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Your presenter is:Alison Sigmon, M.Ed., LPC, PMP

Want to manage change effectively?Start with yourself

What’s on tap for our time together today…

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Change is all around us revisited

Managing through & leveraging emotions

Self-awareness & managing projects

Practicing with intention makes creates insights for more effective management

Wrap it up!

Agenda

It’s a challenge for some people to find good business reasons for paying attention to emotions, but emotions are a key piece of data in a collection of information that can make or break your project.

Managing projects effectively doesn’t start with getting stakeholder buy-in. It starts with you. Before you can assess and tune into the emotions of others on your project, you must be aware and tuned into your own emotions first. We’ll take a look at how you can leverage your emotions and the emotions of others to successfully deliver projects.

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Project change – Revisited

Impact on you and others

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From strategy to reports to documentation to relationships, project managers experience a bevy of challenges that require a wide range of skills.

Work through others to get work done

Get results in nearly impossible conditions and situations

Manage without authority Spend 80 to 90 percent of time

communicating Navigate and leverage politics Build and support project

relationships Facilitate stakeholder interaction and

contributions Analyze data Sell ideas and solutions Manage conflict

Juggling never ends

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Things can get REALLY complicated!

And when you throw change into the mix…

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Change is a huge part of managing projects, and our attitude about it will drive the results and response to it.

We’d love for our plan to be etched in stone, but the reality is that it simply can’t be.

Anyone who has managed a project knows that the farther we look out at our project schedule, the less accurate the plan will be. This is the premise of Rolling Wave planning.

There are just too many variables and unknowns to prevent changes from happening.

Change is all around us…

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With the evolution of technology, today’s business climate has changed to keep pace.

The ability to manage and respond to change fast is now the norm rather than the exception for a business to remain competitive.

Rapid change is here to stay…

Change is moving faster…

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Change helps companies respond to shifting trends, but in the project trenches change can be experienced as a disturbance to our way of seeing and doing things.

Stakeholder tolerance for change varies. It’s important to be able to envision and communicate the possibilities of the big picture while managing the emotions that surround the upheaval of change.

Let’s take a look at how change may be viewed.

Change requires balance…

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The attitude that you and other key stakeholders bring to the project affect how others respond. How do you and the stakeholders on your project view change?

Does it feel like an interruption to stability or the start of a journey

Perhaps it seems like a response to a disturbance or a path to innovation

Maybe it is immediately experienced as a problem or seen as a great opportunity

Attitude can make or break…

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Thriving on change is fundamental to success as a project manager.

Understanding the nature of change allows us to work with it instead of against it.

One key to working with it is awareness of the change process and the emotional response that accompanies it.

Leveraging change to lessen stress…

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Stages of change

Being familiar with a change process can help you and your stakeholders move through the emotions associated with it. While there are lots of change management models out there, this is fast and easy to understand.

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Changing conditions

The way you and others view change drives two main things:

• How quickly the change is responded to

• How fast stakeholders bounce back from the initial news of change

What can help? Understanding and leveraging emotions…

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Managing through & leveraging

emotions

Understanding the value

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Struggle in the corporate world Getting “emotional” is the warm, fuzzy area of business that causes our eyes to roll back in our head.

What’s the irony? It’s emotional connection that typically motivates others to band together to get project work done.

Research supports the value of using emotions to lead others, but finding the project relevance of emotional awareness is challenging when “there is a job to be done.”

In our haste to keep moving fast, emotions tend to get overlooked although they are great source of information about the health of the project and changes that occur throughout.

Fuzzy becomes ironic

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Emotions: Mining for goldEmotions offer a ton of information about others, ourselves, and the project. They help us with the following:

• Alerts us to what needs attention• Brings attention to stakeholders who

have concerns • Communicates level of investment in

the project • Clues us in on any confusion &

issues

It’s emotional awareness that enables a project manager to “read” people, to discern their interests and concerns, and to respond their needs.

However…before you can “read” others, you have to get a handle on yourself. A little self-awareness can go a very long way…

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Self-awareness and managing

projects

Know thyself

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Emotional self-awareness is another way source of information about what’s happening inside you and around you.

We tend to discount emotions at work as being of little or no value for a variety of reasons – pace, experience, culture, etc.

Understanding emotions and managing them appropriately is complicated – emotions are seen as private.

As a result, they are often overlooked as a source of information in projects. The irony is that people experience emotions about projects everyday whether they realize it or not. And guess what…others are watching!

Value of self-awareness

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Getting a handle on ourselves

Private? Get real. There are some project managers who will claim they remain unchanged under stress. Of course, something does change. It helps you, the team, and the project to acknowledge your contribution to situations.

Don’t just sit there. Manage emotions. As soon as we become aware of how we are feeling, we have the opportunity to manage it. People avoid others who are chronically angry, stressed out, and fearful. Emotional self-awareness gives us information to manage our feelings. Take care. Stay healthy. When we fail to deal with our emotions, problems can start to show up physically. Headaches, stomachaches, fatigue, and other symptoms can be caused by our emotions.

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Feelings impact everyone, and people don’t stop having feelings when they get to work. Our emotional brain responds far faster than our logical self – 100 milliseconds as compared to 3.6 seconds for the rational brain.

This is why we can respond to situations seemingly without thinking.

While this can be helpful in a crisis situation, the reality is sometimes we’re reacting without enough information, responding to our anxious feeling, etc.

Science is showing that 40 to 50 percent of the time we are correct in our assumptions about a situation, but you know what that means…

Responding without awareness

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That gut feeling & no way to explain

The emotional brain is also a source in the “knowing in my gut” feeling because it leverages the years of experience we have accumulated, but it’s not always easy to communicate it to others.

When asked how we know something, we often just say, “I don’t know. I just know.”

