you now as a board member and now as the CEO of the nonprofit that houses this activity, what I see is we’ve had to allow the adjustment for functions.

The functions may be needed, but the way the roles are set up can change and it hasn’t been because you have to adjust to what your supply is, what your market demand is, what constitutes value and what the executives want and are willing to fund for you. Right. So between those constraints sitting in the middle of all that is the poor PMO that’s trying to orchestrate the doers. And so you know, Beth has been running this as the PMO chair lead for three years now and she’s picked up something that was already morphing and then she’s had to continue to morph, refine it. And that continuity of the leadership tied to the willingness to adapt to the needs that they face is more than just a management lesson. Unless everyone makes sure that we’re both consistent and adaptive, it really is true then if you cannot adjust your environment, you won’t have something. In our case, volunteers that will do the work, right?

Or people who are willing to sponsor and provide dollars. Know that something works because now three other countries for their countries and probably a total of about 12 different chapters had picked it up at one time or another. And every year we have some new ones and some coming back. So we know that there’s a pattern underneath this, but the pattern has to adapt. And I think that’s what we were able to find that a good PMO lead starting with you and sitting with where Beth is now, is the ability to say, okay, this was a good lesson that tells us what to change and what not to change and be willing to look at that. And that’s hard. And I’ll tell you another, I will speak briefly on behalf of Beth’s part here from our topic here, which is you have to be willing to speak truth to power.

Kendall

So Beth throws up a question to me and I kick it back to her. I was like, okay, as an answer I can come to you guys. And we’re like, well we really want it this way. And she’s like, yeah but that’s not going to actually work or that’s not helpful to me. And that willingness to say, wait, I need to provide information back to the executive for, we can call it a reality check, but it’s, I’m sitting in the do space. So adjust your thinking. So as leaders, both of PMOs and as executives, I think this ability to adjust your own thinking, to rectify your own thinking and be willing to do that is so important. And I’m not given to that. I’m given the kind of picking my way and plowing forward and so again, sinner every day. But I think her ability to highlight that and then ours with you and yours with us as people who have moved through the PMO leadership space is you have to have your data right. You have to have a reasonable reason, but it is so important that you’re a voice. If you’re not, it won’t work. You’ll either lose the followers or you’ll lose the executive oversight, the executive connection. So another lesson that popped out just there on our first year of putting together this volunteer massive thing.

Laura

So what’s really interesting about that, Kendall, is that this is something that I’ve been teaching my students, this concept of continuous evolution. We’ve moved beyond a world I think of continuous improvement. And when I went to the PMI PMO symposium in 2019 and was a speaker and attended a lot of different sessions, I heard a lot of people talking and teaching about this concept of continuous improvement. But I think it goes bigger than that, especially for PMO leaders. You talked about having to be able to adapt and how the PMO had to evolve and the core of the PMO stayed there. But all of the pieces and parts that needed to shift in order to make it continue to work as the needs change, as the volunteers changed, as the scope changed, the PMO had to shift and evolve in order to meet that need. And so there’s a very interesting concept that I think is happening there and a big part of what I teach in my programs with my students is the need to sustain and evolve so that you can keep the organization meeting the evolving business needs.

Because as the needs of the business change, if you stay the same, if you’re solving last year’s problem, you are not going to be able to meet the needs, the demands and the changes as they come at you. And it’s very interesting to watch, going back to the management styles, how the PMO leader, which was me for the first few years, and continue to evolve as people took on different leadership roles, there’s a PMO leader and the CEO role. And it’s interesting to see those first few years when we were figuring it out, when we didn’t know what we were doing when we did a really successful first event. Now how in the heck are we going to create that again? All of those conversations, the function of the PMO had to shift to meet those needs. And my management style shifted as well. And I remember sitting at one of our board meetings talking about this shift in management style because we were talking about how did we make that first event happen and how did that magic actually happen?

