Being a Project Sponsor Means Championing a Cause

When talking about the positions on a project team, the ones that come to mind first are project leader, project manager and team members. Time is spent designing the project, selecting the right members, establishing the critical path leading to end goals, and establishing a reporting and measurement system. Unfortunately, what many firms discover is that the project still seems to get off course even with all the elements so carefully aligned.
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Leadership and Counselling DO Mix!

Despite what you may believe or have been taught in the past, leadership and counselling do mix. This is not to say a leader must be a psychologist with medical diplomas hanging on the wall to be an effective leader. But the combination of leadership and counselling functions is a natural mix because people will often need assistance on the job in order to fulfil their potential and maximise the application of their abilities.

In other words, a leader as counsellor is a change agent who is responsible for helping employees and team members turn abilities into successful actions that benefit staff and company alike. These actions should be company mission focused while promoting employee personal success. This is a key role of a leader and one that is often minimised in the daily rush to get products or services into the marketplace.

Adapting to Change Through Counselling

But studies have shown that companies which train leaders to build company success by developing employee success are more competitive and more adaptive to changing marketplace environments. In difficult economic times, companies that are unable to change as needed to respond to financial pressures or rapidly changing consumer requirements will quickly fade away.

People need help to realize their potential though, and that is where leadership and counselling functions merge. Through administrative training, leaders learn how to counsel employees on a number of levels.

• Develop employee skills to meet needs of the job
• Assist with resolution of personal issues within the work environment that impact ability to perform job functions
• Learn to recognise organisational leadership potential that can be developed
• Provide on-the-job training to employees that promotes success of the business
• Match employee skills to the right job or team position
• Assist employees with development of interpersonal skills
• Learn to manage difficult employees not performing as expected
• Identify morale problems impacting project success
• Learn communication skills so able to teach, train, and monitor employees as needed

As a change agent, leaders must be able to work with a variety of people while assisting them with skills development. In fact, good leaders as counsellors, focus on training employees to become leaders themselves within their abilities. Leadership training covers a range of activities from making good decisions while performing a task to managing a large number of people.

Adapt, Compete and Succeed

Being a counsellor as part of the leadership function, along with the other responsibilities of trainer, corrector and mentor, requires the leader to develop particular skills needed to build a team and keep the team on track. The team may be a project team, a department or even the entire organisation. Every organisation has multiple teams operating at once.

The job of counselling requires being able to consistently and successfully assist others to reach their full potential within their assigned position in a pro-active manner. As a counsellor, the leader will be able to effectively train employees, identify potential leaders, present information, match personal traits to expected organisational roles, and provide useful positive and negative feedback in a way that promotes employee improvement.

Professional leadership training can play a critical role in the ability of the company to develop its human resources to full capability. Since most companies invest heavily in their people, it only makes sense to insure employees are being utilised in the most efficient and effective manner possible. A motivated workforce that has internalised the mission of the organisation is one of the major indications a company is ready to adapt, compete, and succeed.

The Power of Visualising Success

It may seem odd at first to consider the power of visualising success along with creative tension, but they go hand-in-hand in an effective organisation. Creative tension is inspired thinking that goes beyond the current comfort level and often leads to new ideas, goals, and expectations. Success is the actual achievement of those goals.

When you combine the creative tension with the visualisation of success what is created is an environment which is exceptionally motivating and energizing. It is out of these kinds of environments you see leaders emerge. The location is not important. The environment is the most important. If location alone was all that determined success, Apple computers would not exist because the garage location where the idea was born would have limited the vision of success.

Seeing Clearly

When you hand a new employee a policy and procedures manual, it is a roadmap for succeeding in the organization. It defines the mission and conveys a sense of culture. But these types of documents are not visionary. They are documentary and only serve to inform about rules and processes. You can use a policy and procedures manual to establish the rules of play, but they are not effective at creating a vision of the future.

So what is vision? Vision refers to seeing something other than with ordinary sight. Reading a policy and procedures manual does not require vision…only intelligence. A vision is something a person sees in their mind’s eye and embraces on a very personal level. There is the noun “vision” which is the mental image of an outcome. There is also the verb “visualising” which refers to the act of having vision.

It is not difficult to understand how the focus of visionary thinking can be extremely motivating. When you visualise anything, it can often become true because of its motivating power which drives you to seek success. Whole books have been written on the power of visualising including the well known book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. In this book the theory of autosuggestion is discussed. The premise is that if you think about something long enough and hard enough, it becomes a part of your subconscious and drives your actions to make the vision become a reality. This book was devoted to developing personal wealth, but the power of visualisation is made clear for all situations. You can think it and make it come true.

Envision and Succeed

In an organisation, the power of visualising success is the source of leadership on a management and personal level. Organisational members who can “see” success as a specific outcome have more direction and more motivation to pursue creative solutions and new concepts. When someone understands what their actions are intended to accomplish, a goal exists. When someone can visualise success, they incorporate much more than just meeting a specific goal. Instead, the organisational member has a more expansive view that includes how their personal contributions and abilities can contribute to the success of the organisation.

It is easy to see the power of visualising success when you understand the many benefits that ensue.

