The podcast by project managers for project managers. Foundational power skills encompass soft skills, behavioral competencies, and personality traits essential for leaders, aspiring leaders, and team members alike. By embracing these power skills, individuals can elevate their capabilities, leading to enhanced organizational performance and fostering a collaborative, high-performance culture within organizations.

Table of Contents

02:47 … Neal’s Motivation03:54 … Targeting the Audience05:31 … A Power Skill08:21 … The 24 Power Skills12:07 … Pick Your Top Three13:25 … Manage Daily Your Top Three Priorities18:11 … A Project Story21:30 … Feedback on Focusing on Top Three23:13 … Treat All Project Managers Equally27:45 … Setting Expectations29:33 … Kevin and Kyle30:52 … Power Sills for the Team32:29 … Who Teaches the Power Skills?33:58 … Informing Your Leaders37:09 … Make Your Leaders Look Good42:37 … Contact Neal44:22 … Closing

NEAL WHITTEN: Power skills give you the real power to get your job done effectively and efficiently.  It places the accountability for your actions squarely on you.  I’m very big on accountability.  I think it’s something we’re missing in this world quite a bit.  And I find also that most people would rather have the authority and accountability that these power skills support.  So when you unleash this power in the non-management ranks, I assert your organization and company are going to prosper like never before.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds.  And here with me in the studio is Bill Yates, and our sound guy is Danny Brewer.

We’re excited to bring this episode to you.  We’re talking with someone who is well known and loved by all the Velociteach team.  This is Neal Whitten.  He’s a trainer, he’s a consultant, mentor, author, speaker in the areas of power skills and leadership, as well as project management, team building, and employee development.  He has authored eight books and has written over 150 articles for professional magazines and was a contributing editor of PMI’s PM Network Magazine for over 15 years.  He has developed 20 online products through Velociteach.  And Bill, you’re going to tell us a little bit more about Neal, too.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  You know, there are certain relationships that you have at work, partnerships like this, that just take your game to the next level.  We are so honored to partner with Neal.  And I think it’s been nearly 10 years that we’ve been working with Neal.  And yeah, we have a number of InSite courses that are in the voice of Neal Whitten.  It’s actually his voice, it’s his content, and it’s in our InSite self-paced platform.

We also are thrilled to offer, if somebody wants Neal to come onsite and present one of his workshops, he even has a two-day workshop on the content that we’re going to go through with this Power Skills book.  You can contact us.  We have that relationship with Neal, and we can set that up, as well.  One of my highlights in working here at Velociteach has been this partnership with Neal Whitten.  We’ve got so much respect for him.

WENDY GROUNDS:  And we are going to be talking about his book, “Power Skills That Lead to Exceptional Performance.”  It’s a new book that’s just come out this year.  And, hey, if you’re looking for a gift that you want to give to everybody on your team or to a project manager that you know and love, this is an excellent idea for a wonderful Christmas gift, and you’ve just got a few days to go out and get yours.  Hi, Neal.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re excited to have you back again.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Thank you, I’m honored to be here.

Neal’s Motivation

WENDY GROUNDS:  So we’re going to jump right in and talk about your book, “Power Skills That Lead to Exceptional Performance.”  And Bill and I were very excited that we got to read it early.  It’s a very good book.  Can you tell us your motivation for writing this book?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah, I’d be happy to.  I worked alongside, trained, or mentored thousands of project managers, team leaders, and managers at all levels over the years.  You can tell I’m an old guy.  But I’ve learned a lot from others by listening to them, observing them, and mentoring.  And throughout this period, I’ve commonly experienced many people who either purposely or inadvertently held themselves back from reaching their true potential.  And this situation is always frustrating to me because I often believe in others more than they believe in themselves.  But we’ve all been there.  And as a seasoned practitioner – again, read “old guy” there – I decided to write a book to reach out to this audience and encapsulate decades of lessons.  And it represents lessons that are acquired and time tested from a lifetime of application.