And I remember you commenting on my very directive management style and I said to you, yes, because I had to, because nobody had any answers. But we had to keep moving the action the doing to get to done right? And so we had this very successful first event with 300 project managers, a hundred nonprofits, a huge support from the community and a big IMPACT in the community. And in fact we’ve been told that kind of the work we did translates to about a million dollar IMPACT on the DC area from one day of effort of project managers. That’s enormous. Project managers made a million dollar IMPACT in their local community, so that’s really cool, but that was year one. Now we did it and if you’ll remember one thing really cool that we did when we started to say, now how are we going to do this again?

Kendall

We brought back a lot of the same volunteers who wanted to come back and be a part of it for the second year. But remember how year one, we built the org chart. We built the work breakdown structure. You and I built all the infrastructure and year two we sat in the room, but we let those that had been a part of the PMO the last year, figure that out.  We were still in the room to be able to say, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? But we were able to step back from being so directive and let them have a role in defining what the outcomes would be and how we would get there and the whole body of work. And then in the third year we weren’t even in the room when that conversation happened, we heard about it afterwards and supported it.

Laura

But you can see we kind of, each year we’re able to step out of the directive and become more of the supportive leadership role as the PMO infrastructure kind of solidified and people knew more about what to do. And so when I talk about in terms of the management styles, I talk in terms of when the change is unknown, when people don’t know what it looks like, you’ve never done this before, you’re charting new territory, you’ve got to take on a more directive, we must keep moving without all the answers and not get stuck in a, yeah, but we don’t have the whole scope. Therefore we can’t plan. Yeah. But we don’t know how we’re going to get there. So let’s just wait a year. Yeah. But we have this barrier and that barrier. In that first year, you have no choice but to be more directive, inspire, engage, keep people aligned with the outcome you’re trying to achieve and figure it out along the way.

Year two or the next time around, the next iteration, when people have been through the change, they’ve been through the experience. Now you can start coaching versus directing and then again in year three we were able to be more supportive, not even coaching as much, just being more supportive and let them bring all their brilliant ideas. Now that they’ve experienced it, they’ve drank the Kool aid, they saw the IMPACT, the outcomes. They saw this tears shed of joy and excitement and energy we created on the day, they saw the IMPACT. They knew the why. They felt the why. That first year, they just saw it, but they hadn’t felt it. Once they felt it and had been through it, we then were able to take a different management style. So that was one thing that I thought was really cool. And then from a leadership perspective, it’s interesting that you called on those different facets of the diamond, if you will the board members and how we each have our different strengths.

In that first few years, the just go do it, get it done mode of operating, of running the organization that I did is what needed to be there in those years. And then as it was stable, we could then ask questions that Mike came in to ask like how might we, how might we think bigger? How might we do different? How might we challenge and solve these problems? And now you’re in that role. And I think now we’re in the state of what do we want to be when we grow up? And that’s the role that you can play and challenging and probing and asking questions and pushing on various places to figure out what’s strong and what we can do with the organization. So it’s funny how the evolution of this organization and how it went from idea to first IMPACT, to now evolving to meeting the needs and asking more probing questions and challenging how that whole state of evolution has happened as well. So I just think there’s so many lessons learned in there and I try and share all that with my students and here with all my IMPACT drivers, that there’s so many different ways that you can look at this and think through what can you do to get from do to done? I love that. And get something started.

Start to show the value, start to show the IMPACT and build momentum and credibility, which was a big part of this as well, so that you get your second and third chance to keep showing value, keep making an IMPACT.

Kendall

I think a couple of things that you said in there remind me of lessons as well. I don’t know that it always has to move to a directive mode, but that was a decision and that made sense to work for us at that time. When you’re in the emergent space where it’s kind of like, you’re trying to figure it out, there’s an argument not to do that actually. And this is where the situational leadership comes into play and I think the fact that we have multiple leaders in the roles, multiple different work styles in our leadership team was helpful because to the extent that now something has to happen or there’ll be nothing to react to, you have to go to that directive mode, I would say. And you, I analyzed it properly in my mind, which is in the face, not just of unknown, but in the face of experts, seasoned professionals, all of the many people we worked with who have a bias towards saying, I will be hyper effective when you can tell me X, the response that I need to direct you to action because I can’t tell you X. not because I’m hiding it, I simply don’t know.

