In my blog post In-Person Jekyll, Social Media Hyde, I discuss some takeaways to consider when posting to social media. I wrote it in 2021, spurred on by an onslaught of surprisingly divisive social media posts from people who, when face to face, appeared nothing like how their posts represented them.

I am connected with many business colleagues on social media, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X. Many are relatively reserved in their commentary and use business platforms for business topics, and personal platforms for things like vacation pics and family updates.

I really enjoy seeing both sides of colleagues, as it helps me get a more rounded view of them and discover their interests. For example, one of my colleagues is well-established in the tech industry, but also a lead singer for a cover band. It’s really fun to see him live his Sammy Hagar alter ego on the weekends. (Sammy Hagar over David Lee Roth any day!) Whenever I see one of his posts, I know I’ll be lightheartedly entertained and can celebrate his fun side.

My focus, though, is not on those like my lead-singer buddy.

It’s on the finger-wagger.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Glenn, a junior project manager, worked on a mission-critical 18-month program led by Sara, the senior PM. Glenn was very ambitious, worked long hours, and constantly strived to take on more and more work.

About six months into the program, Glenn was feeling exhausted. He became less focused and easily distracted. He always looked tired. He put on weight. His team recognized the change in him and began to lose faith in his ability to execute.

Glenn had always been a proud PM who had never seen the need to get counsel from others on how hard he worked. But as he observed how Sara seemed so focused and intentional in her work, he decided to ask her about it in their next 1:1.

“Sara, I’m barely able to keep up and am exhausted. My team can see it in me, my wife and kids see it. You seem to have it all together. How are you doing it?”

Sara smiled. “Ah, sometimes I put on a good face. There are many nights where I’m driving home yelling at myself in the car. I’ll bet other drivers get a real charge out of seeing me so animated.”

Glenn grinned at her humble response. “I’ll bet you have those moments, but we only see the focused Sara.”

Sara turned more serious. “Glenn, there is something I learned a long time ago that I needed to focus on. I was a lot like you--very ambitious, burning the midnight oil, always wanting more. A senior PM I was working for saw me at the end of my rope and gave me some great advice which I’m going to give you. She said that if I was going to scale, I couldn’t rely on brute force to get things done; I had to build my stamina muscle.”

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

I had a discussion with a young man who, three years after graduating college, still did not have a job. I asked him what he wanted to do for his career. “I want to be a Renaissance Man,” he said.

Now, aside from the fact that it’s been a while since I’ve heard someone refer to themselves as a Renaissance Man, I envisioned someone much older and wiser, not a twenty-something young man. So I did some digging on the definition of “Renaissance Man/Woman” and stumbled across a word I’d never heard before:

Polymath.

Dictionary.com defines Polymath as a person of great learning in several fields of study. The word originates from the Greek polymathḗs, which translates to “having learned much.”

This got me thinking about how I, as a PM and leader, strive to be a person of great learning in several fields of study. The interesting word here is learning. It’s not about being a final authority, knowing all there is to know. Instead, it’s about being a student who develops expertise but continues to learn about both existing and new fields of study.

For the project management discipline, I call that person the Polymath PM.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Ahh, social media. Where from the comfort of your living room you can make your point known to millions of people. People and businesses have grown from being virtual unknowns to worldwide phenoms (think “Gangnam Style”) thanks to social media. Then there are those who fell from grace like a lead balloon (think Roseanne Barr, Anthony Weiner, or Paula Deen) because of social media. Both the rises and falls can happen swiftly and without advance warning. Sadly, it doesn’t even have to be true. Fake news travels just as fast as the truth. It just has to be tantalizing. It also doesn’t even have to go viral; a handful of viewers can see something that will alter their opinions of the person posting.

That viewer could be your current or future boss, customer, or business partner.

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.

For the past year, I have been coaching a high-potential leader. Over the past few months, we have been talking about the concept of a pro forma resume. This is a resume you would like to have in the future, which allows you to chart your career movement and experiences to make the pro forma resume a reality.

