 Hello everyone. Welcome to the opening of the master speakers series for the spring semester. It's a great pleasure for me to open this event as a dean of the School of Business of the Prague College. Before starting introducing our outstanding guest or master speakers from the business field, I just would like to thank our industry partners and companies. We work on projects and also I would like to thank our sponsors that contributed in some sense especially during the COVID time to sponsor the digital campus that in some sense provide us the possibility to offer high quality teaching to all our students. I just would like to mention a few of the sponsors actually that are joined later to sponsor the digital campus. The sponsors like Studio Lovecchio that you can even see here, Pampanzarotto, Amaris, Wysoft, all of them they actually contributed to the sponsorship of the digital campus that enable us to do and to deliver high quality classes. I would like to introduce the speakers of tonight, John Cromblood and talk a bit about him just a few minutes and then I'll let him the floor. He's going to talk about project management leadership. John is a business leader with about 40 years of ex-working experience in the business but also is a sort of colleague I would say he is actually a lecturer in higher education at the university in the United States. He's speaking from the United States. Welcome John. John in East Korea held leadership roles, high level roles in sales, marketing, product and business development and project management and recently retired from Whirlpool Corporation. As you probably know, Whirlpool is the largest manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances in the world. John graduated from Concordia College in Minnesota and an NMBA Thunderbird School of Global Management. Constantly is working still, didn't give up working apparently and currently is working as a contractor for Whirlpool Corporation as a project manager in IoT, the Internet of Things and as an adjunct lecturer is also lecturing in business at the Southwestern Michigan College. John I think in his life traveled I think more than 40 countries or something like that, more than 40 countries for work in his career, lived and worked in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Shanghai. He is going to talk tonight about something very complex or kind of easy. I don't know, we will figure out from the easy to say and complex to define which is about project management leadership. Welcome on behalf of the college and it's a great pleasure for the business school to have you here with us. John the virtual floor, sorry about that, but the virtual floor is all yours. We are looking forward to your talk. Thank you so much for accepting our invitation on behalf of the college. Thank you very much Stefano. I appreciate that very nice introduction. You saved me a slide actually. So it's really a pleasure to be speaking with all of you tonight students. I don't know if there's any prospective students and faculty. I just appreciate the invitation. And so as Stefano mentioned I'll be talking about project management and very specifically leadership of leading teams within project management. So part of the talk is going to be about what it means, what project management is all about to help you understand the principles that I'm going to talk about. You can see here a little picture of Orpals corporate headquarters. And as Stefano said, I couldn't stay away. I retired for a year and I'm back at it. And that's why I'm in this project management position as a contractor because I really love and joy doing this kind of work and being a contractor is a little bit freeing. So some of the that you are the start of your career. This has opened up another opportunity for me to continue the work. And I'll talk a little bit about that as we go forward. So I'm not going to add any more to this, but you can find me on LinkedIn as well. And there might be a little bit more detail on that. So I wanted to initially share this information about as we kick things off about a breakthrough objective. Some years ago, while I was going through a leadership training program while still an employee and a director at Whirlpool, I discovered that there was a value in creating and building and using breakthrough objectives. And I found that having a breakthrough objective like you see here is really taking a stand for something that is outside the normal business objectives of meeting an annual objective or meeting incremental goals. But really it's about a life vision. And you can see here the objective or the stand that I've created here is around being a leader. And as I'll just read it here with you, I'm a leader who holds myself accountable to achieve extraordinary outcomes in all aspects of life and encourage others to do the same. Now, what this has done for me is it challenges me every day in my life and my personal life in my work life. And it defines me as a leader. And I encourage each of you to think about doing this for yourself. The act of creating a breakthrough objective is one that even if you haven't yet achieved it, it actually starts your mind moving toward that and becoming that person that you indicate here in your breakthrough objective stand. And you're already taking one big step down the path. So my talk today, as Stefano said, is about leadership, not just leadership in general, but specifically leadership in leading projects, and more specifically teams in projects. You might find yourself in a position where either you're part of a project team or an organization, or perhaps you're leading a team of people to deliver a set of objectives. And very often we're called to these roles and people are assigned to us or we might actually be assigned to be a part of that team. And this team is thrown together through an organization. And often there's not a lot of definition around how these activities or projects will be accomplished. Often as well, the teams are not part of the same organizational structure. People are asked to work together as a team and deliver a result. And perhaps you haven't appointed or an elected leader, but that person who's leading the team doesn't have this hierarchical role of supervising that team. So we're going to talk about how do we manage through some of those complexities when you're leading a cross functional team like that? And how do we achieve those goals? I've done a lot of work in projects, but only recently in my career. And so I've had to learn quite a bit about project management probably in the last 10 years of my work