VELOCITEACH Manage This
The podcast by project managers for project managers. Dana Brownlee shares tools for managing up that challenging boss or stakeholder, while creating alignment and clear communication.
Table of Contents
00:58 … Meet Dana
02:18 … The Inspiration for The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up
03:54 … Managing Up Research Study
07:02 … It Begins with Self Awareness
08:20 … A Definition of Managing Up
10:05 … Managing Up Mistakes
11:30 … Six Difficult Boss Personality Types
14:32 … A Closer Look at the Clueless Chameleon
19:03 … A Closer Look at the Meddlesome Micromanager
22:40 … A Closer Look at the Tornado
25:22 … The Compliment, Document, and Pivot
27:37 … More Taming of the Tornado
29:32 … Self-Analysis for the Project Manager
31:28 … Get in Touch with Dana
32:24 … Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: Hello,
and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project
managers. I’m Wendy Grounds and with me
in the studio is Bill Yates. Bill, I
have a question for you today. How often
have you experienced a difficult stakeholder or a difficult boss? What’s your experience?
BILL YATES: Oh,
man. This is such a loaded
question. You’re going to get me in
trouble. Andy...
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah,
we don’t have to talk any current.
BILL YATES: Okay, good, yeah. I was going to say, Andy Crowe’s not in the room right now, but he will definitely listen to this. So, got an outstanding manager now. But yeah, I mean, this is just a part of life; right? We have managers who – sometimes our boss, our manager is super supportive and great. Other times there are challenges, and so fortunately we have Dana to talk with us about some of those challenges.
Meet Dana
WENDY GROUNDS: So our guest today is Dana Brownlee, she is a PMP, and she founded Professionalism Matters, which is an Atlanta-based corporate training company. Her business expertise has been featured in Forbes.com, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, to name a few. And Dana likes to give project managers tools they can use. Dana, welcome to Manage This.
DANA BROWNLEE: Thanks
so much for having me.
WENDY GROUNDS: Dana,
won’t you first tell us just a bit about yourself and how you entered the
project management field?
DANA BROWNLEE:
Certainly. Well, I started my
company back in 2003. I’m dating myself
a little bit, can’t believe it’s been that long. But I started in project management I guess
in the early ‘90s. And in fact I
remember it was so long ago, I remember applying for my PMP in handwritten
paper.
BILL YATES: Oh, okay.
WENDY GROUNDS: Wow.
DANA BROWNLEE: Like printing it off and writing it out and actually mailing it in, putting a stamp in, so I’m officially old. But I worked in corporate for a number of years, and then I started my own training company, and I went out, and I teach training classes and give speaking events. But I do think that I’ve always been wired kind of as a project manager, I dot my I’s; I cross my T’s. In fact, my husband laughed. He said, you know, “This is definitely for you. You’ve got a knack for telling other people what to do.” So some of it is kind of in my blood. But I love it.
The Inspiration for The Unwritten Rules of
Managing Up
WENDY GROUNDS: Dana
has written an excellent book that Bill and I have both enjoyed reading. It’s called “The Unwritten Rules of Managing
Up: Project Management Techniques from
the Trenches.” And in this book we read
about different types of bosses and techniques that you can implement when
working with these different types of managers.
Dana, what inspired you to write the book?
DANA BROWNLEE: Actually, my audiences inspired me to write the book. I never intended to speak on this topic, to write on this topic, but let me tell you what started happening. I give talks, and I provide training on a wide range of topics. So I might be out speaking about communication skills, about how to run more effective meetings, how to deal with a difficult person in the meeting.
And what was happening was invariably, irrespective of the topic, when I would get to that Q&A section at the end, where I would open it up to the audience to ask questions, one of the first questions I would always get is, yeah, I love that tip, but what if the problem person is your boss? Or what if it’s the executive that’s pushing back or causing you problems? So I started seeing a lot of energy around this, a lot of interest and curiosity.
So back in 2010 I wrote a whitepaper that I sent to PMI, the Project Management Institute, called “The Project Manager’s Guide to Dealing with a Difficult Sponsor.” And then from there I just started developing more collateral and speaking more on the topic. But really the genesis was the audiences, they really were struggling with this. It was a hot topic, and so that’s how I got into this arena.
