Leading projects early on to become a Monet
Thoughts about early career choices — Change the world, one project at a time, one painting at a time
What experiences should young professionals seek early in their careers?
Let’s see . . . you may be in your twenties, your beliefs have been conditioned by your family and community and, later, by your experience at college.
You’ve certainly accumulated certain hard-skills, shaped by your major and minor study subject choices. However, you may have had limited opportunity to develop certain soft-skills that often come through developing emotional maturity.
You may be at your peak of physical and mental performance but still, struggle to discover who you really are. Well, you’re not alone. We’ve all been there. This is a journey!
That’s why when I get asked about early-career choices, the roles that come at the top of my list are project management, product management, and program development. Let’s call them project management to simplify things.
Why do I believe this?
1. It’s a great way to develop “facilitator” leadership.
As a Project Manager, you may not have hierarchical responsibility for other people in the project, but you still need to deliver to time, quality and cost.
Such parameters help develop resourcefulness, adaptation, communication, inclusiveness, responsibility, and other strengths that will flow from the combination of your skills, knowledge, and experience.
You’ll be excited to see the outcome of building something new through a joint effort and enjoy the ups and downs when facing unexpected challenges.
2. Projects opportunities are often available and can be the foundation for something bigger.
There are project management roles at large and small corporations, at consulting firms, and startups. However, the best opportunities come when you identify a problem and build a project to tackle it. Think about it! This looks very much like entrepreneurship — you identify a problem, you’re driven by a higher purpose and sense of mission, you’re seen by many to be reliable, contributing blood, sweat and tears, to always deliver through a milestone-based approach.
If you want to develop your career in an established company, this is a great way to gain visibility from its executive team. If you plan an entrepreneurial journey, such experience will be beneficial when building a new venture.
Here are three learnings from project management that have been part of my foundation for leading people, managing businesses, and investing in private companies:
i. Find and share Purpose
ii. Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast
iii. Intuition through experience
i. Find and Share Purpose
I remember the excitement in my mid-20s coming to the US for the first time from Europe one April in the year 2000.
I landed at Cincinnati airport and vividly remember looking through the windows of the taxi that brought me to my hotel and seeing how green the fields were at that time of the year.
I was on a mission for Schneider Electric to build a global order-to-cash system dedicated to distribution customers leveraging internet technologies — a Spaniard sent by the French Corporate HQ saying this to new American colleagues made it even more challenging at that time!
I was confident they would be delighted to hear that they were one of the lucky ones to benefit first. Do you think I was right or wrong?
And, how would you approach such a first meeting?
Would you boast about your achievements to convince them about your credibility?
Would you impress them with detailed plans with their future contributions clearly outlined?
Would you propose agile values and principles of software scrum methodologies for continuously delivering value to users?
However, the moment of truth for any project manager is to mobilize people who do not necessarily report to you.
Picture this! You think you are going to have 20% of Joe’s time, 50% or Sarah’s time, 25% of Pedro’s time… but how to maximize their talents and time for your project?
Rubber meets the road when dealing with people.
How you think the meeting went that day in Cincinnati?
It did not start well when one of the participants recognized me as the guy he saw walking from the hotel on the other side of the freeway. He was surprised that I walked for 25 min to get to the office instead of renting a car. That crazy European!
When they started to outline why they should not be involved in such a global project, I got a flashback of my first day at the Barcelona office of Schneider Electric Spain two years before when in my first meeting with a senior executive he told me that he didn’t understand why I’d been hired. I went on to demonstrate exactly why I had been hired by delivering successful projects and recalling that journey at that moment in Cincinnati reassured me that I’d be successful there too, even with such an inauspicious start!
So, what’s the best approach to mobilize people towards a common goal?
First, you’ve got to build a climate of trust. The prerequisites for trust are fairness, openness, and competence. Aligning team members’ personal sense of mission with the project’s vision creates commitment and enthusiasm among everyone. Personal productivity and creativity increase as individuals align with their passion. In such environments, failures become lessons, and work becomes fun.
Simon Sinek encourages us to “Start with the WHY”, in other words, to describe a company’s purpose. The same principles of developing the WHY, HOW, and WHAT applies to project-based endeavors — large or small. You can even use this method for yourself . . .what is your own WHY?
Rejection towards the project was the initial reaction of my US colleagues. However, through collaboratively building a shared WHY, HOW, and WHAT we were able to build something extraordinary that is still used today in Schneider Electric everywhere: My Schneider Electric (mySE).
Once we solved our first-encounter misunderstandings through honest conversations, we empathized with each other and embraced inclusion.
Often at first, we usually find ourselves surrounded by people who all think alike. Not on purpose, of course, it’s just that we enjoy spending our time with people we like. And why do we like them? Because they think like us! When we should be seeking out perspectives and facts that challenge our way of thinking, we are naturally drawn to things that make us feel good, which is everything that confirms what we already believe.
So, don’t be afraid to surround yourself with people that are different, you will become smarter!
ii. Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast
For any endeavor, I recommend thinking big at the scoping stage.
That will inspire people to join you for the quest.
People want to contribute if there is a promise of growth potential. Growth environments can be challenging, but this is what makes life interesting. Growth environments mean the potential for wealth generation while developing new skills.
