Dave is the author of the Drunken PM blog, PMP, Scrum Trainer and past chair of the PMI IT&T SIG and this is his second appearance on my podcast.

We discuss the following questions:

• Why should PMs care about personal branding?
• What is a personal brand in the first place?
• How do you take care of your own brand and can you name some examples of personal branding in PM or outside PM?
• Can you name some easy techniques/steps to start a personal brand?

Why Should Project Managers Care About Personal Branding?

How To Take Care Of Your Personal Brand (for Project Managers)

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Personal Branding For Project Managers is a post from: Project Shrink.

Why Are Leadership Skills Critical For The Project Manager? and
How To Improve Your Leadership Skills

I am a huge fan of the blog of Art Petty. It is a great resource for aspiring leaders and you can download the free ebook “Leadership And The Project Manager“.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Leadership And The Project Manager is a post from: Project Shrink.

I am delighted to talk to Margaret Meloni on this subject. She consults with individuals and organizations on the topic of conflict resolution and she coaches professionals in advancing their careers. She used to work as a Project Manager, so she knows our profession.

Margaret answers the following questions:

• Why is it important to define yourself as a professional?
• How do you get to know what you bring to the table?
• How do you broadcast that to others?

You can view the video below… or follow this link to YouTube.com.

Special Offer For Project Shrink Readers/Viewers

Margaret has provided us with a great offer: her course “Define Yourself, Define Your Life- Develop clarity around – the real YOU at work” (which covers the topics discussed in the video chat and much, much more) will be available with a 30% discount until March 6, 2009.

To make use of this offer, go to the product overview (and read what you get, it is course nr2), and use the code ‘Bas’ at checkout. You will receive $23.70 off the regular price which is $79US.

You might also want to check out…

Intersection Between Personal Development, Change Management And Project Management
Alignment Of Individual And Organizational Objectives With Andrew Meyer
Successful Virtual Teams With Jessica Lipnack

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Define Yourself As A Professional With Margaret Meloni is a post from: Project Shrink.

As I am trying to infuse Project Management with some much needed “human stuff” a chat with her would be very good idea: the intersection between personal development, change management and project management.

Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink Podcast”
Full Video Version of Project Shrink videocast
Audio Only Version of Project Shrink podcast

The questions we address are:

• What does personal development have to do with changes in organizations?
• Why is it useless to plan for anything longer than a year?
• How can anyone bootstrap his own personal change?
• and more

You can view the video below… or follow this link to YouTube.com.

Tell us what you think about the intersection between personal development, change management and project management.

You may also want to check out…

Alignment Of Individual And Organizational Objectives With Andrew Meyer
Successful Virtual Teams With Jessica Lipnack
Self-Organization In Teams With Esther Derby

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Intersection Between Personal Development, Change Management And Project Management is a post from: Project Shrink.

Hey Project Manager! Beware of Fool’s Gold!

“Project managers often find themselves in situations where doing what’s asked will lead to failure. The reminders in this post have been helpful to me in finding ways to move such projects in a different direction.”

6 Lessons on Leadership from Captain Bligh

“We’ve all had to work with difficult bosses at times. Bligh is a nearly perfect example of what not to do on your projects.”

How to Say Goodbye When a Workmate Leaves

“Many of us are having to say goodbye to colleagues. This post can help make our goodbyes a little more meaningful for the person leaving as well as for us.”

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Proud Postings: Making Project Management Better is a post from: Project Shrink.

ARE YOU ALL OUT OF YOUR MIND?

YOU ALL AGREE THAT “PEOPLE PROBLEMS” ARE OUR BIGGEST ISSUES AND THEN YOU START FUMBLING WITH THE ITEMS YOU FIND IN YOUR BIG SHINY PROJECT MANAGEMENT BOX.

ARE YOU NUTS?

I know that if you only have the left side of a brain, the only job you can perform is Project Management. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even try to use the rest of your brain.

Left side: Logical, Sequential, Rational, Analytical, Objective, Looks at parts (source)

Makes you proud to have a hyper developed left part, not?