Targeting the Audience

BILL YATES:  That’s for sure.  Of course, I know and respect you deeply, and we’ve had many conversations.  So when I was reading it, I read it in your voice.  I felt like I was across the coffee table from Neal, and he was pouring truth into me.  This is such good stuff.  And as I’ve said to you, I feel like this should be mandatory training.  These are just basic skills that people need to understand.  They need to have them verified that it’s something they need to do or behavior they need to have.  And you’re validating that in the book.

To me, I’d love to give this book to someone who’s just starting their career in project management.  But for me, who I’ve got a whole bunch of gray hair, there’s stuff in here that resonates with me that reminds me or teaches me a different approach.  So to me the audience seems really broad.  Who’s your target audience when you were writing this book?

NEAL WHITTEN:  It is a broad audience, but I can be very specific.  There are three specific target areas that I went after.  First of all, it’s for leaders.  If you’re a leader today, I don’t care if you’re in management or a project manager or you’re a team leader, whatever you are, it’s for you.  And it’s also for those who aspire to be leaders so they understand what’s expected of them.  And the third audience is all employees who desire to take their performance to a higher level.  So I agree with you.  It is very, very broad.  Now, a lot of my examples in the book are related to project management.  Those are my roots.  But people who are not project managers, or BAs or whatever, I really think can relate very much to the book, and I want them to be able to do so.

Power Skills

WENDY GROUNDS:  In the book, you describe a number of power skills that we can implement to take our leadership performance to a higher level.  So just describe exactly what a power skill is.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah, power skills, that term hasn’t been around much for very long, maybe a few years.  It’s actually been around a lot longer than that, but it just hasn’t been common.  I like the term.  Power skills include what we think of as soft skills, people skills, behavioral skills, personality traits.  And these are things that come into play every day.  And this book is about those power skills that all employees, leaders and non-leaders alike, need to embrace to perform at their best, thus causing their organizations to also perform at their best.  That was my goal, by the way.  Wasn’t just to have each individual be the best version of themselves, it was also train an organization so it can also now be a best version of itself.

Readers will likely recognize the power skills that I introduced.  They’re not like, oh, wow, Neal just created something I never thought of before.  Although there may be some of that in there.  People are not always acutely aware of these power skills, even though they’ve been out there.  And it’s either because no one made them aware of these power skills; or they were aware of them, but they were afraid to apply some of them.  For example, for some people, their palms are going to sweat and their heart’s going to race when they start reaching out to do some of these things because it’s going to require a backbone.  And if that scares people back, there are so many other things in the book that will encourage them to move forward in other areas.

And by the way, I’m not trying to change anybody because I want to change them.  I want people to be who they choose to be.  What I’m trying to do is I want people to recognize they can be almost anybody they choose to be.  And I want to give them the tools to get there if they choose to.  Even if, let’s say I talk about 50 different things in the book, and let’s say 10 of them make people a little nervous.  They’re not so sure they could do those things.  Well, even if they just did the 40, they’re going to be better off than where they were before they picked up the book.  But I will bet that most people will move towards those other 10, maybe inch towards it or maybe gallop towards it, depending on who the individual is.

But power skills give you the real power to get your job done effectively and efficiently.  It places the accountability for your actions squarely on you.  I’m very big on accountability.  I think it’s something we’re missing in this world quite a bit.  And I find also that most people would rather have the authority and accountability that these power skills support.  So when you unleash this power in the non-management ranks, I assert your organization and company are going to prosper like never before.

The 24 Power Skills

BILL YATES:  Hmm.  That’s so true.  Throughout the book, you build that premise of, okay, this is good for the individual.  But every individual is part of a team, and every team is part of an organization.  So I really appreciate the way you apply it, first to the individual, and then to teams and organizations.  It raises the value for everyone.  Okay, I’ve got to ask this question.