Bob McGannon- Increasing Your Perception as a Leader
15 June, 2015
PMI Adelaide’s monthly member meeting had an interesting speaker this time. Bob McGannon handles a senior leadership position at IBM and moved to Australia from USA, 7 years ago. His topic- “Increasing Your Perception as a Leader” examines behaviors and situations that inhibit or enhance your effectiveness as a leader, and addresses tools and techniques to alter your approach. He believed that appointed leaders, whether in a corporate, government or other organisation type, must rely on their leadership skills to assemble and maintain viable teams and produce expected results. His presentation presented practical tools and techniques to examine and increase our leadership perception .
Key Hightlights:
- A project leader should always highlight problems to the sponsors and be ready with a “multiple-choice” solution to address the problem inorder to make the process efficient, result-oriented and fast.
- Project leaders always encourage risk taking, ask “why” questions, instill trust within the team members and motivate the team to achieve the desired goal.
- Project leaders are always measured on managerial qualities but to be able to execute such tasks, they have to conduct and view things based on their leadership qualities.
- Variables for choosing a leadership style:
- Being predicatable
- Extroverted / Introverted Style
- Nature of the team
- Stage of the project
- Timescale
- Experience of the team
- Being consistent
- Usually, team members forget the clear objectives and conduct their daily activities much like playing “Wack-a-mole” and to be able to lead such members it is important for you to ask a lot of questions to analyse the situation.
- Types of Work Styles: (Eg: Trip to Melbourne)
- Action-Oriented – Leaps before thinking (Awesome, let’s go fuel up and drive)
- Social – Wastes time (We can book a campervan, have Dj, etc)
- Planner – Doesn’t know when to stop (Ok, so how far is MEL? Do we have enough fuel? Is the car okay?)
- Questionner – Makes sure you took care of everything.
Understanding which team member fall in the above categories, is vital for your project success. If these team members are identified and assigned roles as per their tendencies, the project leader stands a better chance to achieve the deliverables.
Recommended Book: Fail Forward by John Maxwell.
Siddhant Borade 