In this leader’s case, we have been talking about what he wants his resume to look like in 10 years. His pro forma has given him a north star to strive for in his career and is providing a roadmap to help him get there. In a recent meeting, he brought up a benefit of the pro forma that I hadn’t considered, but one that makes perfect sense.
He is currently leading a particularly complex project involving both employees and volunteers, and has exposure at the very highest levels of the organization. The work is particularly stressful, and he is facing a number of new challenges.

In our meeting, he was feeling a bit overwhelmed and stressed due to the project and its issues. As we talked about the project, he made an interesting observation. “You know,” he said, “there are a lot of tough things I’m working through, but knowing I can include some of these things on my resume is really going to enhance my marketability.”

His comment caught me off guard, not because it was in any way wrong (in fact it was a brilliant observation), but because I had never articulated like he did the link between navigating thorny issues and how they enhance a resume. He later told me that the idea of having a more robust resume as result of the project and its challenges energizes him to address the issues head on.

Now that’s a “making lemonade out of lemons” perspective.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

In Part 1 of The 4 Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence (EI), I focus on knowing thyself. A key aspect of knowing thyself is developing an action plan based on improvement opportunities identified from a 360-feedback evaluation. The nuggets you get from a 360 are crucial in helping you become a better-rounded PM.

There is another great source to help you in your learning journey: your stakeholder’s values. Before we get in too deep, here is a level-set of who I include in the stakeholder universe:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

I worked for three companies in my professional career: Accenture, Microsoft, and my own company, Consetta Group.

In my 11 years at Accenture, I worked on gigs in the oil & gas, food distribution, technology, retail distribution, aerospace & defense, software product management, and outsourcing industries. At Microsoft I worked in IT, corporate procurement, corporate planning, and HR over a nine-year span. I not only got a rich education in different industries and functions, but was able to go deeper in areas I liked.

And it all largely happened despite my lack of planning.

Particularly in my career at Accenture, I mostly took the gigs that were given to me. I really had no idea what skills I wanted to build or industries I wanted to work in. What my experience at Accenture imprinted on me was to stay in a job for about 18 months then look for my next opportunity.

This continued at Microsoft as well as my own consultancy. After about 18 months I would get bored and need a change. Even to this day, I occasionally get an itch to do something different and new.

I’ve looked at a lot of LinkedIn profiles over the past several years. My first inclination is to go to the experience section and see not just where people have worked, but how many companies and how long they worked at each company. This review provides first impressions for me:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

LinkedIn is the standard for introducing you to the world and enabling you to put your best foot forward in your chosen profession. According to LinkedIn’s pressroom:

• There are more than one billion members in 200 countries and regions worldwide.
• Seven people are hired every minute on LinkedIn.
• 9,000 members apply for a job every minute.
• 1.5 million feed updates are viewed per minute.
• 138 hours of learning content is consumed every minute.
• 67 million companies are on LinkedIn.

When used well, it can lead to fruitful long-term relationships. When used poorly, it can lock a door to an opportunity you may never even know about. Given that it can be used for free, it’s a no-brainer to use LinkedIn.

But merely putting up a profile may not be enough. I’ve seen many LinkedIn profiles that not only don’t make me more interested in a person, but they actually leave me with a negative perception of them. To that end, here are 11 lessons that might be helpful for you to avoid when creating a profile and using LinkedIn (or any other platform):

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Way back when I was with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), our senior management became very interested in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Every partner and manager attended an intensive five-day seminar on the seven habits and how to practically implement them into our daily lives.

Now, I have attended many seminars that I honestly got nothing out of. Not this one. This was when I experienced my first 360 evaluation. It was also during this seminar that one of the key concepts left a lasting impression: Habit 3, “Put first things first.” In this habit, Covey introduces the four quadrants of time management, as follows:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.