My focus in this series is not only about ambiguity, but about how people respond to ambiguity and impact themselves and those around them. Those impacted could be colleagues, family or friends. As a leader, your ability to bring clarity to chaos is one of the single most important skills you can possess. So far, we’ve looked at three personas:.

• Part 1 introduced Aaron the Avoider
  
• Part 2 introduced Brett the Broadcaster
  
• Part 3 introduced Cal the Complicator
  
• Part 4 introduced Diane the Driver
  

The final persona is Sue the Scaler.

Sue was the VP of Program Management at Alloy Industries. Seven directors reported to her, each with about 20 people under them. She started at Alloy as a project manager two decades earlier, having worked her way up to her current VP position. She excelled at execution, and especially noteworthy was her ability to bring clarity to ambiguity.

When faced with an ambiguous situation, she methodically dissected the situation, separated knowns from unknowns, ensured those who needed to be involved in driving clarity had a seat at the table, drove to consensus, and did the follow-through to ensure clarity stuck.

When she was promoted to director, her mentor, Teresa, took her out for coffee.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com. 

My focus in this series is not only about ambiguity, but about how people respond to ambiguity and impact themselves and those around them. Those impacted could be colleagues, family or friends. As a leader, your ability to bring clarity to chaos is one of the single most important skills you can possess. So far, we’ve looked at three personas:.

• Part 1 introduced Aaron the Avoider
• Part 2 introduced Brett the Broadcaster
• Part 3 introduced Cal the Complicator

Now we meet Diane the Driver.

Diane was a seasoned PM known for her discipline to keep project teams and stakeholders focused through successful completion. Her latest project was to implement a new company-wide HR system. Dave was a new hire and was staffed on the project as a product manager.

Dave did a great job of building relationships with the business users. Diane was under mandate to hold the schedule firm, which meant she had to keep scope to plan of record to ensure she met her date. Everything was going well into user acceptance testing. During UAT, Jeff, one of the business users raised two “small” enhancements that were previously deemed as out of scope with Dave.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

My focus in this article series is not only about ambiguity, but about how people respond to ambiguity and impact themselves and those around them. It’s not limited to a person’s professional life; ambiguity can manifest itself in virtually any aspect of a person’s life. Part 1 introduced Aaron the Avoider, while in Part 2 we met Brett the Broadcaster. The next persona is Cal the Complicator.

Mary was just hired as Conset’s new CIO. Mary brought a long list of achievements with her, having worked in and with some of the largest companies on earth. She was also known as someone not afraid to make changes to improve an organization’s performance. Her courage didn’t mean she was reckless in her execution. Her execution was thoughtful, measured and well-informed.

Conset’s IT organization was divided by discipline, with product managers, program managers, engineering, and support all reporting up to different VPs. One of Mary’s first acts was to consolidate program and product management under one VP and merge the organizations.

Under the prior CIO, the two organizations didn’t work particularly well together, with the two regularly pointing fingers at each other whenever problems occurred. Mary then held the VP under the combined organization accountable for how she wanted it structured, with the plan to be revealed at a later date.

Cal was a program manager accountable for Conset’s sales and marketing IT systems. He was very comfortable with the product/program organizational split. For him, combining the organizations under one VP with details to be released later was very unsettling.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com. 

As I covered in Part 1 of this series, one of my previous employers utilized a methodology to help its employees assess skill strengths and opportunities for improvement. The methodology contained a broad set of core competencies. My favorite core competency was dealing with ambiguity.

My focus in this series is about how people respond to ambiguity and impact themselves and those around them. It’s not limited to a person’s professional life; ambiguity can manifest itself in virtually any aspect of a person’s life. Those impacted could be colleagues, family, friends, or loved ones.

As a leader, your ability to bring clarity to chaos is one of the single most important skills you can possess.
Part introduced Aaron the Avoider. Now let’s meet Brett the Broadcaster.

“We’ve got to embed AI in everything we do!” Corrie, the CEO, made this announcement at their latest company meeting. “Our competitors are doing it and our customers expect it. If we are going to not just survive but thrive as long-term players, we’ve got to take this seriously. If ever there was an executive mandate, this is it!”