• Personal nature of visionary thinking promotes individual development to the good of the company

• Visionary thinking increases creative thinking and problem solving

• Visionary thinking removes common barriers which impede organisational progress because success becomes “hard-wired” into the subconscious

• Visualising success is motivating

• Visualising success promotes organisational unity when allowed to become a shared vision

It is easy to be esoteric and assume the power of visualising success is only available to the chosen few within an organisation. But success within a business begins with its staff and employees who incorporate company goals and the company mission into their lives. When people are able to visualise success, they allow creative tension to inspire and challenge in a way that can lead to innovation or new ways of doing things.

Creative Problem Solving Leads to Organisational Innovation

The words “creative problem solving” have almost become more like buzzwords tossed around the workplace and never really landing anywhere. Everyone knows intuitively that creative problem solving can work, and it’s the “thing to do” in a participatory organisation, but exactly what does it mean and what benefits can be obtained?

Creative problem solving is a method of approaching change within the organisation. It usually involves a team approach, because people within the workplace are empowered to participate in the change process when looking for creative solutions. An effective organisation recognises that its own personnel often hold the keys to innovation within themselves and only need the right outlet to share their experience based ideas.

A Creative Change Agent

In other words, creative problem solving is a method of finding innovative approaches for problem resolution. The problem may be any of a number of situations or needs. For example, the problem may be stated in terms of the need to resolve interdepartmental conflict which is reducing efficiency. On the other hand, the problem may be a need for a product innovation in order to improve the company’s competitive standing within its industry.

No matter what the problem or need the business may be addressing, creative ideas and fresh approaches can often make the difference between a successful company and one that is unable to remain efficient and competitive. It also offers a way to introduce change into an organisation that minimises the normal fear that usually accompanies change. The creative problem solving process becomes a change agent that can turn resistance into action.

Seeing a Problem as an Opportunity

One of the most important features of the creative problem solving process is the fact it turns a problem into an opportunity to improve the organisation. Instead of just relying on traditional ideas or past practices to resolve a problem, the creative approach encourages people to participate in a dynamic setting which encourages new ideas and approaches.

The fact is that most organisations have the creative power within their own setting among the staff. The creative process brings together various people including managers, office personnel, line workers or supervisors, and many others. The people chosen to participate depends on the problem being solved.

The creative process follows a format which takes the group up to the moment when creative thinking is unleashed. In the initial stages, the process first accomplishes the following:

• Identifies the problem in traditional terms
• Establishes goals
• Empowers participants
• Develops criteria for choosing ideas
• Focuses on how to “sell” the creative idea

Popular creative problem solving strategies which have been developed include brainstorming, mind mapping, and even role or team game playing. In every situation, the goal is to empower people to feel comfortable enough to freely generate ideas without fear of criticism.

The Path of Creativity

In both brainstorming and mind mapping, ideas are suggested which may or may not seem reasonable on the surface. But no idea is eliminated and all ideas are welcomed. One idea is mapped or associated with another idea and a path of ideas leads to one or more creative solutions to a problem. The solution chosen depends on the criteria established at the beginning of the process.

In creative problem solving, organisational members are encouraged to participate and the process provides recognition to the people who are major contributors to the success of the business to date. It promotes teamwork, unity, creative approaches, and positive energy. However, possibly the most important success factor in creative problem solving is ensuring that time is dedicated regularly to the creativity process.

What Are Your Expectations?

Depending on how organised you are, that could be a difficult question to answer. Whether you have a work related project or task to complete, or are establishing working guidelines for your overall leadership role, you should have clear and well defined expectations of what you want to achieve before you begin.

This is especially necessary if the project involves teamwork. If the overall expectations of what needs to be achieved are not clearly defined, then the people involved may produce very different results, as they will all have different ideas about what is expected of them.

To this end, it helps immensely if a clear framework for your working relationship is laid out before the project begins. And the first step in this process is to take some time to make sure that your expectations are clear to yourself. Everyone should have a specific task and have the benefit of knowing not only what they are expected to do but also what are the parameters for their performance. Each person then operates as part of the whole, and it is only by everyone performing their own part that the project can be completed satisfactorily.

These expectations for team performance normally take two forms – operational and behavioural expectations. Under normal circumstances many operational expectations are dealt with in job descriptions, company poicy documents and the like. However behavioural expectations are much more subjective and as a reulst of this are harder to address.

Regular meetings at agreed points are also useful to determine if everyone is staying on track. Your expectations for the completion of a project should match the actual finished result as closely as possible and regular meetings help to steer you in the right direction.

There are many different opportunities to communicate your expectations – whether it be as part of the interview process to match a potential recruit to your team, at the start of a new project or when taking over a new position for example.

Remember that there are many great leaders, and all have an individual leadership style just as all artists have different artistic styles. However one of the major keys to really effective leadership is the clear understanding of your style by your team. By making your performance expectations clear to yourself, it allows you to effectively communicate them. This in turn allows your team members to work according to your expectations, which makes them confident and secure.

And one more thing – it is important to remember that you have to be a role model for the expectations you have of others!