life. So let's first define what is project management? What is a project? And typically we might describe a project as you're given an objective. You have a start, you have an end date, and you're delivering a set of objectives. In project management, there are people who define it differently. Once I interviewed for a role of a project director within Whirlpool, and the vice president who interviewed me at the time asked me to define project management. I'm not sure what I actually said at the moment, but what I remember is what he said to me. And his definition was project management is risk management. In other words, everything you're doing as a project leader or project manager is minimizing risk, breaking down barriers to deliver those objectives. So is that it? Well, the guide to project management, the body of knowledge, talks about this. And one of the things they do talk about is people management. But again, a project manager may not actually do the work, but is leading the team that is doing the work. The PIMBOT guide or the project management body of knowledge is published by the Project Management Institute, and it's the really global industry leader that guides principles around project management, has published this book and has become known as the global standard for project management. The PIMBOT guide defines a project manager as someone who is assigned by the organization to lead the team. And I underlined and bolded lead the team because that's what we're talking about today. That's responsible for achieving project objectives. Therefore, the project manager is the team leader. And in project management, and I'm going to talk in principles of leadership, but it helps you to understand some key competencies required in project management. There are three that the PIMBOT guide shown here really talks about. First of all is the importance of having a technical skill of project management, the knowledge, the skills, how you deliver projects, and knowing the tools and having the skills. You can actually get undergraduate degrees, master's degrees, specifically in project management. So that is a key competency if you're going to lead a project. Now, like me, you can learn those skills. And so it doesn't, you don't have to read the PIMBOT guide, but I'm going to give you some of those skills and information as well if you're put into a position where you might do that. But it's going to be helpful for you to learn more. Secondly, knowing your specific industry is a key second point. And that's the strategic strategic and business management, not just knowing it, but whatever your organization, your area of influence, whether it's business, it's a specific field, it might be education or even nonprofit. You have to be knowledgeable about that area and have to have the vision, the ability to be a visionary and to be forward thinking. It's not just, well, I'll go do an execute, but it's important to have that strategic capability as well. And finally, the subject we're really talking about is leadership, is knowing how to guide, motivate and direct teams and being practiced and skilled at what drives behavior, what motivates team members to do their best individually and to be more productive as a team as a whole. So in defining project management as guiding, motivating and directing, these are very different aspects of leading. First of all, in guiding, we need to provide a roadmap so that people understand where they need to go. This requires a plan and it's up to the project leader to develop this plan. We're going to talk about how you do that in that overall project management process. Once the plan is there, the mission is understood, the leader must keep the team focused on that vision and mission throughout the entire project. Additionally, they must keep each of the team members clear in what their individual contribution is to the project and keep them in their lanes of work. Now, there's opportunity for them to expand beyond that, but that's the project leader's prerogative to manage that and guide them and keep them on the path on the lane where they should be and helping everyone understand what is their role to contribute to keep the gears moving in this project that might have some complexity. Secondly, it's easy to lose steam when you're perhaps distracted by other work, other responsibilities, often people that are on project teams have multiple teams they're working on or they have competing priorities or other responsibilities outside that project and maybe those things may even seem more interesting. So it's up to the project leader to keep the team member motivated by helping them to see how they're contributing by encouraging each other and helping each other know how to help each other when needed and overall motivating them to work together toward that common goal. Thirdly, it's important that direction or directing is a key activity as well. As I mentioned, often you are leading people on a project team who don't report to you directly and providing direction can be challenging, especially if the team members don't report to you in that organization hierarchy. Now, it's often and sometimes necessary to be an assertive leader who is assertive, but yet does not lead by force and that's a fine balance oftentimes, but keeping the team focused on that goal. Occasionally, a more assertive push is needed to give specific instructions and as a project leader, you have to have that capability to be more assertive at times. We're going to briefly, oops, I went the wrong direction, excuse me. There we go. We're going to look at three phases of project management leadership that will help break this down a little bit in the progression of a project. First of all, we need advanced preparation, what to do before the project starts. Secondly, we'll talk about leading the team during a project and finally providing for the actions for an appropriate closure of a project. Before we actually kick off the project, we can't just gather the team and figure it out. Advanced planning is required. First, the leader should make sure that the expectations are clear for yourself as the leader and then as well as others on the team. It's important to know what's expected of you and what's expected of the team and you can do this by creating a fast learning curve. Find out who are the people on your team, who are the knowledgeable people, who are the experts or who in the organization knows what's needed, what you need to learn about the project. You need to learn who those knowledge experts are and we can do that by asking. It's also important