So that was what made that the right call in that situation, because it was unformed that we should be directive. It was the nature of the type of people we were working with, so here’s the lesson to me is understand the people. We say understand your stakeholders, right? You have to understand your team. And I think that was the call that you made on that was these are PMs, they will respond to structure and instructions. In fact, that’s what they’re driving me nuts with. What’s the answer of these certain kinds of ways of scope, schedule and cost. Right. That was a really, really strong call in that case. That highlighted another lesson to me that I’ve experienced generally in my kind of executive roles that I would highlight to your PMO folks if I may. 

We like to talk about the case of change or in the case of the emergent, the unknown space, the sponsor, the executive needs to tell us. We need to be careful with that because in part I sometimes see that as kind of laying off the blame or laying off the accountability on someone else. A PMO generally, a PMO leader specifically has a very painful additional role. I said speaking truth to power, it is also probing into the unknown. The sponsor may not know, the executive may not know. So if you’re going to be directive, it may be we don’t know an answer yet. But instead of saying, well, they haven’t told us where, which way to go. And we’ve rustled that with our PMO as we’ve matured over the years where I wasn’t even aware, Oh actually we as a board were not even aware that something may have of come to a halt. And it was because you haven’t given us the direction. I’m like, well you didn’t ask or you didn’t probe me, you know, challenge me, tell me what you need.

And I think that was a maturation we needed from our continual PMO leadership as well. Right. So as a PMO leader, I would say to your folks, be ready to probe, be ready to ask questions where you don’t know an answer. But instead of saying, well, we haven’t gotten the proper direction from the sponsor, therefore this is a problem because the sponsor hasn’t championed us correctly. Well, no, you have an obligation to probe. Do you have an opportunity to probe? You have the hard job to probe. That’s a PMO leader problem. I don’t know if it’s unique but it’s not for everyone. And that’s a skill that’s needed as well.

Laura

Yeah. And that’s what I’m always telling my students is in fact, I was just telling one of my coaching students today, that when somebody says something like, well this is what we need to do or, you know, tries to set you off in a direction or is not giving enough information for you to act or respond. Just keep asking why and tell me more about that and tell me more about that, until you can get the answer you need. And in this case, it’s tell me more about that, so that I have enough understanding of the why and enough understanding of the outcome you want to achieve, so that I can propose a solution to get there. And I think that that’s super important because a lot of us in the project management space, we’re very much focused on our inputs, our outputs, our tools and techniques, right?

We’ve had all that ingrained in us. And so we say, okay, this is the scope it’s given to me, therefore I can then deliver on it. And it won’t always be given to you, I think is the lesson there. And you need to be able to be brave enough frankly, to ask those questions and probe and push and as simple things like tell me more about that or why is that important? And so that you can then as a leader connect people to that why and that outcome so that you can affect change and bring people with you through the change process.

Kendall

I think you’ve just hit something really important. Your PMO leadership, PM’s need to receive the scope and document it. PMO leadership probably needs to drive the scope because the executive doesn’t know the scope or shouldn’t be even held accountable to it. Executive owns problem definition. I find in my consulting side as well, just let’s make sure we have the problem defined by the person that owns a problem or is representing the problem. And the reason I mentioned this to your team, I don’t know if we’ve discussed what actually happened at PMDoS, but on that first 2015 Martin Luther King day, national day of service, one of the things that I remember is our sense of elation and joy and completion.

Now that has been challenged by us, by people such as yourself about talking about IMPACT.  It’s been challenged by been challenged to me by people in the nonprofit space, the gurus and the consultants who are like, yeah, but when did you really affect, when did you really change? Fair enough. Perhaps. In other words, what nonprofit who heard the news of project manager and scope the project has now done an amazing thing and saved fill in the blank, mission, mission oriented success. We do struggle with that. We want to do more of that and that’s part of the role we want to have as a nonprofit PM for Change itself beyond the day of service. But I want to be clear, that first PM day of service on that Martin Luther King day, the problem statement for me was the business problem. I want sticky membership. I believe that will be driven by volunteerism.

