Earlier this month Dr Thomas Juli, founder of i-Sparks, spoke at Synergy, the PMI UK event for International Project Management Day at IndigO2 in London. His presentation was about the tips and habits of project managers who want a better work/life balance and a more zen approach to work.
Last week I shared 5 of his tips; here are 5 more.
1. Individual and hierarchy
“It’s not about individual performance,” Thomas said. “If you have work/life balance and the rest of the team hasn’t, that’s not a good place to be.” In other words, it is your life and you need to work out how you fit into it. There is a purpose to considering yourself an individual and making sure that you fit into the hierarchy in a way that works for you.
This can be especially important if you have a manager or project sponsor who has unrealistic expectations about what you and the team can deliver.
2. Truth and illusion
“What matters to you the most?” Thomas asked. “Who tells you that there is only one way of doing things?” Thomas stressed that it was important to know what matters most to you, and explained that different people see things in different ways.
This manifests itself on projects in a number of different ways, most clearly in project priorities or the prioritisation of risks and issues. Use a tool like Seavus iMindQ to brainstorm what is important to different groups so that you can identify priorities across all project stakeholders and then work collectively in order to be able to structure your work to satisfy their needs. (If you can’t at least you’ll be aware of it and able to make changes to your communication approach to ensure that they understand why their priorities are not being worked on.)
3. Play
You can coach your team, Thomas said, but they have to play without you. In other words, don’t micromanage. This can be really detrimental for team harmony as it can come across as if you don’t trust your team members. It is also a very ineffective way of getting things done – micromanaging won’t actually help you achieve your project milestones any faster.
4. Motivation
Acknowledge your own performance and that of your team. Celebrate success often, and in a timely way. This can be as simple as writing a letter to thank them, giving them small tokens of appreciation when milestones are hit, or going out for a meal.
Even if the project is a failure consider ways that you can celebrate what did work well. Perhaps the team performed as a cohesive unit across departmental boundaries? Perhaps you delivered something that can be salvaged and used to benefit another project or team? We should be results-orientated – after all, that is what project management is mainly about – but the way we get there is also important so celebrate the journey as well as the goal.
5. Passion
Thomas’s last tip was to take your passion back to work. As we were all sitting in an International Project Management Day event it would be fair to say that we all had a strong interest in project management and doing projects well. If you are passionate about delivery, or project management, or your team, or electronics, or whatever part of your field or discipline that helps you get up in the morning, make sure everyone knows about it. Even, Thomas said, if you are motivated by money. Understand what drives you and then see if you can share that drive and passion with others in your team. Your attitude rubs off on others, so try to make every day a good day.
“We’ve become slaves to time,” Thomas said in his conclusion. “We’re not in control any more. We try to plan everything but you can’t plan everything.”
So where does that leave us? You start your journey to having a better work/life balance and making sure that you get joy out of your work through being a bit more zen every day. But just when you think you have made it, something will change. Thomas warned us that the journey is never over and that we should never stop trying to achieve a personal balance that works for us in our private and work lives.