to find one or two people who you can trust, who will be honest with you, who will be available to you as a resource to bounce off ideas and also to be a mentor. When I first started in the biggest project I led initially was a bit initially seemingly overwhelming for me because I was asked to move me and my family to China and to lead a major refrigeration project. I was going to be the overall leader for a project where we're going to manufacture a new refrigerator in a manufacturing plant in a joint venture in China. I had a meeting with the chief technology officer of the corporation who said to me, we believe you're the right person. We really need you to do this. And multiple times I had said to him, look, you know I don't have a degree in project management. That's not what I was trained to do. I don't have a lot of experience in it. I've led people who lead projects. He said to me, you don't worry about that. We want your leadership, your capability, your understanding of China, and we will get you the help you need to learn the project management skills. And as it resulted, what resulted in that was I had a couple of people who mentored me over that time and one in particular eventually became my supervisor and became a mentor not only during that project but in future projects became a close friend of mine. And so I was fortunate to have several people that coached me along the way. And it's always important to have those opportunities to find mentors and coaches that can help you be a better leader, not only in leadership but in the skills and knowledge and technology that you need. Michael Watkins in his book, The First 90 Days that you see pictured here on the slide says that all leaders only have 90 days after they start a leadership role to get to what he calls a break-even point when your organization needs you as the leader as much as you need that job to be in that position. And a lot of times we see in the United States, President of the United States says in my first 100 days I'm going to do these things. Well, Michael Watkins said you only have 90 days and I found that it's a very effective tool. This is an excellent read by the way. You see it here, I highly recommend it for anyone going into a new position, not just a project management position and he outlines the tasks that you take. And something that I very much support that he articulates here as well is if you follow his advice, you will meet with stakeholders, with team members and their managers and potentially others who may have information that are useful for the project. This is really critical that you meet with people one on one. You know, when I first took this project to China, I started doing that and this was not the first time I used that book, by the way, in a new position. And I met with a number of folks. This was a project and I'll tell you a little bit more detail. It was called XXL. It was a large-sized refrigerator. So the XXL was the company code name for the project. And it was phase four because it was the fourth iteration of that. Well, first of all, when I discovered that it was important that I talked to stakeholders from the other phases who told me that the previous projects had not gone well and they were not very enthusiastic about me starting this thing. And the fact that it was named phase four was another problem because any of you, maybe none of you know Mandarin, but if you do, you would know that the word four in Mandarin is very similar and synonymous with the word deaf. So I was going into a potential difficult situation. We immediately changed the name with help from the project team. But the point of the story is that understanding that there were some previous assumptions about this project that I knew I had to overcome at the very beginning by having those conversations. Now, although you might not have a perfect plan in place, it's important to develop a plan, as I said, before you start. And you can do that by answering these questions. What are you trying to accomplish? What resources do you have? Do you have the appropriate number of resources? What's your level of authority? How much decision can you as a leader make versus needing to make decisions by others? With help from experts, you can build that plan. And in addition, I encourage you to build that together with your team members that may already be starting to form. You want to develop that initial plan and potentially even a timeline. And the key thing is just asking questions. As I mentioned in the subtext note there, the act of doing the timeline and the plan, putting that in front of you will build trust with your team as you start to do that with your team before the execution and implementation of the project. And they will know and be able to help you, but having that initial plan is critical before you get started. Now, before you can actually start working that plan as well, you need to make sure that you have the right team in place. Often, as I said, you have people assigned to you and experts in each area that are needed on the team. When I've led more traditional projects, now I'm leading more software agile projects, we have more traditional projects. We would have a team of experts or leads in each area, such as one for marketing, one for manufacturing, engineering, etc. Currently, I'm leading software projects which are a little different, which we still do have experts in software development or design or application. In any case, your project, whether it's a non-profit or a business, you may have these people assigned to you. And it's your job as a leader to assess their capabilities initially before you even get started. Again, meeting with them and understanding if they're right for your team and whether the team is the right fit. Also, determining what's missing and get the help that you need from your leadership initially. You want to do that ahead of time if you possibly can. After you've assessed your leaders, you also need to determine if their supervisors are aligned with the expectations. Early on, you can assess as well who might have greater potential, people you can mentor as the project progresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later and how you can help create others and build others through this and not your goal, not just being delivering the project but developing people on your team. So the final thing here before we get into leading the project team, you have to have clear goals and objectives established before you just start working, even if you have a plan. It can be very helpful as a leader to develop a purpose