That affects what people are skilled at doing, not just hands but their brains and to do it in their community. So now I’m using skills based volunteering of project managers with nonprofits. So what is my actual problem that you delivered the solution on Martin Luther King day 2015. It wasn’t the big IMPACT. What was the actual IMPACT? I want 500 project managers in a room solving 100 problems on that day. Whether they had follow on IMPACT or not. That actually was my problem statement that responds to the business need I was coming at as the chapter chair, frankly. Now we’ve changed the problem and elevated the problem and have a bigger claim on a future, we hope and we have to continue to staff and work towards that. But I would urge PMO leaders to make sure their executives have given them a problem because of what you said they have, in your case, it was you have to work what the scope will actually look like and be.

Now why that matters is did we have success at the end of that day? And I’ll tell you the indicator of my success was not just that it happened and everybody was there and nobody got hurt and they’re were happy people. We had some indicators, because of work we did with points of light, who had worked with the corporation for national community service for the federal government. You know, we were able to get a cabinet level secretary, department of commerce to show up as our keynote, because we were working with partners. For me, the magical moment of success was walking the government team that had come with the secretary out the door and I overheard them say something that you and I had said in August, which is when you think pro bono don’t think lawyers, think project managers. We walked out and the aides said, you know, it’s really weird when we’re talking about all this pro bono work we’re trying to stimulate the economy out there, we should be thinking about project managers. They said it. And there we go. My problem statement for the day was to have engaged volunteers working in their community with nonprofit organizations and to show that their skills were relevant and mattered and that we mattered as project managers and that we can matter as project managers and that’s what you and the PMO delivered.

Kendall

I think that’s what the PMO punch line is that you have to meet the problem statement of the executive.  You want to look at that constant tension, the role and the sharing between the executive and the PMO leadership is an example of first follower. It’s an example of solving a business problem.  It’s about actually getting organized.  It’s about staying adaptive.  It’s about adaptive leadership to know when to drive or not drive, be an emergent or not an emergent.  Speaking truth to power for clarity.  It’s probing in the face of the unknown and willing to go forward and not lay off the responsibility.  And it’s about actually making sure you meet the actual stated problem, because again, in our world, everyone will challenge, and we even feel it in our hearts, we wish these non-profits will go off and do amazing things and we can take some credit for that.  But whether they have full IMPACT or not, that’s actually a different problem that you accepted, standing in a bar one day saying this is the right idea, let me make this happen.  That was the problem you solved, was that project managers could use their skills in the market and meet on a day and be seen doing that and feel good about it.  And that’s what you delivered.  And I think that’s important from a PMO leadership perspective.

Laura

And there you have it. The story of a PMO leader and an executive as they worked to define and deliver a huge IMPACT using the power of a PMO and project management to do so. We go through the dynamic and that push and pull and the importance of that first follower and having an adaptive leadership style.  Making sure that you can push and pull to get to where you need to go in a powerful and important relationship between that executive with the idea and the PMO leader that’s going to drive that idea home. I hope you found this journey, this story, interesting and can think about ways that it might apply to you in your organization as a PMO leader and maybe have a little bit of additional insight into how the minds of the executives are working and maybe understanding a little bit about how you can support them along that journey, especially when the idea isn’t clear and it hasn’t all been figured out.

That’s the cool part. That’s the fun space to be in and that’s a really powerful position for a PMO leader to be in to help become the strategy navigator for the organization, helping your executives, your leadership team define and deliver on that strategy ultimately to make a huge IMPACT. I hope you have enjoyed this episode today. I look forward to bringing you more practitioner perspectives in the future and I would love to know what you think. And don’t forget, there are so many ways that you can get involved in using the power of our project management skills to give back to your local communities. So make sure to check out project management for change@pm4change.org and let’s change the world together, one project at a time.