Leadership

Targeted communication – the key to effective stakeholder engagement

Leadership

Just as each project is unique, so is each of its stakeholders! Whether as individuals, groups or organizations, every stakeholder, and every stakeholder community has a unique and evolving set of cultures, expectations and perceptions. To effectively engage with, and influence, this diverse community the traditional approach to project communications of regular reports and other […]

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Valuing Soft Skills

Leadership

The project management community and the wider business community are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of soft skills. However, being aware of their importance and investing in developing improved capabilities are different.  Before most organisations (and individuals) will invest in developing improved soft-skill capabilities, their value needs to be demonstrated. A recent report prepared

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Level 5 Leadership

Leadership

A Level 5 Leader (L5L) is an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will. The characteristics and success of these leaders were first identified by Jim Collins in 2001 and formed a central plank in his best selling book, ‘From Good to Great’. The Level 5 discovery derived from a research project

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Problems, conflicts and decisions

Leadership

Whilst frequently treated as separate topics, conflict management, problem solving and decision making are interrelated and all are focused on achieving the best possible outcome. In an ideal world there would always be sufficient information and rational maturity to treat everything as a problem and apply the following steps to reach the optimum solution: Investigate

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Eliminating the fear factor

Leadership

The PMBOK® Guide and most modern management texts emphasise the importance of leadership and motivation over directive control.  This is for a very good reason, as modern management evolved during the Industrial Revolution, the function of most workers was to ‘man the equipment’ to literally keep the wheels of industry turning.  In the 21st century,

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Why are they (you) fighting?

Leadership

Most issues and points of difference and even bad events are resolved without conflict.  Negotiation, discussion and helpful 3rd party input resolve the issue. Even when the issue is stressful and damaging (eg someone runs into your car…) most of the time people deal with the situation without descending into acrimony. But at other times

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Rhetoric can backfire

Leadership

One of the more interesting communication backfires of the last few weeks has been the widespread reaction to the Australian government\’s chief business adviser, Maurice Newman’s ‘opinion piece’ in the The Australian newspaper: ‘We’re ill-prepared if the iceman cometh’. The construct of the article uses two rhetorical ploys that can be effective if applied subtly

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