PMI Talent Triangle: Power Skills (Leadership)

Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers! Today we are talking with Emma-Ruth Arnaz-Pemberton, a fellow of the Association for Project Management. She is an expert in PMO project, program, and portfolio management, with extensive experience in the change management industry, which, as you guys know by now, is near and dear to my heart. She has a particular focus and emphasis on collaboration and PMO conception and strategy, as well as method and capability development. My favorite things about Emma are that she organizes two flagship events for Wellingtone, the organization that she works for, which are the future PMO Conference, which is a fantastic conference done over in the UK. And she brought the Project Management Day of Service, my little baby, all the way over to the UK. They have had some fantastic and successful PMDoS events over there. But today, we're talking about a little bit, a little teaser of what Emma-Ruth is covering in the PMO IMPACT Summit. Emma is a part of our PMO Impact Summit and she's going to be speaking about the PMO hierarchy of needs and effective learning.

Learn the best-kept secrets to creating a PMO that drives IMPACT. Join us for the PMO IMPACT Summit.Register for FreeLaura: I would love to start with, where we are today from a learning styles perspective, especially as it relates to our space, PMOs and project management? Where are we today and why are we talking about this now? What's shifting that's prompted this to be a really hot topic for you?

Emma-Ruth: From a PMO perspective, I'm very people-focused, so I'm all about collaboration and development of people and capability. That's me on a professional level, but also on a very personal level. What I have found is that the world is changing and a lot of our systems, particularly learning systems don't really seem to be changing. There's a very well known concept around the different learning styles that everybody has. Some people are very visual. They prefer using pictures and images to learn. If any of you have kids, if you've seen them revise, you'll be able to see how they learn because some people draw, some people write, some people listen, and some people read. Some people are very oral, so it's all about the auditory stuff. So they prefer using sound and music. Some people learn are more verbal, use more linguistic skills both in speech and in writing. They're really looking for somebody to have a conversation. That's how they remember stuff. Other people are very physical. They're very much about using their body, their hands, their sense of touch. These are the people that if you're teaching them a system, they want to just get on and do it. They don't want to listen to you. They just want to be left to press the buttons. Even still, other people are more logical, more mathematical in nature. They tend to be quite analytical. They need to work through the logic, the reasoning. They need to understand the systems and the processes, whereas others are more social. They prefer to learn in groups as opposed to solitary people who prefer to learn on their own. That's been around for a really long time and lots of training and trainers, they adapt the way that they teach in order to hit as many of those as they can in a session. That's how I was taught to train. Make sure you do something for each one of those kinds of learning styles. It still works to a point. But nowadays we live in this chaotic world where everything's volatile. It's uncertain. It's complex and it's ambiguous. There's so much out there now that what we find is so much and so many people and particularly in our industry is kind of gone from quite niched to now everybody's a project manager.

Project management is a life skill for all. The way that we learn typically is you go, you sit in a room, you get some presentation, you'll do some exercises,