PMI Talent Triangle: Power Skills (Leadership)

Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers!

Today we are talking to Colin D. Ellis. Colin is an international award-winning project management speaker and author and helps organizations around the world to build delivery cultures that everyone actually wants to be a part of. Prior to building this phenomenal delivery cultures, Colin spent 30 years, as a permanent employee of other people's delivery cultures in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, and most of them were well not so great. Sound familiar? He's written three best-selling project management books, including his latest one, The Project Book and speaks with energy, passion, humor and thank goodness, honesty. Remember what that was all about? About the challenges that organizations face in creating project leaders and the cultures required to deliver successfully every time. Born in Liverpool, UK, Colin now lives with his family in Melbourne, Australia, and what we're going to talk about today I think is incredibly important.

Learn the best-kept secrets to creating a PMO that drives IMPACT.  Join us for the PMO IMPACT Summit.Register for FreeLaura Barnard:  Colin and I are going to talk today about EQ, emotional intelligence, and everything that goes with that. But from the perspective of you as a PMO leader and what you need to be thinking about, what EQ even means anyway and how it specifically applies to all of you that are in the role in driving change, helping to deliver organizational strategy and lead people with the PMO. Before we dive in, is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience today about you and all of your great experience?

Colin D. Ellis: Yeah, I think the only thing that I would add, Laura, is that I've been working for myself for four years, but for the 20 years before that, I really started from absolute zero like most project managers. I did not have a clue. I was walked out of a tele-sales environment in a newspaper in Liverpool where I lived in England, and really crafted a career based on being a good human being, creating great teams, but then staying on top of the technical knowledge that I needed as well. I associate with, project managers, program managers, PMO managers. I was a senior executive in governments. I understand all government challenges, and it's just been a never ending moving kind of feast in the project management world at least for 20 years and no doubt that won't end any time soon.

Laura: I like that. I like how you're talking about it as just you just tried to be a good human being. And I think that, I remember back when I built my first PMO back in 1999 and I had no idea what I was doing. I was plopped down in the middle of the .com craziness, the Y2K craziness and trying to just figure out how in the world to help this organization I was working in deliver all of these client projects, and everything was new. You couldn't just go to Google “how do I build a PMO?” and get 8 million results to about how to build a PMO. Google technically existed, but nobody really knew about it back in the late nineties and I didn't have access to books, I didn't have access to training. I didn't have access to all the brilliant thought leaders that I do today. It was really hard to figure it out and learn from mistakes and try and figure out the right way to do it. I am really glad to hear that you have that experience because I think that when you have to figure it out on your own, there's so much to be said for the way you actually internalize the lessons along the way.

Colin: That's so true. I was the same, 56K modem in my bedroom using the net browser and kind of trying to come up with something when you just couldn't get... I was going to the library but the resources really weren't there. Really what we learned to do in those early days, Laura, and I'm not pining for the good old days,