statement. A purpose statement for your project and your team that should be aligned with your team. You can draft one and then modify it with help from your team. This is going to get buy in from your team members as well. In addition, you want to list clear objectives after you have that purpose statement that are aligned with your sponsors and your stakeholders and then review it with them and make sure that you've got that alignment. What that's going to do is help you in your future because every project has problems and it's going to help you with your leadership to be able to resolve those issues when they know what those objectives clearly are that are stated. And again, as I mentioned, assure that your team members know what's expected of them, everything from their time commitment, what are their responsibilities and authority. We'll talk more about milestones in a bit but you want to establish those early milestones, what are the step by steps activities that you will be doing. And finally, it's really important that everyone, you, your team, your sponsors and your stakeholders, know that, okay, now that we've done all the planning, the project is underway. So by creating, by having a kickoff meeting, an official beginning, you're making that signal and that's your first milestone. So make it official, make it a, make it a specific meeting, presentation, whatever it might be that now everyone knows you're starting. Now that you're ready to start, all of your planning is done, your team is set, you've aligned with sponsors and stakeholders. I'm going to come back to the definition that I shared in the beginning. The project manager is a leader of the team who will actually do the work. And what does that sound like to you if someone is leading a team? Well, in my first role as a project director, the first time leading a project, I was leading a team and I hadn't met the team. I was following a process that I wasn't familiar with, tools that I wasn't familiar with, technology I knew little about. The advice that was given to me by one of the mentors was just be the orchestra director. And it's not so different as I note here. You know, if you take that analogy with an orchestra director, what do they do? They don't actually play the instruments. It's the orchestra that plays. They don't shine. They don't do solos in the performance, but every member of the orchestra has to have their eyes on the conductor. They must play from the same music to be successful. Although an orchestra conductor might have some ability to play an instrument, and it's good that they do, they almost never can play all the instruments, certainly not to the level of the members of the orchestra, the experts in the orchestra. But they must know how each section works, how each instrument works. And like the orchestra conductor, the project leader must also understand the management processes, must understand the level of technical, at least a minimal level of technical understanding in each area to be successful. And that means like me, if they're not an engineer, like I am not, but we're leading engineers, we must understand something about engineering, understand something about the software technology. And so this occurred to me in multiple times in projects, and the key there is acting as if you do, understand it and learn, and don't worry about perhaps making mistakes along the way because you will learn and you will grow, and your team will help you with that. I'd like to have a, to show a video here that talks about, that shows a little bit about being a leader when you may not know exactly everything about what you're doing. So Victoria, could you show the video please? Do I need to stop sharing? Stay smart, stay at a holiday in express. I hope you enjoyed that. Here, let me get my back up. So I realize it's a little bit funny, but the key here is that you don't always know every detail, but it's important to be a leader, and a little humor doesn't hurt either. You know, it's important also if you think about the orchestra director, they need to constantly communicate with each section, making sure they come in at the right time, cut off at the right time. And this, basically this knowledge gave me comfort that I didn't have to know everything, but the team relied on me for leadership, and eventually I was able to be successful. So now a person can't lead if we're not followers. So as we've discussed, and as we will continue to discuss, the leader must earn the right to lead. It's important for the project leader or the leader in any role really to understand the makeup of the team they're leading and what roles they are asked to take. And in projects, you'll likely have functional leaders on your team. These leaders can be referred to as subject manager, excuse me, subject matter experts, or SMEs, as they're often called. And they might be in a particular area of expertise or functions such as engineering or consumer services, or they might have a more specific expertise, like someone in my case, in project I'm leading now, which is an expert in software development for voice control, integrating our appliances together with Amazon Alexa Voice. As a leader, you'll gain a much stronger team if you help your team recognize that they are able to contribute more than just their individual SME defined role. They're a member of the project team, and therefore they're expected to support each other as team members. And you can encourage them to do that. Even though, as I mentioned earlier, stay in the lane, but it's also your role as the leader to be able to coach them to say, step up and do other things if you have capability. And if the team is aligned to it and you as a leader are aligned to it. Going back to the analogy of the orchestra director, you might need to have a bass guitarist who is going to be in a unique rock fusion composition. But that bass guitarist might come from your trombone section, because that's what they play. So just keep that in mind. Find out the qualities of your team members. And that's a key thing. We'll talk about that a little bit more. Also, be looking for potential leaders from your team and group them. I'm currently mentoring a scrum master, for example, who's learning to be a project manager by letting him lead one of the projects that I would normally have led. This is giving him a lot of visibility to leadership and guidance and support while I coach him in the activity. As a leader, it's important, as I mentioned, I talked about milestones. It's important your team knows that they are on track. How do they know that? How do they