You will inspire people depending on your storytelling and how well it connects their left and right brain — the left brain drives logic and analytics, while the right brain drives imagination and intuition.
However, it helps if you action something pretty early on!
Such a mindset in VC-backed, early-stage companies leads to seeking early traction to enable it to spread everywhere. The earlier the project gets feedback from the user or customer, the better you can secure the path to verifying customer value delivery.
With the right foundations, the scaling will have a chance to happen fast. In the growth VC investments I am involved in, the main criteria for evaluating companies is how efficient they are at scaling up. The same applies to any project-type endeavor.
Let’s retake the example of mySE as an innovative intrapreneurial project.
Before this year 2000 global project, there was a minimum viable product (MVP) with e-lectric done in Barcelona in 1999
What we were able to reuse from that MVP was not the code itself, but the experience of understanding the problem. When you define a problem so well, the solution becomes apparent.
Take Einstein, for instance, he was asked if he had 60 minutes to save the world, how would he compose his thoughts. He said, ‘I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem, then we’d save the world in five minutes!’ Change is possible when the solutions appear to be simple.
That first experimentation of e-lectric brought me early learnings and, later, the global project was built to scale up globally quickly.
mySE was deployed in the US, Spain, Canada, France, China, and the UK in a record time of less than three years from that first meeting in Cincinnati, and today it is used worldwide.
People usually want to be held accountable but not micro-managed and supervised every moment of every day. More accountability was given to everyone in the global project, and structures were not driven by hierarchies.
Early on, we realized that we were scaling faster when embracing adaptability, empower team members and encourage continuous learning.
Even though we were working for a multi-billion global corporation, we had one motto, ‘Think and act like you are spending your own money!’
iii. Intuition Through Experience
Projects are temporary by nature. They have a beginning and an end. At some stage, the project finishes. It dies.
memento mori [ me-men-toh -moh-ree ]
Latin. remember that you must die.
Hopefully, you’ll have delivered to the expectations, created fond memories and fantastic relationships with the all the stakeholders so that when the time comes you can close the project and move on.
This temporary mindset is entrepreneurial by nature and puts us in tune with the new future of work: no jobs will last a full career due to the accelerated change of current times.
It’s good to be exposed to different experiences and different projects. Variety is the spice of life, including work life!.
Nobody wants a one-dimensional athlete. They want people who’ve seen and done a lot; who’ve made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of successes; who’ve managed big and small teams; who have technical expertise but can do people things; who can do things strategically and yet be empathetic in a tragic employee situation. You actually want the full breadth.
Just like a Monet is better when you stand back and you see all of the different colors form the picture. Up close, it just looks like dots and blurbs and blobs of paint, but the majesty is sort of all of it together.
— a Google VP according to Tracy Wilk
Deliberate practice, including in different environments, is the only serious way of becoming better at what you do. At some stage, you will develop one of the most significant decision-making assets: gut feeling. If you prefer a fancier expression, intuition-based decision making.
The former head of US military forces and former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is credited with the 40–70 rule of decision-making.
It says that leaders should take decisions when they have between 40–70% of the information required for it. According to the rule, when you take a decision with less than 40% information, then you are shooting from the hip, without carefully studying the background information.
It is always better to wait until you have more than 70% of the information, and you have studied it deeply. When a decision-maker acts on scanty information, they sound indecisive and overwhelmed, and stand to risk the productivity of their entire project or organization.
The 40–70 rule is a two-way approach to decision-making. Firstly, analyze your percentage of accuracy. To get a better understanding of where you fall in the 40–70 range, Powell introduced the formula ‘P = 40 to 70’. Here, ‘P’ stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. While this can be hard to judge, you need to estimate where you think you fall in this range based on the information you have.
Secondly, trust your gut feeling. When you reach that sweet spot between 40% and 70%, then it’s up to your intuition to take the right decision. This is where most effective leaders are born, because it’s not just about the facts, it is also about the leader’s gut instinct. And those with an instinct pointing them in the right direction are the ones who will lead their organization to success.
Gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops of success or failure. The more experience you gain, the more you will be able to rely on your intuition to tell you what to do next.
During an interview at the Economic Club of Washington, Founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos said, ‘I believe in the power of wandering. All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts…’
What should I tell the next time I am asked what my recommendation is on early career choices?
Hopefully, this article will broaden your view on why project management is a good experience for anyone with leadership ambitions.
The nature of project management fosters curiosity, execution drive, flexibility, planning, adaptability, communication, decision making, and people management. These are critical skills that will be used wherever you go. That sounds like a good canvas for your career!
And on that journey, when you address the right problems, you’ll change the world, one project at a time, one painting at a time.
Are you in?
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About Albert Vazquez-Agusti: Since I was a teenager working with my father at his engineering office, I’ve seen firsthand how technology and innovation impact our work. We have reached a crucial acceleration point where technological change, education, and inequality are involved in a kind of race. I’ve come to realize that the real bottleneck to taking advantage of innovation is the lack of relevant managerial skills to impact business models through new technologies. That’s why I promote the development of people and organizations to support technology adoption to solve small to big problems based on my experience in Fortune 500, SMBs, Private Equity, Start-ups and Venture Capital organizations.