Managing Up Research
Study
BILL YATES: Could you
tell us more about that research that that led to?
DANA BROWNLEE: Yes. So I was giving a talk in Chicago, at a PMI event in Chicago, I think it was 2016. And actually a publisher reached out to me, once they saw the speaker lineup, and they said, “Yeah, we’re kind of curious about this topic. We want to come sit in on your talk.” And it was standing room only, and I promise you, it wasn’t because of me, it was because of the topic, because people were really interested in that. And so from there they asked me to write a book. They said, “Hey, we think there’s a book here. We think there’s a lot of urgency around this topic, a lot of interest around this topic.”
So they asked me to write the book, and of course I said yes, I was really interested in writing the book. But I said, you know, I don’t want this book to just be informed by my personal experience. I want to hear from other people, and so I said, “I’m going to send out a survey.” Now, as soon as I said that I got nervous because I’m like, who’s going to respond to the survey? I didn’t have – I’m not Beyoncé, I mean, I didn’t have like a bazillion followers, and of course everybody hates surveys, I hate surveys. Nobody responds to surveys, but I could not believe it, I sent out this survey, and within about three weeks I had 1,173 responses, unique responses.
BILL YATES: Wow, that’s
outstanding. And you got really good response, I mean, reading through the
book, some of the quotes that you pulled out of those surveys are just
hilarious, and they’re so brutally honest with you.
DANA BROWNLEE: They
make you laugh and cry at the same time.
BILL YATES: Yeah,
yeah.
DANA BROWNLEE: I
mean, some of them really almost brought me to tears. Some of them were hilarious, with the little
names they gave for their crazy bosses or crazy stakeholders. So, yeah, it was great, I felt like it was
kind of cathartic for a lot of people.
And so maybe that’s why they didn’t mind it quite as much. But they got really granular, they told me
their horror stories. I remember one
person told me she went out on disability, she was so stressed out in her
situation, and she wasn’t unique, but I was really, really grateful to get
great feedback.
BILL YATES: And then
if you summarize – and I know you’ve got some great graphics that you share in
your presentations and in the book.
Summarize some of those findings.
DANA BROWNLEE: When we use the term “boss,” we’re using that pretty liberally, we don’t necessarily mean it has to be the person you’re reporting to. As project managers, a lot of our struggle is we have too many bosses.
BILL YATES: Right.
DANA BROWNLEE: That we’ve got all these stakeholders – maybe it’s a senior executive, maybe it’s a client, so maybe it’s even a difficult vendor that’s important – that you’re trying to maintain a strong relationship with. But at any rate, going back to your question, one of the stats that I use sometimes at the beginning of my speaking events is I ask them this. I say, okay. I surveyed 1,172 respondents. How many of those do you feel said they’ve never had a difficult boss experience? And then I wait, and out of that number, almost 1,200, only two, only two people said that they have never had that experience.
So it’s common, you know, we need to not think of it as a negative thing, or feel embarrassed about it. I promise you, if you live long enough, you will have a difficult boss experience. It’s just part of working.
It Begins with Self Awareness
WENDY GROUNDS: I was
telling Bill yesterday that many years ago I worked in a hospital. And we had a professor in charge of radiology
where I worked who, when he had a bad day, he would wear something yellow. And we knew when he was walking into the
department, if he had a yellow tie or a yellow shirt, keep away from him. It’s not going to be pretty.
DANA BROWNLEE: Well,
that’s great self-awareness because awareness is the first step, so I actually
like that.
WENDY GROUNDS:
Absolutely. But they don’t do that,
bosses don’t go around with a color code and say, you know, I’m wearing
turquoise today, so I’m in a good mood.
DANA BROWNLEE: Well, you know, we say that, and we’re laughing. But actually in the book I have a little bit of a checklist because the beginning of turning it around is just identifying these characteristics within ourselves because I think we all have them in one way or another. In fact, my husband was telling me, you know, “Yeah, you’re great, so you’re the perfect person because you’re the Micromanager and the Tornado, like all rolled up into one.”
But it’s not a negative thing, I think that we all have a little bit of some of these tendencies. And acknowledging that in yourself, being able to kind of pull yourself back and say, well, wait a minute, so maybe I am micromanaging a little bit. I need to pull back, so awareness really, really is the first step.