know to continue in the right direction? And for this reason, the leader can establish clear milestones to help the team assess together whether adjustments need to be made and even whether a redirection might be needed. Sponsors of the project will also want opportunities to either be able to know that it's on track or even make decisions. And that's something that you can align as a leader with your sponsors or your stakeholders. Milestones like markers on a highway let you know that you are where you want to be and help you change course at certain points along the way. Establish these markers when you do your planning, and they will serve you well to assess your progress. These markers can also be an opportunity to celebrate accomplishments, and I encourage you as a leader to have accomplishments that are small celebrations along the way. This is important for individual and team motivation. It's also helpful for your team to break down key tasks into more details. These work breakdown tasks are very much kind of a skill around project management, but it can be done in any activity in work where you break down activities that can be done by individuals and reviewed with a leader for alignment or can be done by smaller groups within the team and don't always have to be into the details with the project leader as long as they know that work is being done. I remember the recent discussion of the orchestra director around that as well. I once had one of my mentors would regularly not only check in with me, but with other project managers that he was leading in his first key question always when he was coming in to learn about a new project and assess whether the project was being managed in a positive way, he would say, what is your management system? This was his way of quickly determining whether the project was set up for success. At first glance, you might think that having a management system in place has nothing to do with leading people, but it does. When you're leading a project team, one of the first things you have to have in place before you start leading your team, and I realize this is leading the team, so hopefully you've done a little advanced planning around this, is having a strong management system. Think about these things that I'm going to list out here and make your decisions about how you will manage your project and your team as you start and as you continue along the way, you can adjust as you go. So first of all, meetings. What types of meetings do you have? When are they set up? What's the length of the meetings? How frequent do you have them and what are the purpose? You must have purpose to meetings or don't have them. Also, reports reporting on the progress of a project is something that a leader will always have to do, and it's important to have a plan on knowing how you're going to report information from the team and within the team. Know who your audience will be and create that communication plan. There are regular report outs by email or do you have meetings? How often do you do it every week, every other week, every month? Know what you're going to do and then be consistent about it so your leaders know what to expect. Also, how much information should you put into those leadership reports and you can get feedback from your sponsors or people that you're reporting out to. It's also important to know how your team is going to communicate internally. What tools do you use? Do you use chat? Do you use email? It helps for the team to understand so they can work together and respond quickly. You also want to have tools for tracking. These are some of those project management tools that I mentioned before, but I tend to use and you can create this easily in a spreadsheet format of actions, risks, issues, decisions, and accomplishments. All the team uses this collaborative document and everything is tracked in that one place where we close things out. The way I lead projects is we don't end the project until everything has been addressed in that action register. In decision making, it's important to agree on how the team is going to make decisions. Is this a consensus team where you have to have a general agreement? Do the SMEs make the decision in their specific area? Do you vote or are some decisions made exclusively by the project leader? Finally, in your project management system, you need to pay attention to documentation. It's important to have an established process and a location where project information is documented and saved for future reference. It's a lot easier these days. Everything can be electronic, but this will establish history for future projects and gives your team members evidence of accomplishments that they can use with their organizations or future business or future opportunities. Documentation helps to establish all the history on that project itself. Stephen M. R. Covey in his book The Speed of Trust said, the first job of a leader at work or at home is to inspire trust. It's to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardship and to create an environment in which high trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility. I believe there are three key ways you as a leader of a project team can establish that trust. First, as I've noted here, be a servant leader. Often servant leadership is misunderstood. Being a servant leader has demonstrated that it can result in positive business performance and outcomes. It's just not about being nice, but it's by demonstrating that you support an individual on your team by acknowledging their expertise and supporting them in a way that they need it. You are serving them and building up to be their best. Secondly, accept failure. Admit when you're wrong and when the team has failed. Your team will respect you, will follow your lead. As the leader, you're establishing a culture, not a failure but of learning. And failure is learning. I knew a former CEO that told me he thought he was going to get fired for an $8 million expense that he made a mistake on and he was surprised that his boss said, why would I fire you? I just spent $8 million training you. So finally, perhaps most importantly, in order to build trust and get to know each of your team members as individuals, know what's important to them, know them on a personal level, understand who they are, and they will build that trust with you. But if you understand a little bit about their personal lives, you'll know what motivates them and you can help them along the way. And when you criticize, you can make it obvious that you care. They'll know where you're coming from and they will accept