Generalist vs. Specialist

I read a great article in HBR today in which the authors, Wanda T. Wallace and David Creelman, discuss what to do if your leadership role demands dealing with team members who are much greater experts in their domains than you could hope (or have time) to be. The article basically confirms, in a much more elegant way that I would have managed to articulate, my own perspective on how to be a good project manager: A PM should be able to look at the project from a high level perspective, visualize the potential problems that may still be on the horizon, and get together a team of experts in the material to come up with applicable solutions to these problems.

There are four points that the article presents for a generalist project manager:

1. Focus on relationships, not facts,
2. Add value by enabling things to happen, not by doing the work,
3. Practice seeing the detailed picture, not mastering the details, and
4. Rely on "executive presence" to project confidence, not on having all the facts and answers.

In my view, the main objective of good PM should be to be a facilitator for a smooth operation of the project team. Being a facilitator means that you, as a PM, should be able to present a problem to your team of experts in a clear and precise way and have a two way communication going to arrive at the optimum solution. As a PM in your industry you need to be a generalist and be knowledgeable about the broad strokes of what needs to be done so that you may prod holes in your experts' logic and lead them to think about alternative failure modes and scenarios. You do not need to know the ins and outs of the calculations required for finding a solution. You should be able to understand the parameters and limiting conditions that set up the proper execution of, say, a software although its internal runnings, which you may leave to your experts, may be a black box to you. Being a generalist, with an all-encompassing view of the project, is much more important for a PM than being a specialist in a narrow field of application

Being a good facilitator requires a lot of up-front work. This will include a good project execution plan (PEP) so that all stakeholders are clear on the objectives of the project and what will be done (and how) to achieve the stated objectives, a well thought out project schedule to clarify not only the sequence of activities but also the dependencies and conflicts between these activities, and a well defined communication plan so that team members know whom to approach in case conflicts and issues arise.

There are, of course, numerous other issues that a PM will have to take care of in his (or her) day-by-day running of the project but, I am sure, if these three aspects of the project are well taken care of during the planning stages of a project things become much easier to manage during the execution stage of the project, even if the team members are much more of an expert in their areas then he (or she) will ever be!

Fancy Brain Teasers Do Not Predict Success in a Job

Just ran into this article about Google coming to a conclusion about the [in]famous "brain teasers" method of conducting interviews: Not surprisingly, they found that asking these questions do not show any correlation to the ultimate long term performance of their hires.

I always found the questions to be a bit gimmicky - the most it showed was if the person being interviewed was quick on his feet or not; it didn't say anything about whether the quick thinking was right or not and whether it would lead to the solution. If you look at real life examples you'd find that most successful people are those that keep hammering away at the problem till they achieve a breakthrough. Other than in hand-to-hand combat situations, quick thinking is generally not the most important predictor of future success. Angela Lee Duckworth talked about this in an interesting presentation at TED - her analysis, after years of teaching math to 7th graders, has lead her to believe that it is "grit", and not IQ, that is a more reliable predictor of academic and professional success.

Another finding indicated that a successful hiring is a complete crap shoot! You may interview a person all you want, look at his GPA, talk to people who recommend him - it ultimately comes down what that person wants you, the interviewer, to think of him. You probably need a Master's degree in psychoanalysis to be able to cut through people's presentation to look into their souls and determine whether they'll be successful in your company or not. And even then you'd not be able to predict future circumstances that will influence their performance.

The best way to improve a person's performance depends, to a large extent, on the leader of the group. As I pointed out in another post, an inconsistent leader is a big killer of morale and productivity. Being consistent in your approach to management and instructions will encourage everyone to put their best foot forward, without fearing that you will later change your mind and all their work will come to a naught.
The other, not very surprising, conclusion was the disconnect between performance at school and long term performance in 'real life". Schools, I've believed for a long time, have not been designed to produce risk taking entrepreneurial members of the society. At the graduate school level, in the US at least, this mold is partially broken and people are encouraged think on their own but till you reach that level of schooling you are mostly encouraged to conform with the teacher's expectation - there is only one correct response to a problem and they are the arbiters of what it is!

In any case, I could go on and on on this subject but I'd encourage you to read at least the summarized conclusions and, if you have a bit more time on your hand, the full interview on New Your Times with Laszlo Bock of Google. Let me know your thoughts on the subject in comments either here or on my Google+ page.

Dunbar's Number and Project Management

In the late eighties Prof. R. I. M. Dunbar, in his anthropological studies, discussed optimal group sizes for primates, which seemed to be a function of relative neocortical volume in their brains. According to Dunbar, the number of neocortical neurons limits the organism's information-processing capacity and that this then limits the number of relationships that an individual can monitor simultaneously. When a group's size exceeds this limit, it becomes unstable and begins to fragment. This then places an upper limit on the size of groups which any given species can maintain as cohesive social units through time. In other words, there is a natural limit beyond which the group's functionality and efficiency begins to deteriorate. For humans, the Dunbar's number seems to be around 150 (Dunbar actually calculated the mean group size to be 148). Dunbar also noted that the group has to be highly motivated for such a large number to work - in the absence of intense economic or environmental incentives and "social grooming" such large groups tend to break down into smaller fragments.

Here are a few thoughts on how his study impacts the way work groups should be structured.

• The Dunbar's number indicates the total number of relationships a person can maintain, including family, friends and professional relationships. Many authors on the web take the number to mean the optimum number of people that you may have on a project. I think there are two mistakes these authors are making here. (1) They are confusing the maximum with the optimum. The brain is wired to monitor up to approximately 150 persons. This is not the same as saying that the brain monitors 150 people best. And, (2) that the 150 relationships are exclusively for the work environment. If you take into account relationship slots that may be occupied by friends, family members and professional relationships outside the project environs then an appreciably less number of slots are available for project related relationships. A Facebook study from a couple of years ago estimated that an average user tracked about 40 "friends". Add to this about 20 to 25 people that a person may relate to in some other way but who are not members of Facebook and this will leave a maximum of about 80 to 90 people that a team member may effectively monitor. The optimum number will probably be some where about half of this.

• A macro group may be formed which may be composed of many smaller cohesive groups, each containing the optimum number of members. These smaller groups may communicate with each other through the upper hierarchy levels, which forms the communications/coordination backbone of the organization.

• The larger the group the more "social grooming" that is required. In other words, larger groups need more team building exercises to keep them functioning as a productive whole. According to Dunbar, for numbers approaching the limits the time required for these activities may be as much as 42% of the total time. This means that there is a diminishing rate of return associated with increase in team size. This is another reason why the actual optimum number of team members in a group will be appreciably less than Dunbar's number.

Interesting read: http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/15/diminishing-returns-of-collaboration