How are you managing your reputation?

 

Spend a few moments considering the reputations of people you know. Some have a reputation for great technical ability, some for excellent project delivery – perhaps some have a reputation for late task completion or poor punctuality. What do you have a reputation for?

A reputation is a promise. It tells someone what they can expect when they deal with you. Importantly, it’s a promise that’s created not by your words, but by your actions. It’s your personal brand – your personal marketing. When someone recommends you, it’s based on your reputation.

In the same way that successful businesses actively manage their brand, you should actively manage your reputation – it will take you wherever you want to go in your career.

So how do you manage your reputation?

1. What do you want your reputation to be? Do you want to be known for your leadership; for being hard-line and decisive or being a compassionate, consensus-style project manager? Do you want a reputation for being an excellent communicator, a reputation for being responsive, proactive or well organized? Write down the elements that will make up your ‘brand’.
2. What are you doing about it? What specific things can you do – every day – to build your reputation through your actions? How will you conduct yourself – what will you change? Write this down too, so you can do these actions every day.
3. What are you doing (or not doing) that’s undermining your reputation? If you want a reputation for strong leadership, but procrastinate about decisions, your actions are actually giving you a reputation for weak leadership. Remember doing nothing still contributes to your reputation – but it won’t be the reputation you want.
4. How are you monitoring your reputation? It’s a good reality check if you can find someone who will be honest with you.

My suggestion is to take the daily actions you come up with and add them to your leading indicator checklist. That way you’ll quickly incorporate effective reputation-building actions into your routine.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can build the reputation you want by simply managing it actively and giving it a little focus every day. Remember, no action is still an action!

What will you do today to build your reputation?

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Play the Project Management Game

If you treated your project management like a professional sports person treats their sport, how would your perspectives change?

You take it seriously but you don’t take it to heart

You strive to do your best; to push yourself to do better than you did yesterday. If you hit a setback, you don’t stress about it all night; you dust yourself off and prepare for the next game.

A new day, a new game

Each day is a new game. You know you can’t change the game you played yesterday, but you can play today’s game to the best of your ability.

You work on your game

You continually look for ways to improve your game. You work with your coach to build skills and techniques to make you a champion. Every single day you review what worked for you and what didn’t.

You have fun playing the game

You know it’s a GAME and it’s meant to be fun. You also know this doesn’t mean less work but you put effort in to make it fun because you know you win most often when you’re enjoying yourself.

 

So treat your project management like a game, and yourself as a professional player. It puts you in a great frame of mind and you’ll enjoy the challenges even more.

Play hard and have fun!

Effective project managers live in the future

There are two types of project manager: those who live in the past and those who live in the future. Those living in the past are so busy dealing with tasks that were due yesterday that they haven’t got time to think about what’s going to clobber them tomorrow – they’re reactive. Those who live in the future think ahead, mitigating future risks and finding opportunities for project gains – they’re proactive and as a result, effective.

Leading indicator checklists are a great tool to help you become proactive – but how do you know what your leading indicators are? To identify them, first look at the disciplines you need to be outstanding in your project management role.

The disciplines

Good project management disciplines include:

• Pro-activity: Thinking ahead, anticipating risks, seeking opportunities to advance ahead of the plan.
• Stakeholder communication: Making sure stakeholders feel informed and included.
• Professionalism & reputation: Being prompt in response to calls, emails and queries. Managing meetings effectively.
• Leadership of project team: Being an effective leader, building team cohesion, fostering communication flow.
• Adding value: Finding ways to ’stand out from the crowd’ – to contribute something extra to stakeholders or to the project at no real cost.

You may identify other disciplines that are important for you – great, keep going.

Actions from the disciplines

Now identify all the actions that you can to do to help build that discipline. Some won’t make it into your leading indicators checklist, but they’ll still be useful for focussing on project health, team performance etc.

Make a daily checklist

The secret to success with leading indicators is to turn them into a checklist. This Harvard article about checklists shows why they are so powerful.

From your list of actions, make a checklist of those you can do daily that, combined, will support all the disciplines. You’ll find some actions you can use as a basic core, and some that will vary from project to project depending on targets and people. Pick an effective yet manageable number – too many and you’ll end up back in the past.

My personal checklist always contains at least the following six actions:

Daily Leading Indicators		Why I use this action
Have I spoken with each of my team? Leadership, Adding value		Talking with team members provides insight into their strengths, weaknesses and motivations – vital for good leadership.
Have I updated task status in the WBS and reviewed future tasks? Professionalism, Leadership, Pro-activity		Using conversations with the project team members, you can tell exactly where your project is up to and can quickly identify and deal with any potential problems. Reviewing future tasks also helps you think of optimisations you can make to progress the project.
Have I reviewed and updated project risks? (Pro-activity, Professionalism)		If you want to think about the future, reviewing risks is a great place to start.
Have I spoken with my stakeholders? Stakeholder communication, Leadership, Adding value		I believe that talking (not email) is essential to building effective working relationships. A phone call is quick and establishes a personal connection. The more you talk with customers, the easier it gets, and the easier it is to add value. I find reasons to speak with stakeholders as often as I can.
Have I sent actions/minutes from my meetings on the same day as the meeting? Professionalism, Leadership, Adding value		By being consistently efficient, you set an expectation of performance and professionalism for all members of the team, internal and external. Meeting attendees will learn that your minutes will contain all their actions and makes it far more likely the actions will be done.
Have I followed up phone conversations with email? Professionalism, Leadership, Communication, Adding value		This reduces the risk of you or the recipient forgetting or misunderstanding what was discussed and provides an opportunity for them to clarify anything. Keep the email short, and use bullet points – it’s easier to read and more effective as a reminder.

 

When completing the checklist, keep it simple. The answer to the indicator question is either yes or no.

Use your checklist every day and reviewing your results each week and you will easily identify if you’re consistently missing an action. This lets you rectify it before you slip back into reactive mode.

Leading indicator checklists are a powerful tool to
help you to become more proactive and effective- they keep you on top of your projects and free up more time for you to think about the future.

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