that. I'm going to talk just a little bit about communication. I won't go into the detail here because I know our time is a little short, but I do want to mention that communication in leading teams and being a leader is absolutely critical. Meetings can be necessary, evil, but if you review these things like in your meetings, be very efficient, schedule your meetings, publish an agenda, stand-ups are 15-minute quick reviews often daily so that each team member knows what the others are doing and can support them if needed. Make sure you have a clear plan to report your progress, as I mentioned before. And it's important to regularly meet with your team members one on one so that you can get to know things that you wouldn't know any other way. And I don't want to minimize either the team member supervisors to make sure that you've aligned on time commitments and also you may have an opportunity to provide feedback for their performance appraisals as well. Closing the project, I just want to state a few things that you make sure that you do have a clear project closure. Everything begins and everything ends and so make sure that you've reviewed all of your objectives in the beginning. Declare the project complete, meet with each team member individually so they know as well whether there's any follow-up work that might be needed and also get alignment from their supervisor. And then don't forget to celebrate. When a project ends, it's up to you as the leader to celebrate publicly. Thank each team member publicly. This is different than those ongoing milestone celebrations. Many leadership books and theorists acknowledge that thanking people for their work can have more positive impact than financial compensation. And make sure that you reflect. They're organized a retrospective so you can allow each team member to contribute what went well, what should have been improved, what could have been done differently or discontinued. Put that in a documentation document and that goes into your documentation. And again, I mentioned make sure you document everything so that it's set aside for you. I'm going to close with five key ways to communicate value to your people because we're talking about leading people. Initially, make a decision that you will highly value your people. Once you make that decision here, it's going to come out clearly in how you deal with your people. Communicate through as many ways as you can. Speak words of affirmation regularly so they know that they are valued. Many people need that to hear that. Be a student of your people. Know who they are and become committed to them and they will commit to you and you will be successful in your project. Thank you. I'm open for questions and hope I didn't take too much time, Stefano. Thank you so much, John, for the clarity for the brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. I think everybody benefited from your talk. I would like to start in some sense to open the floor for questions. Since I was the one introducing you, I introduced the question so to break the ice so that the other people can actually follow along. Even because I teach some of the leadership classes and I'm always interested in the field experience and the people who did lead large projects as in your case. Maybe can you share at a time when you mentor team members by getting to know them and it results in an aspect of positive outcomes, for example, some kind of examples. I think it's like the anecdote of the CEO saying I just spend $8 million to train here. Why should I fire you? That's the kind of part of the best example of leadership you can get there. I think you have plenty of this in 40 years of experience, plenty of stories. I think students would kind of be interested. I have several, but one that comes to mind specifically is probably the most challenging not only project but role I had in my 35 plus years at Whirlpool was going to China and leading a project with a Chinese joint venture, 50-50, very challenging. The Chinese partner didn't have the same objectives we did. It was a constant challenge every day. I'm putting that very lightly by calling it a challenge. One of the things that we did is we brought in a cross functional team, actually a global team, and we brought them to China to lead the manufacturing operation. One of the people that sticks out in my mind very much is the leader of that team. Initially they were reporting into the manufacturing group and we discovered that that was just not working. I proposed that to have that person report to me, even though again I was sort of like the guy in the video. I had no idea about how to build a refrigerator, how to manufacture a refrigerator, but I learned and I spent a lot of days, long days in the plant learning each step, how do you do this, how do you do that. I was able to gain the knowledge and this young man who was leading that manufacturing team was very challenged by being fighting with the partners every day. One of the things I discovered by getting to know him though was we had many talks and one of those talks was what do you want to do with your life? As it turned out, he was a manufacturing guy all the way, but as it turned out he started to show interest or I would say capability and project management and he never thought about being a project manager. Eventually when the project ended and he went back to the United States, he was actually from Brazil, he went to the United States. Long story short is he became a project leader and of leading very high, big volume, large refrigeration projects in the U.S., but not as an engineer as a project leader. What's surprising to me is that I discovered that I thought he would be great at it, I encouraged it, but it was all his decision and I think all the tough times we went together kind of helped him, shaped him to do that work for the future and help the company. I think you're going to get many, many questions here. I'm just a reader and so you can at least I'll let you. How do you keep team members motivated best, especially now with remote work? Very good. I have a number of teams that are most many of them are based actually in India. We have software engineers in India today and some projects that I'm leading and the way we have daily meetings, first of all, so we continue to check in with them. As I mentioned before, I think it's really important to have one-on-one meetings. I meet with each of the team members no matter what the level on a regular basis. It might be once a month but checking in with them and allowing them to share what's going on personally. For example, I