Throughout my career, I’ve facilitated and been a party to disagreements or conflict more times that I can possibly count. Sometimes things worked out okay, and those affected were satisfied with the outcome.

Other times, things didn’t turn out as well. As I’ve thought about both the good and not-so-good outcomes, it caused me to dig deeper to find the underlying factors that helped drive the outcomes.

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Jane was a group manager over a team of six buyers for a large department store chain.  Her team specialized in buying house-wares, including linens, sheets, towels and small appliances.  Her team met every week to discuss advertised specials for upcoming weeks and any supplier issues that the team needed to be aware of.  There was one linens supplier, Patty’s Linens, that has had some difficulty with product quality and the department store was experiencing higher-than-normal returns on the product.  Two weeks earlier, the supplier submitted a plan for how they were going to improve the quality of their product.  The department store decided to keep the supplier on for three more months to evaluate their plan and give the supplier an opportunity to resolve the quality issues.  With this as backdrop, we eavesdrop on Jane’s current team meeting:

In The Clarity PM: 6 Areas to Improve, I talk about six attributes of a what I call a Clarity PM, as follows:

1. Clarity of purpose
2. Clarity of done
3. Clarity of constraints
4. Clarity of what/who/when
5. Clarity of external dependencies
6. Clarity of communication

I’ve certainly been burned by not doing each of the attributes well. Number 5, clarity of external dependencies, has brought unwanted surprises that created ugly fire drills. It has caused me to be more mindful of those dependencies and how I unearth and manage them, making me better at intentional external dependency management.

Given so, I’d like to share some lessons learned to help you avoid getting bit by an external dependency. Here are six external groups that can carry dependencies that can have a material impact on both your work and the external group’s work:

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As a parallel to the book, I developed an excel spreadsheet to help you define good-enough goals and work towards those goals. The Nine Crucial Elements to Achieve Good-Enough Contentment Assessment includes an annual goal setting tab to help you identify what you'd like to achieve by the end of the year for each good-enough contentment element and put steps in place to do it. You can download the spreadsheet which you should use after reading the book.

Recently I read a Forbes article about navigating leadership challenges in a rapidly changing world. The article highlighted 10 areas of focus for survival.

Nothing on the list was an earth-shattering surprise for me. Things like building a robust network, cultivating emotional intelligence, and embracing continuous learning can be found on most lists of focus areas for leaders. What I found interesting was what the article listed as number one: Prioritize mental and physical health.

For some, this might not make much of an impression. For me, it brought back a trajectory-changing time in my life that happened more than 30 years ago.

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Recently, Harvard Business Review published an article about what the next generation of project management will look like. The article highlighted 10 next-generation skills:

1. Organizational awareness
2. Data acumen
3. Cross-functional collaboration
4. Decision-making
5. Willingness to explore and adopt new technology
6. Financial acumen
7. Process and framework expertise (i.e., business process improvement, agile, organizational change management, risk)
8. Growth mindset
9. The ability to coach and motivate teams
10. Customer centricity

Now, these are all good skills for today’s project manager to focus on to be relevant tomorrow. There is one item on the list that piqued my interest the most.

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Years back, I worked on a large, high-visibility program. My direct boss was generally well respected by senior leadership for his client management abilities and how well he communicated upward. He scheduled a weekly two-hour staff meeting with his direct reports.

Most times, my peers and I would sit in the meeting waiting for our boss to show up, with him either coming in more than an hour late or not at all. There was always some excuse as to why he couldn’t meet. We had a running joke about what time our boss would show. It was frustrating that we seemed to not matter much to him, particularly on such a high-visibility program.

This behavior was in direct contrast to our boss’s boss, the executive in charge of the entire program. If he made time for you to meet with him, he kept it. If you were late or didn’t show, he let you know about it. In the rare event that he did need to cancel, his assistant would contact you with not just a cancellation but alternate times that he was able to meet. He treated both his and others’ time with respect.

The experiences with my direct and skip-level bosses left a very significant impression on me. Both worked on the same program, yet the one who had the greater span of control also had a much better command of his calendar and demonstrated more respect for others than my direct boss did. Seeing how the two worked together showed me what I did not want to be known as:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.