During my work as a project manager for IT projects I have seen many different kinds of people. Internal company employees, externally hired consultants, company management, the list goes on. Some of these people are successful. Most are not. What is it that separates the successful from the unsuccessful?
Here are my top 4 rules to be successful. They are simple, but hard to achieve. If you want to become successful, then start today by living and breathing these 3 simple rules.
Rule 1 - Be honest
This one might seem obvious, but there is a lot to honesty when you really think about it. I bet you’ve seen a movie or two where people take an oath in court. It goes like this ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. This sentence must have been constructed by a very smart person, for it captures the essence of honesty.
Telling the truth is the obvious one. It means you tell, as best as you can, your view on a situation without trying to mislead your counter party into thinking something different happened.
The whole truth. This one I love dearly. In a project I once lead we had a person who forwarded an email from someone to the project manager, to inform him of something. This person had sent it to an address the project manager could only read when at the client. So the project manager asked that person to resend it, to his other email address. But the person was in the car; so he asked the original sender to send it to the project manager. In an attempt to make himself look good to the project manager this person took out some paragraphs of the email! Needless to say, he told the truth. He just didn’t tell the whole truth. You can imagine the consequences.
Nothing but the truth. It means you do not make the story into more than it is. Obscuring the truth by adding unnecessary information or facts that do not relate to that truth. In short … be to the point.
Rule 2 - Do not criticize
People make mistakes. All the time, everywhere. Get used to that, for you make them too. Therefore, do not criticize people on their decisions. Rather help them when they have gotten into trouble by making a mistake. If you handle such a situation well, you can be sure this person never makes that mistake again. And that means you can more confidently work together.
If, however, you decide to criticize the person for making the mistake, debating the issue, the only thing you will achieve is being disliked. When someone gets pushed into this position, they’ll be more reluctant to work on a good solution afterwards. Avoid therefore to criticize.
Rule 3 - Admit your own mistakes
Like all other people, you are a mistake-machine. No worries, we all are. For example, the other day I ordered some envelopes, for sending DVDs. I had ordered 20 units of 100 pieces. Yet I was surprised to see a full pallet on my driveway at night when I got home. A full pallet! I had made a big mistake by not even thinking about the size of these things … if only ordering online wasn’t so easy… Luckily my girlfriend took my sincere apologies to heart and helped me in finding space for the boxes, while laughing over this extremely silly mistake. You can bet this won’t happen again though!
Another occasion which I want to highlight is where I had a different opinion than someone else, and after trying my usual method, I found we just had opposite positions and he just plainly thought I was dead wrong. So what I now did was admit that I had made a mistake. Because from his point of view: I had!
The point is, it doesn’t matter what you think. It matters what the other person thinks. Admitting that I was wrong opened up his willingness to solve the problem. Instead of highlighting our differences I told him that I too wanted to deliver a good project result. I then suggested him that we would go over the list of things he thought should be looked at again, together with someone else. As I said goodbye, I told him again how sorry I was about how things had gone and that it wasn’t my intention to upset him. This helped in turning his hostile attitude towards me around even more and ensured we would not have any problems about this.
Rule 4 – Do what you say and say what you do
Do what you say. If you make a promise, keep it. This means that you do not make a promise lightly. So far, most people understand this. But also most people have a hard time doing this. Breaking a promise makes me feel bad. Really bad. Sick bad. Even a little promise like ‘I promise I will be on time’. Therefore I do not often promise things unless I am 100% sure I can deliver.
The more subtle point here is that you must make sure the other party doesn’t think you’ve made a promise. This has to do with not leading the other party to false beliefs. If you suspect that the other party thinks you have made a promise, simply say ‘I cannot guarantee this. I can only guarantee that I will do my best to achieve it’. Making sure that the other party knows you do not promise something (that you don’t think you can achieve), makes you more honest and increases your integrity.
Fri, Oct 16, 2009
Becoming Successful