had one of our key software engineers sent a note to the team saying, I've got to be out for a couple of days, but over time we build the trust by me being vulnerable and saying, I have this issue. It allows them, as I said before, you're setting the tone for what is allowed to share. This young man shared that, well, my father was having some health issues and so I had to be out for two weeks. It's not typical of people in India. They're usually fairly guarded. As we've opened that up with the team, we feel more connected when people become more vulnerable. The best way to do it is for me to be vulnerable myself and that allows others to realize they can do the same. That's building that trust in relationship. Also, Jeff is asking, what is the number one quality according to you for a leader to possess or work on? What do you think is the number one quality a leader should have? There's a number of qualities. I think it's a combination. This is my personal belief. There may be different views on leadership, but my belief is that there needs to be a combination of confidence and strength and humility and the right balance between them. Being decisive, making difficult decisions, being important to do that is one, but not doing that without humility just makes into a tyrant or makes somebody who's just directing. The humility part is accepting those mistakes and being willing to admit that with the team. I hope you have free afternoon, right? You're in the US, so you have free afternoon, John, because the... Well, no, I'm just looking. I'm a bit scared of the number question. Anyway, so I'll try. I can go a little bit over, but yeah. Okay. Sorry about that. No, that's okay. I appreciate that. It means you did a good job, by the way. So anyway, what is the most common mistake that might happen in event management? Event management, so what do you think is the most common mistake there? In event management? Event management, yes. Event management is not necessarily my expertise, specifically, but I think... This is... Yeah, yeah. It's not preparing for contingencies. So it's really important to think through what are all the things that could go wrong and planning around that. I spent several years working the CES booth for Whirlpool in Las Vegas, and everything that could go wrong went wrong at one time or another. So it's really important that, you can do with a team, you can sort of have a brainstorming. What are all the things that could go bad? Okay, what are we going to do about it? That's risk management. And one of the things that we've also done in project management is to create a risk register and then actually list out what are the risks. And project management teaches there are positive risks and negative risks. What are the good things, unexpected things, and also the negative. And dealing with the potential for all those is really important, I think. Do you have any advice on building cohesion in a team and promote good supportive communication between team members from MIRA? You know, I think it's important to give opportunities for collaboration between the team members. So it's a little more difficult now in our virtual environment, but give opportunities for people to work together, give them assignments to work together so that and then keep track of it. You know, I in my this is more general, not just in leading projects, but in supervising people. And you can quickly recognize when you have personality clashes and helping people through that. I mean, everyone does not work with everyone wonderfully. People clash. I've worked with people who clash and what I discovered myself and this is what I coach other people to do is you can't change the other person, but you can change yourself and you can change how you react to that other person. So if you coach your team members as well in that same way to not assume that I'm going to get this person to change, but how can I go from in a relatedness, not relationship, but relatedness working together, maybe categorize that one to 10 and maybe it's a two. How do I get it to a four? What can I do? And I know that's not a straight answer, but I think it's a way to try to put a process together. And then you as a leader, you need to recognize if you have team members that aren't working together to try to help them through that. And it can be very uncomfortable sometimes. A quick question from Dave about your experience in China, you are expert of China. So did culture impact your interpersonal dynamics on the project? And if so, how did you approach these issues? Yeah. And when we speak of China, I mean, the most recent was mainland China, which is very different than Hong Kong, very different than Taiwan. And I'll speak in mainland China. Let's see. What was the interaction question? I'm trying to see if I can see. Did culture impact interpersonal? Yeah, our culture basically did impact interpersonal dynamics on the project. For sure. It's such a huge question. We could do a whole semester class. But I would say just at a high level, the Chinese culture for sure is different in a big way in that you and I can have Stefano this relationship where we can talk and be very open about answer questions straightforward. It's more of a Western approach, whereas the Chinese approach or even an Asian approach is going to be more guarded where the interaction that you're having face to face is not the real interaction. There's lots behind that. And so you need to peel back that and understand that just because someone said something doesn't mean that's actually what they meant. And so that's the hardest way. It's very indirect. So it's kind of like and how normally you deal with this type of issues. So because yeah, so the need to understand the context in which it's being discussed, maybe have other conversations to understand it. Sometimes you have to break through that. In China, we just sometimes had to break through and ignore the culture because to get things done. So one of them was I had a I'll answer this very quickly, but I needed to get something signed. There was a by the local Chinese joint venture to get some parts ordered or something like that. And I was getting stonewalled a little bit. They weren't signing it. And so I had to go research what who's the person who's the next person that has to put a stamp, a chop on it, you know, is going to go through their process. And I found that person I was just getting so tired of the stonewalling. So I went and you know, the Chinese have a very open office. And so I went into the room where that person was or probably 50 people in there. And I sat at