The catch is you know but they don’t!

Awareness of emotions helps us better communicate & manage change.

But how can we develop our awareness?

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A little self-awareness goes a long way

There’s a term in psychology called “observing ego” which is when we watch ourselves in a variety of situations & identify (without any judgment) how we are feeling in response to the situation. The following are ways we can grow our awareness:

Expand your vocabulary. Talk it out. Become more articulate when identifying and talking about what is going on inside. Watch for events & the emotions that “trigger” a response that might not be appropriate.

See it then decide what to do with it. Recognize the emergence of your emotions. Speak to the core emotions and how they are experienced at varying levels instead of using just one or two words to describe what’s really a feeling that sits on a spectrum of core emotion. For example, frustration is a subset of anger, but anger is much stronger.

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Address the plumbing

Patch those leaky pipes. Understand the impact on yourself and others when feelings are ignored. The sooner you recognize and respond to feelings, the less likely you will “leak.” Not paying attention to this can result in everyone but you knowing “something’s up” with you.

Match the response to the situation. When we’re not emotionally aware, we run the risk of overreacting to a situation. This is when the feelings expressed are out of proportion to the situation.

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Coaching ourselves so we can coach others

When we begin to pay attention to how we’re feeling in response events, our awareness grows. That awareness enables us to manage our own emotions, which, in turn, can help us with responding and managing the emotions of others through coaching.

Cultivating an internal coach is a good first step to developing greater self-awareness. It helps us recognize what we’re feeling and determine how to best respond.

The absence of an internal coach makes us vulnerable to having “uh-oh” moments where we speak before we have a chance to think in non-crisis moments.

Becoming practiced at coaching ourselves helps us with coaching others through project change. But how?

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Developing an internal coach – overview

Break it down then take a 30,000 ft view of it. After an event, recognize what the event was, how you felt about it, and what, if anything, you would do differently if it happened again. Consider if you’ve had the same response to a similar event in the past. Is this a trigger point for you? Do you need to change something or put something in place so you don’t respond the same way again?

Ask for what you need. We can’t address what we’re not aware of so seek feedback. Getting the perspective of others on how we behave might feel painful sometimes, but it gives us a chance to address blind spots all of us have for our behavior.

Track it. Another way to gain insight into your behavior and feelings is to journal. Don’t stop at text – use numbers, charts, draw pictures. It’s also a place for tackling something that might be nagging you. Sometimes just writing about something can help you work through it and let it go.

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Get little help from our friends

Blind spots sneak up on us!

As self-observant as we may think we are, our paradigms ensure that we miss things. People who have been around us in a project context often see patterns that escape our notice because we all have blind spots about ourselves. • When asking others for feedback, listen

with the goal of increasing your emotional self-awareness.

• Stay away from generalized, open-ended questions, such as, “Can you give me some feedback about how I’m doing?”

• If you want a more useful response, be as specific as possible. For example, “Do you notice any changes in my behavior when we miss a deadline?”

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Considerations for their feedback

People have different biases about others’ behavior. Those biases come from the way they interact with you in terms of their relationship with you (e.g., supervisors, subordinates, peers, others) and in terms of their own set of paradigms and issues from their professional and personal experience and history.

Listen with an open mind, but integrate what others say with what you already know about yourself. The key to effective use of the feedback from others is to avoid the extremes. Thinking “I’m right and they are wrong” or “They are right and I am wrong” doesn’t get you any closer to solving the issue at hand, and chances are the reality of what will work sits somewhere in between what you both think.

Thinking in extremes will only keep both parties stuck. What else can you do?

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Time in a bottle

It’s a scientific fact that our memories fade over time. While we might recall the general emotion felt, the details become fuzzy as we accumulate new memories.

One way to gain more memory accuracy and insight is to keep a journal. Maintaining a journal not only helps us with gaining deeper self-awareness through identifying patterns, it also helps us work through issues.

Our feelings sharpen our insight into what is taking place in the project environment, and they provide information that helps us develop plans and make changes.

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Pause, reflect, insightKick off journaling with recording emotional situations that occurred at work. Don’t spend a ton of time on this – 10 to 15 minutes is enough and only select one or two events per entry. Note a physical signal or body sensation related to the event.

Event: A short statement to describe the incident that triggered the physical response.Physical signal: Description of the physical response felt.Intensity: A rating of the intensity of the physical signal (e.g., from “1” for a minimal response to “10” for a debilitating response).Date / time: The date and time of the physical signal.Feeling: Words to identify basic and expanded emotions related to the situation.

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Closing thoughts on self-awareness & emotions

Survival of the fittest

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A PM’s work is never done…

Project managers wear a lot of hats that require a variety of skills…

AnalysisDocumentation

BudgetingCommunication

TeamworkIntelligenceSteadiness

Time Management

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Awareness of your emotions and the emotions of your stakeholders are ways to keep a handle on the many things you do day in and day out to make your project a success, but it starts with intention and practice.

Practicing process makes perfect (well, almost )

Wrap up…

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Questions???

What we discussed

It’s a challenge for some people to find good business reasons for paying attention to emotions, but emotions are a key piece of data in a collection of information that can make or break your project.

Managing projects effectively doesn’t start with getting stakeholder buy-in. It starts with you. Before you can assess and tune into the emotions of others on your project, you must be aware and tuned into your own emotions first. We’ll take a look at how you can leverage your emotions and the emotions of others to successfully deliver projects.

Change is all around us revisited

Managing through & leveraging emotions

Self-awareness & managing projects

Practicing with intention makes creates insights for more effective management

Wrap it up!

Thank you!www.systemation.com

Alison Sigmon, M.Ed, LPC, PMPasigmon@systemation.com

Twitter @alisonsigmonwww.slideshare.net/ahsigmon

www.mindscraping.com

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