In an earlier post this year, Richard Bernheim reflected on the issues that a PM has to deal with:

“Ernst & Young and numerous others state that there are three categories of Project Management issues:

• People-related issues which on average represent 80%
• Process-related issues which on average represent 10%
• Technology-related issues which on average represent 10%”

Mix that with increasing complexity, uncertainty, mobility, flexibility and diversity of our projects and surroundings, and your left brain will come up short … BIG TIME!

80% of our issues are in an area where our left brain sucks!

We need to invoke all three parts of the brain: left side, right side and heart!

Right side: Random, Intuitive, Holistic, Synthesizing, Subjective, Looks at wholes
Heart: Passion, Emotion, Inspiration, Feeling

For this you are going to need major brain surgery!

Hack The Man. (or woman, although their internal wiring is better suited for 3 Sphere Project Management).

This is not about expanding the PM discipline, this is about enhancing PM people.

Seek to understand.

How to hack the brain of a Project Manager? It took me a while to figure it out, but the answer is coming soon.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Three Sphere Project Management: Using All 3 Parts of Your Brain is a post from: Project Shrink.

Well, that is just my summary. Take a cup of coffee and read the entire discussion.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - A Good Project Manager Is A Happy One is a post from: Project Shrink.

Photography by Dylan Parker

A couple of years ago I was asked during a sales presentation what I thought was the most essential ingredient for a successful project. My answer was “mutual trust”. People
in the room were staring at me like I was some kind of Softy Oozy New Age Treehugger. I switched very fast to the normal “plan-and-control” crap to get happy faces again.

Today I would provide the same answer to that question. Trust is essential to doing successful projects, and therefor a core concept for Project Management. But to avoid this “Treehugger” image, let me give you a view on how trust can be modelled, so we put some hands and feet to this rather abstract idea.

As a starting point we take the Prisoners Dilemma (PD) as discussed in this posting. In essence it is a situation where

• 1) if people cooperate both have success,
• 2) if one person is taking advantage of the other (defect) this person has an even larger benefit, but the other suffers a loss,
• 3) if both persons defect they loose both. In a situation like being in prison, you have only those two options, cooperate and defect.

However in more general circumstances, like projects, you can have a third: don’t play, walk away, just exit. For this posting I will simplify a project to a series of prisoners dilemma’s where the strategies can be cooperate, defect and exit.

Earlier I talked about the idea of “iterative PDs” where an enormous series of PDs are performed behind each other and the choice of strategy is based upon the outcomes of the previous iterations (remember Tit-For-tat? ). History plays an important role in choosing a strategy. Central question is “Do you trust the other party to cooperate?” “Trust” is defined as “have confidence or faith in” but also as “reliance: certainty based on past experience”. Based upon the things that happen in the past, you adapt your strategy.

Having Only One Shot

But what if you haven’t done a zillion iterations? What if you meet a person for the first time and you are confronted with a prisoners dilemma? Researchers call this the “one-shot prisoners dilemma”. In a situation like this, people are trying to determine the “trustworthiness” of others. They are trying to read “telltale signs”, look for behavior or other marks that they identify with trustworthiness. This might be as simple as being friendly and saying “hello” every time you see someone down the hall. Perhaps you have automatically more trust in someone wearing a suit, or a person with PhD behind his name. The idea is that you are trying to detect signs of trustworthiness, whatever
that my be for you.

Next to this detection, the projection of your own intentions plays a role in the decision of the strategy; if you want to cooperate you are more likely to be biased into “seeing” the other as trustworthy. So, we use projection and detection as a mechanism to compensate for the lack of history one has in one-shot Prisoner Dilemma’s.

How people detect the tell-tale signs of trustworthiness is not only based upon behavioral markers that society associates with it; it has also to do with the similarity of the other with you. Persons that are more viewed as being equal or “the same” or more likely to be considered honest and sincere towards you. Translated to terms of social networks: people closer in social networks are more likely to consider each other trustworthy than people further apart.

This is not a one dimensional thing, people are associated with multiple social networks and groups. And every social group has its own rituals and signs that communicate its uniqueness towards the world outside the group. If you have a lot of aspects associated with a certain social group, you will more likely be considered trustworthy by members of the same group.

The only question remaining is: do you trust this model?

This posting is largely based upon THE EVOLUTION OF TRUST AND COOPERATION. BETWEEN STRANGERS:. A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Treehugger Project Management: Is Trust Important? is a post from: Project Shrink.