While this might sound a might aggrandizing, the qualities of a great teacher and effective project managers are very similar. Or at least they should be.
Palmer Parker, a very well known educationalist has some excellent ideas, derived from many years of successful teaching that we can use as project managers.
In his book, “The Courage to Teach” Parker notes in the first chapter … “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”
Certainly the same could be said of a project manager. We can pass as many PMI or Prince2 exams as we like, but if we cannot communicate with authentically our our project team mates what will we really achieve?
Letting our personality and humanity come out requires a lot of Courage, hence the reason for his topic and title of the book.
Much of this premise is based on our natural fears to be ourselves and therefore create that “open framework” that is so essential to learning and change. As much of what is going on in our projects falls into those two categories we are in the middle of this, whether we admit it or not.
Parker is not just talking about communication styles, or openness to ideas, but exposing the fear of failure to the students. In the project management world, we often have to get many individuals with different views, agendas, cultures, opinions all on the same page. Looking for this common ground and making ourselves transparent and even vulnerable can make a huge difference.
Here is my Personal Improvement checklist for being a better teacher and project manager:
- Transparency with all communications
- Active listening to all on the project, not just the team members talking the most or the loudest
- Use different methods to teach and update others on the project. Some need to be face to face, even if you have to use web video/conferencing
- Always have an agenda and well prepared meeting materials
- Always add time for discussion/review and comments/suggestions
- Don’t make pronouncements, but rather probe
Great post Mike and team. Project managers as teachers is a great analogy. I have a teaching undergrad degree, never taught school, but have found myself teaching my entire career. Coincidently, I blogged about project managers as bus drivers just yesterday. Maybe we should collaborate on teaching bus drivers?