In a keynote speech by Jon Duschinsky during the PMI® Global Congress 2014 — EMEA, he mentioned that project management is not favored by people. Project managers are rational and their main focus is on project scope, schedule and budget. They lack emotions and they don’t connect with people; they don’t speak to their hearts and souls.
He stressed that it is time to change conversation with people and make what you do is worth talking about. It is time to change the mindset and inspire people rather than just managing projects.
Every project has to be coherent with organization values, why you are doing it, and what is in it for people to make them believe in it. It is all to do with words. If you change your words, you will change your world and achieve what you are looking for.
The title of his speech took my memories back to an old powerful video I watched few years back titled “The power of words”. It was uploaded on YouTube in February 2010 and up to date it has more than 19 million views. It is about a blind man who was amazed with people’s reaction donating more money when the written words were changed from “I’m blind … Please help” to “It is a beautiful day and I can’t see it”. On the same subject, there are also some books published with titles such as “Change your words, change your world”, and “Change your words, change your life”.
Scope, budget and schedule are key objectives for every project manager; however, this doesn’t mean that a project manager has to be rigid all the time. He (or she) has to strike a balance between being rational and emotional. An effective project manager needs to possess exceptional management and leadership skills that enable him to interact effectively with his team and all involved stakeholders in order to achieve his objectives successfully. Based on situations and circumstances, he needs to select the appropriate approach and style with the right selection of words while dealing with people. Selected words may build a strong business relationship and rapport with all involved parties which will streamline processes and get work executed smoothly with limited number of obstacles. On the other hand, improper selection of words could ruin the relationship and make life more miserable and complicated which could contribute to an adverse impact on reaching unanimous consensus and quick resolution of outstanding controversial issues. Hence this could potentially result in a severe impact on project schedule, budget and other important objectives.
“Change your words, change your world” is applicable everywhere in our life, at home, social, business and wherever we interact with people. Certainly it is impossible to change the world of others but changing our individual worlds will result in a major change to the world surrounding us. As a matter of fact, it starts with the words you send to yourself. If you keep sending negative words to your unconscious mind, this will have an impact on your performance, interaction, confidence and productivity.
Take it to your children, your spouse, your friends, your employees; it has the same impact. Simply with single words, you can either make the people around you to say yes or no; like to live with you or not; welling to collaborate efficiently with you or not. With words, great leaders who possess essential leadership skills can make substantial changes. They can influence their teams to be very efficient, dedicated, accountable, loyal, inspired and productive. They can create a passion and make people self-driven, innovative, proactive and initiative. If you can make people believe in what they do and love it, then expect a remarkable outcome from them whether you are present around them or not. A great quote from one of the great leaders, Steve Jobs says “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do“.
If you are not getting what you want to get, it is time to start changing your words and assess the benefits that would be realized in your world. It is time to be as Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”.
Abdullah Al Hejji
June 16, 2014
Thanks