Category Archives: Thoughts

To Trust or Not To Trust – That’s Leadership

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In my early days of ‘professional’ project management of IT solutions, I was running a data migration project when I was also assigned to a new Business Group to lead a team supporting an existing in-house-built solution.  After few days of the assignment, I was going out for a coffee with my new boss, the Business Group Manager.  As we were stepping into the coffee shop he suddenly asked me: “How much time you’re going to spend on your data migration project before you can move completely to my group?”  I said: “I still need around 3 months, spending up to half of my time in that project”.  I said that and started thinking of justification of my off-the-air guesstimate as I expected a series of “why and how” questions.  My new manager completely surprised me when he responded with one word: “Cool”.  Then he continued explaining to me his expectations of what I will be doing as part of his Group.  My new boss never asked me about how much time I am giving to my new role again, and I completed the data migration project in a bit less than 3 months.

Some many years later in another company, I was in a meeting with a Manager who, at the time, I was working with him for more than a year.  I presented a concise document of 2 pages as a description of a potential solution requested by a business group.  After his initial judgement of the poorness of the document based on its length, the Manager threw a series of questions –interjected with satirical comments- on how this document was developed.  I explained that this document is a description of rather a straightforward solution, compiled out of long documents and some meetings with the potential users of the solution.  I was taken by complete surprise when the Manager asked me, with a hint of mis-trust, “can I see these original documents, now!”  I left the meeting, printed 40+ pages of different documents and brought them back, only for the Manager to take a 10-seconds look at them (poor trees).  Unfortunately, I left this company and the poor project was still looping in its very early stage trying hard to set free out of the ‘excessive multi-cook syndrome’.

I remembered these two situations as I was going through the book “Smart Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey, Greg Link and Rebecca R. Merrill.  The authors stated that “trust has become the new currency of the global economy.  It is the basis on which many people do business – or don’t” (page 13).  The authors beautifully explained that when trust goes down in a relationship or an organisation, speed goes down and cost goes up.  I was amused by this straightforward explanation.  They clarified to me in layman’s terms why things were going fast and effective in the company of the first story above, and why they were the opposite in the second.

Trust is an important lubricant to run organisations smoothly.  Trust inhibits the fear of failure and encourages creativity and collaboration among all workers.  The minute that you start asking about each and every detail, (micro-management!) innovation flies away.  As soon as you hint to your team that you don’t trust them enough, you start losing their initiative, they will rarely try new things, tasks will take longer and become more costly, and you’ll start hearing phrases like “if you want to get along, you’d better go along.”

As for the two Managers in the stories above, they showed me in a practical way some important differences between managers and leaders.  For that, I do thank them both a lot, trust me.

Oblivious Self Awareness

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A participant in one of my project management training courses said something that was an eye-opener for me.  The training course was a preparation course for the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.  In this course, I use a lot of sample questions to ‘train’ participants on the structure and content of PMP exam questions.  I usually display a question with four possible answers, give the participants a couple of minutes to think about it and to select an answer, and then I highlight the best answer with an explanation and justification of why it is the best answer and the others are not.  In that particular session, an active and experienced participant said firmly that the answer to a particular question is B.  When I said that the best answer is C and not B, he said to me: “I am sure that the answer is B.  However, I am also sure that you, as you always do, will convince me and all of us with your clear argument that the best answer is C.”  He complemented his statement with giving me the posture of an attentive and focused listener, waiting anxiously to hear what I was going to say.

I remembered this when I was recently listening to one of my friends who I enjoy listening to.  Tarek is a quite knowledgeable conversation partner and posseses an excellent way to describe things.  Tarek paints a clear picture, supported with facts and readings to present his point of view, which forces you to respect his point of view even if you don’t agree with it.  In a recent conversation with Tarek I told him that he is a perfect example of someone who “knows more than he thinks he knows, and can do more than he thinks he can do.”  I urged him to put his thoughts on paper and start blogging (ironically, Tarek is the one who told me sometime ago that I should start blogging and he is the one who introduced me to WordPress).

The point I want to make here is that, most probably, we know more than we think we know; all of us can do more than we think we can do.  The reason behind not knowing what we really know is what I would like to call is our “oblivious self-awareness”.  I don’t think we do this on purpose; well it is oblivious after all.  I can attribute this to our normal practice of acquiring knowledge and experiences.

As we move on in our life, we slowly accumulate knowledge and skills: we change.  We unknowingly treat the accumulated work and personal experiences as ‘common sense’ and we convince ourselves that everyone is aware of.  We believe that our actions and knowledge are nothing but spontaneous and instinctive ‘facts of life’ which everyone do and know.  However, with some observation you will find out that some or even most of your spontaneous actions and instinctive knowledge are not as spontaneous and instinctive to others.  This is nothing but a positive implication of the ‘boiling frog syndrome’, where you are not fully aware of the changes that happened to your behaviour and intellect as a result of the experiences you are continually collecting.

Therefore, you should have more confidence in yourself, your knowledge and your experience.  Continually test your knowledge and skills and increase your self-awareness.  Wherever you are in the journey of life, chances are that you know more than what you think you know, and you can do more than what you think you can do.  You just need to be more self-aware, get into the habit of attuning to what others are telling you, and attract your luck by surrounding you with people who would give you a little nudge.