PMI Talent Triangle: Power Skills (Leadership)

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

Today, we are talking with one of my dear friends and esteemed colleagues, Barbara Trautlein. We are going to talk about how to stop getting in the way and coach stakeholders to help, not hurt your projects. Before we dive in, let me tell you a little bit about Barbara. In addition to being my organizational change management superhero, she's also a PhD and author of the bestselling book Change Intelligence: Use the Power of CQ to Lead Change That Sticks. She's also the principal founder of Change Catalysts and originator of the CQ System for developing change intelligent leaders and organizations. For over 30 years, Barbara has coached executives, trained leaders at all levels, certified change agents, and facilitated mission-critical change management initiatives, achieving bottom line business and powerful leadership results for clients, and this is so super cool to me and not a surprise at all. In 2015, she had the honor of being awarded Change Management Consultant of the Year by the Association of Change Management Professionals Midwest Chapter. She is truly gifted at sharing strategies and tactics that are accessible, actionable, and immediately applicable, and that is why I had to share Barbara with you all here, all of my impact drivers, because I know like me, you want to have the practical takeaways and the list of things that we can go do right away to affect the changes that we're trying to create, and it's not just about the theory, and it's not just about the stories. Those certainly help give us the context of what we're trying to do, but we also just want to know how do I put this in practice right away. Barbara is the person to talk to when it comes to change intelligence and bringing people with you through the change process.

Learn the best-kept secrets to creating a PMO that drives IMPACT.  The LIVE dates are over, but you can still access this content with the Unlimited Access Pass!UNLIMITED ACCESSLaura Barnard: Today, we are going to talk about an incredibly important topic to everyone listening today. Whether it's sponsors blessing and advocating, or end-users resisting, or project team members not following through with their accountabilities, that never happens, right?  As a PMO leader, you grapple with challenging stakeholder behaviors every single day, so in this session, we are going to talk about highly interactive learning experience and how you can learn about potential root causes of the seemingly difficult behaviors that we deal with sometimes in the workplace and what you as a PMO leader can do to coach others to become collaborative contributors, to have a positive impact, build relationships, and get results for your projects.  Barbara, you've created this really cool concept called Change Intelligence or CQ, which is your foundational approach. I've heard you describe it as vital competency for any PMO leader right up there with EQ or emotional intelligence. Can you talk about this CQ concept and what it means?

Barbara Trautlein: Sure, absolutely. How I define CQ or change intelligence is that change intelligence is the awareness of our style of leading change, and every project is a change, so every PMO leader is a change leader. That's my terminology.  It's our awareness of our style of leading change and our ability to adapt our style to be optimally effective across people in situations.

First of all, the awareness of our style, and then the ability to adapt our style. To get the most out of our brief podcast today, just let me explain what those styles of leading change are so the listeners can self-diagnose because it's a simple, but powerful model. What I say is that people lead change, lead projects, lead PMOs from one of three ways, that some people lead from the heart that's focusing on the people. They're very engaging, and collaborative,