Brett sat in the audience, puzzled. He’d used AI to help him write emails, but that was about as far as he took it. “I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do with that,” he thought.

After the company meeting, nearly every discussion between Brett and others included, “I’ve got no idea what Corrie expects us to do!” He rationalized it away as management speak. “The execs don’t really understand what we do; they need to give some concrete actions on what they expect.”

Read more at ProjectManagement.com. 

In 7 Tips for Better 360-Feedback Evaluations, I discussed a situation where a non-profit leader whom I coached was reluctant to use 360-feedback evaluations due to an experience with a prior leader of the organization.

It was a textbook example of not only an unwillingness to improve based on feedback, but an unwillingness to even get feedback in the first place. The leader only underwent the 360 because the board he reported to required it. Those in the organization providing feedback insisted on it being anonymous, as they were concerned about retaliation from the leader.

An executive coach (not me) was assigned to administer the 360 process, gather the feedback through interviews, help distill the feedback, then present the feedback to the leader. The leader refused to accept the feedback and would not participate in any corrective action discussions.

The experience was so bad that even long after the leader had left the organization, those who remembered the process didn’t want to do it again with any other execs. Everyone lost, and the organization suffered as a result.
As someone who develops content intended for mass consumption, I am no stranger to feedback. Some feedback is positive, some more constructive. Some is helpful for taking action, while some falls into a vague “this stinks” bucket.

I get feedback from anonymous sources, as well as those as close to me (like my editor/wife, Patty). While I’ve learned to be better at accepting constructive feedback, sometimes it still hurts—particularly if it’s something that I’ve tried to address previously.

Recently I was asked by a journalist how I practiced public speaking.  At this point in my life, getting up in front of an audience is pretty much second nature.  However, it wasn't always so.  I had to work hard at the skill and had to fail A LOT before I found my schtick and was able to get pretty OK at it.   

Here are the highlights from the interview along with six take-aways to help you be a better public speaker.

A LinkedIn interaction from some time back still sticks with me today. Why? He and I connected, then he immediately asked to review my personal finances so he could do for me what he had allegedly done for so many other “thrilled customers.” I told him “No thanks.” He replied back asking me why. Being the direct guy I am, I told him I thought it was insincere to connect with me and immediately want to review my personal finances and try to sell me on his service. He said he never asked me to send my personal finances through LinkedIn. At this point, the discussion was no longer about him trying to sell me a service; instead, I wanted to provide a teachable moment for him. I told him that sending personal finances through LinkedIn wasn’t the issue, but I didn’t want to divulge my personal finances to someone I didn’t even know who connected with me only 30 minutes ago. After another couple of interactions, he told me that “nice people” would agree to meet with him (I guess I’m not a nice person) and that he was rescinding his offer to meet (even though I already told him I didn’t want to meet with him). It was kind of like “you can’t break up with me because I’m breaking up with you first”. He then wished me the best. He made an impression on me for sure, just not one he wanted.

In a recent phone call I told the CEO of my insurance brokerage that after being a loyal customer for 15 years I had moved all my business to other providers. Given our long-standing relationship, I felt I owed him an explanation; not because I wanted to see someone fired, but because I wanted him to know my reasons for leaving so he could put any lessons learned to use.

It started about seven years ago when the person assigned to my business insurance seemed to lose interest in me. He wasn’t on top of my renewals, made me do work that he could have done for me, and didn’t competitively bid my insurance. I moved all of my business insurance to another agency. A similar issue happened in the past year with my personal insurance; I simply didn’t feel that I was important to my agent. The final nail in the coffin came when my bank notified me that my homeowners’ insurance had lapsed two months earlier without any notification from my insurance agent. I then reached out to another agency, who quickly bound coverage for me at 10 p.m. on a Saturday evening.

Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth

Within a few months of my open door policy, I saw my own productivity drop and my frustration level rise because I kept getting interrupted by people taking me up on my open-door policy.  My open-door policy soon turned into a series of random interruptions that caused me to not get my stuff done.  I came to recognize that I needed to be accessible to people but that I could control the accessibility through scheduled time.  Open-door means be accessible, not come in whenever you want.

Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth