Elizabeth Lyle: How to break bad management habits before they reach the next generation of leaders

1.5M views

Have you ever thought that your bad leadership habits can pass on to the next generation of leaders? Many young leaders inherit from their supervisors and repeat the catch-22 scenario. But the worst thing is that some of their bad routines become the habits of a lifetime for organizations. After all, a business that undergoes digital transformation can’t afford similar scenarios. Luckily, we have coaches like Elizabeth Lyle. She educates senior leaders on change and sheds old-fashioned leadership patterns. Elizabeth encourages younger generations to talk about major show-stoppers upon notice. Because when they are in the saddle, the worst way they can choose is repeating bad habits of their teachers.

Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the very long term

2.2M views

This TED talk on planning would become a great addition to Elizabeth Lyle’s. Ari Wallach, the speaker, is an expert who helps great leaders be more self-conscious about shaping their futures. “So it’s important that we remember — the future, we treat it like a noun. It’s not, it’s a verb. It requires action, it requires us to push into it. It’s not this thing that washes over us. It’s something that we actually have total control over. But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don’t,” says Ari. In this TED talk, he brings to light civilizational-scale problems and explains why short-term planning, or ‘short-termism,’ as he puts it, leads to numerous disasters. Ari focuses on different kinds of thinking that encourage long path philosophy, such as transgenerational thinking, futures thinking, and telos thinking. What distinguishes these three types of thinking from short-term contemplation is a focus on our actions as triggers to the next generations.

Liv Boeree: 3 lessons on decision-making from a poker champion

2.2M views

Ask yourself who you weren’t, occupying a project management position. Project managers are jugglers, builders, prophets, watchers, officers, poker players (scrum), and while they try on many other roles, they’re decision-makers, first place. This is the shortest speech among the other TED talks for project managers in this list, but it’ll give you three essential and straightforward lessons. Liv Boeree, a poker winner of the European Poker Tour, shares her twist on decision-making based on her own experience. She’ll walk you through her understanding of the lucky factor, communication, and intuition. The main lesson from her speech leaders have to remember is this one: “When we speak in numbers, we know what lands in the other person’s brain.”

Chieh Huang: Confessions of a recovering micromanager

1M views

Micromanagement is a hard lesson to learn for every leader. Chieh Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Boxed.com who once went off the rails to micromanage workers telling them how to write notes to customers. Let’s forgive him because based on this journey, he gave us one of the most creative definitions to micromanagement and delivered his most precious lessons.

Micromanagement is taking great, wonderful, imaginative people, bringing them into an organization, and then crushing their souls by telling them what font size to use. — Chieh Huang

This is the funniest TED talk for project managers I’ve personally seen in years. Who else compares his mother-in-law to a micromanager because both are constantly watching over somebody’s shoulder? But to be serious, in his speech, Chieh dwells upon the downsides and upsides of not micromanaging. His story simply deserves to be heard for the sake of the final lesson he utters at the end of the talk.

Julia Dhar: How to disagree productively and find common ground

1.7M views

It happens that a project manager comes to work and finds a new idea on the table. A debate is coming. One of your team members has just suggested something that, in their opinion, will blow away the market. How do you open your mind to it and how do you come completely tolerant, but objective to an idea? How do you disagree productively to a bad idea to filter it out? Julia Dhar has been arguing since her childhood to figure out the technical skills needed to win a debate, and she has learned some valuable lessons to share when idea management is concerned. Attacking a person making the argument is the last thing you should ever consider, admits Julia, and proves that finding common ground is imperative firsthand.

Vinay Shandal: How conscious investors can turn up the heat and make companies change

1.1M views

This is a must-watch TED talk for project managers who work with senior investment professionals. Vinay Shandal reflects on how they can catalyze large-scale change in organizations by solving different environmental, social, and governmental issues that line up with their values and purposes. If you work with a conscious investor and have an idea of making your portfolio greener, then you can use your voices together to improve the environment and the society, says Vinay.

Margaret Heffernan: Forget the pecking order at work

2.9M views

Margaret Heffernan is a management thinker, a brilliant TED speaker, and the former CEO of five businesses. She delivers an exceptionally important message to project management experts, giving advice on how to build a dream team with the potential to show spectacular results. Margaret’s story starts with research conducted on two different types of chickens — ordinary generation of chickens and the superflock. From there, the speaker jumps to her own experience of working with different companies and makes a statement that we have a wrong understanding of how to achieve success at a company level and how teams should be built. Margaret is convinced that success is not achieved by picking superstars and giving them all resources and power. In fact, such actions lead to aggression, dysfunction, and waste of the team members’ energy. What matters and outperforms individual intelligence is social connectedness, a high degree of sensitivity and empathy to each other. Margaret proceeds with her speech, identifying how to increase the level of social connectedness, as it won’t happen naturally between your team members.

Melinda Epler: 3 ways to be a better ally in the workplace

1.5M views

Melinda Epler was the Head of Marketing and Culture at an international engineering firm in 2013. Her experience there proved to be rather negative. The company culture taught her some fundamental lessons about cooperation and management that she now brings to the masses. According to Melinda, “While there were bigger issues, most of what happened were little behaviors and patterns that slowly chipped away my ability to do my work well. They ate away my confidence, my leadership, my capacity to innovate.” Melinda raises the issues that are probably familiar to everyone. Her point is that in organizations, there are people who are underprivileged because of many factors, like gender, race, nationality, geography, skin color, etc. So this TED talk is for people who would like to rebuild their confidence. If you’re a project management leader, it will also help you figure out a strategy to lead successful meetings with your team and make sure you are heard every time.

Frances Frei: How to build (and rebuild trust)

2.8M views

Frances Frei is a Harvard Business School professor who once committed all her efforts to rebuild trust to Uber when it was on fire. Frances believes that with trust people would reach unprecedented human progress. She sheds light on the component parts of trust and reveals how each of them — authenticity, logic, and empathy — can get shaky. But the main value of this TED talk for project managers is gaining knowledge of how to restore and nurture trust both on organizational and team level.

Illustration: Copyright © Irena Voilenko

The post 9 NEW Inspiring TED Talks for Project Managers appeared first on PM Column.

At this point, I recommend referring to these trusted project management sources where you’ll definitely find what you’ve been looking for — pure inspiration, joy, knowledge, and words of encouragement. Apart from the list of these good old sources below, you’ll find PM articles worth reading right here, right now. So here’s my top six.

CIO | Project Management | News, how-tos, features, reviews, and videos

For me, there’s no better place to go hunt for a solid piece of project management news or advice than CIO. Its project management column is written by the word wizards whose messages are clear and recommendations relevant. There you can find leadership lessons, digital transformation tips, and beautifully crafted reviews of project management applications. If you don’t feel like reading, you can go watch their expert videos or listen to the interviews with top project performers.

Must-read: How AI could revolutionize project management

Harvard Business Review | Project Management Digital Archive

HBR is one of my favorite professional project management sources I read when I feel that my level of motivation gets depleted. It honestly reveals the challenges of project manager’s role in a simple but witty manner. The only downside of HBR, in contrast to CIO, is a limited number of articles you can read without a paid subscription. But even reading three free articles a month can fill in your reservoir of inspiration and motivate you. It’s mesmerizing how HBR’s contributors can fit an impressive amount of information into their clear-cut recommendations.

Must-read: Why Agile goes awry — and how to fix it

McKinsey | Project Management Blog

There’s still time in our lives when we want to dip our toes in the waters of research and stay away from lyrics about project management. In this case, McKinsey sounds like a perfect choice. With a thousand of experts and consultants around the world, this group of researchers creates different types of content worth even your single minute of free time. McKinsey’s project management podcasts, articles, and white papers are always backed up by their own research and real experience gained through cooperation with the world’s top companies. What I like most about McKinsey is their way to present content — making it exclusively readable. This website won’t get you irritated with advertisements or irrelevant news. Vice versa, McKinsey prefers that you stay focused on what you’re reading.

Must-read: Managing big projects: The lessons of experience

Project Manager Today

PM Today is one out of many editions focused on project management that sees the world in a printed version. It’s a good old source of inspiration for project managers who prefer the smell of printing ink to computers and smartphones. Generally, PM Today uncovers current project management trends and analyses how digital transformation affects the domain. What makes it one of the best sources of inspiration for project managers is loyalty to the subject and its target audience.

A Girl’s Guide to Project Management

Written by Elizabeth Harrin, this source is probably one of the liveliest project management blogs on the web and the first in a class of its own speaking to the audience of women. A Girl’s Guide to PM regularly offers valuable information to its readers in the form of independent software reviews, project management books, PM conferences to visit, and other practical information you need to thrive in the domain of project management.

Must-read: 15 tested and practical tips from women in project management

The Digital Project Manager

Enriched with the power of over 40 professional certified project management contributors, this platform is one of the newest and fastest growing digital project management websites in the world. It offers how-to guidelines, reflects light upon PM tools and presents insights key to project success. What distinguishes DPM from other listed sources of inspiration is a beautiful, modern, and user-friendly design.

Must-read: How to identify and avoid scope creep

Toptal Projects Blog

The Toptal Projects Blog is best for inspiration when it comes to the current best practices, tricks, and state of knowledge in Project Management and Agile leadership. The articles are penned by the professional network of Toptal project managers who share their experience and make the domain more tangible.

Must-read: How to prevent and manage scope creep

You might also like to check books project managers have been reading in 2018 and an easy-peasy explanation of Agile to children.

What’s your favorite project management source of inspiration? Share it in the comments below and don’t forget to sign up! 

Illustration: Copyright © Anastasiia Shcherban

The post The Good Old Sources of Inspiration for Project Managers appeared first on PM Column.