Be a Project Motivator: Unlock the Secrets of Strengths-Based Project Management

By Ruth Pearce

“This book will soon become a widely accepted standard on how to deliver a successful project on time and on budget in any industry.” 
—John Garahan, Vice President, Global Delivery, Broadridge Financial Solutions

Successful project managers must engage and motivate others to achieve complex goals. Ruth Pearce shows how behavior, language, and attitudes affect engagement and how leveraging character strengths can help improve relationships, increase innovation, and build higher-functioning teams. This focus on character strengths—such as bravery, curiosity, fairness, gratitude, and humor—can help project managers recognize and cultivate the things that are best in themselves and others.

Many project managers do not have the authority to direct the activities of people on their teams—they can only influence them. The most influential people succeed by focusing less on themselves and their message and more on others. They pay attention, they are brave, they are vulnerable, they are curious, and they look for and acknowledge the things that are important about and to the other person. And they model the behavior that they want to see. This book tells you how.

Pearce provides tools and frameworks for building a culture of appreciation, understanding character strengths, mapping leadership qualities, understanding learning styles, identifying team roles, and executing plans. She also explores the factors that contribute to conflict and tensions, as well as strategies for getting through difficult times. We see these tools and techniques in action through “Maggie,” a project manager who is struggling to motivate her team. Each chapter concludes with reflective questions to make the ideas stick and with key strategies for success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781523095810

Ruth Pearce

Ruth Pearce has managed large-scale, international, complex projects for twenty-five years and is currently focused on helping project managers build coaching skills and cultivate character strengths in their teams. Ruth holds PMP and PMI-ACP credentials and is an International Coach Federation accredited coach. She is the founder of ALLE LLC, which provides project motivation services as well as coaching for project managers who want to be more engaged and more engaging in their work.

Book preview

http://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager.aspx.

1

Project Managers: More Than Just Plate Spinners and Ball Jugglers

Project managers can be a big reason for a project’s success and a big reason for its failure. It is our choice which we are.

Most of this book is about doing things better. It focuses on building skills, increasing your influence, and making things better for you and those around you. This chapter makes the case for why all these things are important. There are quite a few statistics. Some of them focus on the world at large and are from organizations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI), Gallup, and the VIA Institute on Character. But a big part of this chapter is about you. I asked project managers and their stakeholders what the role of the project manager is. I asked project managers what they have to do with team engagement, how much they know about it, and how much they want to know. And finally, I asked project managers about their strengths—or superpowers—and also about their potential challenges.

Things to Look Out For

1. Learn how we and our stakeholders view project managers.

2. Understand how fellow project managers perceive engagement and their role and readiness.

3. Appreciate why engagement is important in motivating teams.

4. Find out what strengths project managers already have—and where they need help.

Implementing the Platinum Rule—Treating People as They Want to Be Treated

Social intelligence and emotional intelligence are very popular concepts in the workplace these days, and as project managers, we need to use social intelligence at every turn if we are going to be successful.

I, like many of you, was brought up using the Golden Rule to deal with others: treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. This did not seem like such a bad rule until I reached high school and started to mix with people who had very different backgrounds from mine. At that point, I started to realize that many people did not have the same values that I did and did not want the same life I did. As someone who, even then, was incurably curious and had a passion for learning—although not always for school—my values and behaviors were not the same as those of people who valued relationship building, or who focused on their family or church community, or who loved arts and creativity. It was not necessarily in either of our best interests to treat them as I would like to be treated.

Years later, I came across the Platinum Rule, which says that we should treat others as they would like to be treated. This seems rational and reasonable, a laudable goal, except then we are pretty much left on our own to fathom how people want to be treated. Of course, we can always ask, but that is not always practical when we are dealing with dozens or hundreds of people a day in the workplace or we are communicating in an impersonal medium such as email or text.

At the heart of this book is a series of practices that help us to answer the question, How do other people want to be treated? Answering that question will help you build social intelligence and will allow you to develop a greater sense of connection with, and kindness and even love toward, your teams.

In this book, I will share some of the things I have learned and am continuing to learn. My goal is to share with you some empowering and useful tools that have taken me years to discover. They are all simple, effective, and fun. Even if you can only experience and practice them yourself, you will see a benefit—and so will those around you. If you are feeling brave, you can share all the methods from the book with others. And if you are feeling very brave, or you happen to work in a very open, accessible work environment, you can even suggest to your leadership team that these tools and practices be shared more broadly.

With this book you can start to implement the Platinum Rule—and start to treat people the way they want to be treated!

When we see people for who they are, and treat them as they want to be treated, they become engaged. When they are engaged, they are motivated. And when they are motivated, they get stuff done.

Why Do Project Managers Need Their Own Book on Engagement?

Regardless of the audience, the basic foundations we need to build engaged, connected, and empowered teams are the same. When we use curiosity to prospect for and leverage strengths, embody bravery through vulnerability, and model the behavior we want to see, teams flourish.

This may sound hard to do—especially embodying bravery!—but these components integrate naturally and are straight-forward to learn and apply. Your skill and comfort level with these concepts will grow over time, but even a little bit of each will make a big difference in your day-to-day experience.

Of course, there are many books out there about engagement, and lots of research that shows the amazing things that can happen when people are engaged. Why do we need a book specifically for project