ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● NEAL WHITTEN

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s our opportunity to talk about what matters most to you, whether you’re a professional project manager or working toward one of your certifications.  Our purpose is to light up your imagination, encourage you, and give you some perspective.  We talk about trends in the field, and we draw on the experience of others who are doing the stuff of project management.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the two guys who make this podcast happen, our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, we’re also going to hear from one of our favorite guests today.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, the guy that I refer to as my “sensei,” absolutely.  Neal Whitten’s in-studio with us, and we’re always excited to have him.

NICK WALKER:  Neal Whitten is an author, a mentor, a trainer, a sought-after speaker, and a project management professional.  Neal Whitten, welcome once again to Manage This.

NEAL WHITTEN:  I am honored to be here, guys.  Thank you very much.

NICK WALKER:  Now, Neal, you speak a lot on project management topics.  You get feedback from your seminars which, I understand, is always positive.  We’re going to talk today about one of the subjects that always gets a reaction from your audiences because it’s real.  It hits home with a lot of project managers.  That’s because you force us to answer the question, am I too much of a softie?  All right, Neal.  You’re a nice guy.  This room is full of nice people.  But there must be a difference between “nice” and “too soft.”  What is that?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, let me just say that I have found that most people in our profession are too soft, and probably most people in general are too soft.  But when I’m in front of a group, and it’s relevant, I’ll often ask this very simple question.  Do you believe that you tend to be too soft at work?  And what I mean by “too soft” is demonstrating behavior that results in being consistently less effective than what is otherwise possible and needed in performing responsibilities.

Anyway, when I ask this at conferences, webinars, and so forth, most people say yes, they are too soft.  And from experience I’ve found most project managers, most business analysts indeed to be too soft.  They’re not willing to make the tough and unpopular project- or business analyst-related decisions, even though their instincts warn them that they’re not taking the most effective action.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  So how can we know if we are approaching that “too soft” category?

NEAL WHITTEN:  I can give you some examples.  And you can decide for yourself if you fall into these examples.  One that comes to mind is, if you behave as if you have the responsibility, but without the authority, then in my view you’re too soft.  I do face time with thousands of people each year.  I frequently  hear project managers and business analysts say that they have the responsibility, but not the authority.  This just is not true.  You almost always have the authority.  The problem is that you don’t take it.

BILL YATES:  So, Neal, I can agree with this.  I mean, I’ve heard this complaint from project managers when doing face-to-face classes with them.  That’s one of the most common complaints is just what you’re pointing out here, that I don’t really have the authority that I need in order to get my job done.  So you’re saying they do have it, they just need to reach in and grab it?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah, that’s the neat thing about it.  It’s already there.  Here’s an example.  And I say this to everyone listening.  When was the last time you were called on the carpet, challenged, for exceeding your authority?  Was it within the last week, or the last month, or even the last year?  Was it ever?  My experience is that less than 15 percent of people in a large group, and by that I mean a statistically valid size group, have ever experienced being confronted exceeding their authority.  And this is sad to me.  But what is sadder is that statistically most people listening will never experience being called out on exceeding their authority across their entire career.  We’re talking about your entire career.  My assertion is that you almost always have the authority, you just don’t seize it.  You’re too soft.

BILL YATES:  So I’m hearing Neal Whitten call us all out, that we need to misbehave.

NICK WALKER:  It sounds like it, yeah.

BILL YATES:  We need to overstep our bounds.  We need to go beyond what we perhaps think our authority is.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  You know something I’ve found with this, Neal, is you get into trouble for the authority you don’t assume, not for over-assuming your authority.  You get in trouble, you get smacked around for not taking enough ownership, not taking enough authority.  And one of the things that we did in the alpha study of project managers, we surveyed 860 PMs and asked them, “Do you believe you have adequate authority for the projects for which you’re held responsible?”  And what was really interesting is the high performers said yes.  They agreed with that statement to a degree of 90 percent agreement.

The lower performers, and really when I say the “lower performers,” I mean the 98 percent of everybody, so not just the low performers, but 98 percent of all of us came in below 50 percent agreement with that statement.  So there’s this huge dramatic gap right there of saying whether or not they even believed they had adequate authority.  And it’s largely – then when you turn around and ask senior management, senior management said, “Of course, they all have authority.”

BILL YATES:  They’re in charge of the project; right?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Those results parrot my experiences totally.  I really believe that, when you go to work every day, you know, put your meekness at the doorstep before you walk in.  Become who you choose to be, and don’t be fearful of doing that.  I was in management for a number of years in a large company.  And I will tell you that I would rather my employees did something that exceeded their authority.  I’d rather they beg for forgiveness than ask permission.

ANDY CROWE:  Yes.

BILL YATES:  Yup.

NICK WALKER:  Interesting.  All right.  So take the authority.  Even if you don’t think you’ve got it, you do.

ANDY CROWE:  And let me say, Neal, just as one caution, that that “take the authority rather than ask for permission” does not extend to raising teenagers. We’ll caution that.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Oh, I love it.

ANDY CROWE:  I’m working through that right now, as a matter of fact.

BILL YATES:  I love it.

NEAL WHITTEN:  All right.  Let me give you a sidebar that you might find interesting.  So I worked for a major corporation for 23 years.  And in that period of time I exceeded my authority and called down on the carpet about a half a dozen times.  And, now, I never came close to being fired that I’m aware of.  At least nobody ever told me that.  And when I exceeded my authority, it wasn’t for personal reasons.  It was for the business.  It was for the project sponsor.  It was for the customer.  It was for the team.  It was for what I would call the right reasons.  But here’s a sideline that I never would have thought about when I was doing that.  In each case, I either got promoted, or a large award, or both.  Now, it didn’t happen on the same day that I got my hand slapped.

BILL YATES:  Right.

NEAL WHITTEN:  But it happened on the same project because of the style of taking charge and making things happen.  So being too soft is actually not a good thing, it is a bad thing.  And you will lose respect.  People won’t want to work for you from a leadership point of view.  Let me give you another example, by the way, of being too soft.  If you fail to perform your assignment as if you own the business, to me that is indicative of being too soft.  When you look around you for the people who you respect the most, they’re likely folks who come to work each day with the mindset that they perform their duties as if they own the business.  And that business is defined by their domain of responsibility.

If you’ve ever owned your own company, and we’ve got people around the table that have, you’ll know exactly what I mean because you can’t put food in your belly or pay your bills unless you’re successful.  It’s this passion that helps people achieve their best.  These are people who make things happen.  They believe, and their actions demonstrate, that the buck stops here, and that they are fully accountable for the project or their assigned domain.  Your boss and your senior management want you to take charge over your domain of responsibility with a passion that comes about when you behave as if you own the business.  And if you hesitate or routinely pull back, then again you’re demonstrating too-soft behavior.

ANDY CROWE:  Neal, I love this.  This is such a good point.  It has some tie-ins with your previous point, as well.  But to me every employee ought to have an entrepreneurial mindset.  And you go into an organization – and an entrepreneur, the mindset, that used to be a bad word when I would tell people back in the ‘80s I was an “entrepreneur.”  That means stay away from this person.  Now it’s got kind of a cool edginess to it.  But back then people didn’t want to be around an entrepreneur.  And I remember my mom asking me, “When are you going to get a real job?”

NICK WALKER:  Right, yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  “But, Mom, I’ve got a real job.”  So in this case, though, every employee needs to take ownership of their job.  They own their own position.  And that means making it successful; applying the resources, every resource you have control over; probably asking forgiveness rather than permission, within limits, obviously.  You don’t want somebody endangering the business.