the chair next to her desk. And I said to her in Mandarin, I'm going to sit here until you put the stamp on there. And I did and it probably took an hour. I just sat there and she finally got tired of me and put the stamp on. So I mean, sometimes that's what I'm saying you have to break through. Understand it. So what can you do again anonymous, but what can you do if for whatever reason, maybe some team members are problematic, your team members do not follow your lead or do not respect that you are the project manager? Yes. Well, that's when it requires a one on one meeting. I mean, you're going to know this. And so you need to talk with them directly. And you know, maybe maybe there's something going on in their lives that you're not aware of that's affecting their behavior. But that's where you don't want to come in very aggressively and say you're not you're not being part of the team. But come in in a more questioning answer. Here's what I'm seeing. Do you see the same thing is and then try to find if there's something else that's causing that? It's like a sort of reality checks, like kind of like to see if we see the things in the same way. Yes. Okay, that's an interesting question. You mentioned that you are now leading agile teams that has been more difficult in any way. Has this been more difficult in any way? And how do you deal with simultaneously leading various teams using different approaches? How do you do that? Well, I'll answer the first question first, which is some of you may or may not be familiar with agile. It's a method of project management within software, especially where there's not the difference between they call it waterfall and agile and waterfall was kind of where I learned project management, where you're doing step by step. It's more for manufacturing. You have an end goal, you have a timeline, whereas agile, it's very loose. And what I found, at least at Whirlpool is we're not we say we're agile, but we're not agile. So it's finding this balance between our corporate leadership that says, you know, I want on this date, this timeline, and true agile, you don't have an end date. You have two weeks sprints, and you're going to try to do what you need to do in the two weeks. And if you're not, you're measuring it. So it can be very dangerous and agile to think that you don't have to meet objectives. And so we try to that, that's where we're trying to balance that. That's actually very interesting. It seems like, see, this is like when let's say manufacturing world meets like software industry seems to be a problem. Yes. And that's where that's exactly where we are. Like it's exactly one of the major issues there. Yes. Balancing the two actually is kind of interesting. So and how do you deal with simultaneously leading various teams using different approaches? Yeah, you can use different approaches. But, you know, I mean, leadership, you can have the basic principles that are the same. But, you know, the team is different. So you tend to adapt to basically, you tend to adapt to them. Okay. In your opinion, which is more important to project manager technical or behavioral competencies as them? Okay. Are you more like a sort of psychologist or like? No, I'm just fine. No, but it's actually true, actually. Behavioral competencies or like technical competencies? Well, you see yourself. I think it's more behavioral, to be honest, because that's what's going to motivate people. Yeah, I agree. And they have to, you know, you need your technical experts. And for you to get credibility from your technical experts, you need to at least know a little bit. One of the things one of my one of my corporate leaders said to me years ago that stuck with me is that your people know what's important to them. What's important to you by the questions you ask. If you ask about things, that's what they know they need to work on or they need to pay attention to. And so that's the behavior of the psychology. But you don't know what questions to ask if you don't have a technical, at least a minimal technical. So you can come in and be totally not knowledgeable. And that's one of the things that I've learned over my career is it's important to reinvent yourself and learn. And so I've gone into many roles where I knew nothing about that area of expertise. And so anybody can do that, you just need to be willing to learn. Tiago asked three questions. Sorry, Tiago, it's one of my scenes. Actually, I'm going to actually pick one actually actually very interesting. This one actually suppose the project has gone off the tray of the rails. So what steps would you take to get it back on track? What did you do in the past in your experience? So if something happened like this, it can happen. I mean, right? Kind of like it does happen. It does happen. Yeah. And off the rails means it's really just you're going nowhere. So usually you need some intervention then probably. And so I'm thinking of several things. One is I think if you realize that it is, it is really not going, you need to bring in help. You need to bring in intervention. So whether it means you need to find out what that is. And so probably means bringing the team back together and saying admitting, look, it's not going how we expect. Where's the help that we need? And then so that's where an intervention you might need a leader to come in, but understand where the gaps are. We might need to reassess the objectives. And that means going to leadership and saying we're off the rails. We need time here to reassess and we'll come back to you. You can't come and say, this is not working, but you need to come back with, you can even get some usually some forgiveness, but they'll get some time by saying, we need to we need to put a halt. We need to assess and we need this amount of time. And then you need to go take that and kind of reassess and then come back and say, here's our revised proposal. And you might need to ask for resources to do that. Extra resources normally, yeah. Seems a lot of people dealing with issues in teams here. How do you do with people over stepping the responsibility or challenging authority and leadership? Well, did you have that? I haven't had a ton of experience in that, but what I think of is it goes back to my meeting individually. It's not good to call somebody out in a meeting. I'm assuming these are things that happen without you being there and that just people are starting to do things. And so I just think it means meeting with those individuals and try to understand it. And in some cases, you may have to remove somebody from your team. And ultimately, you can't be assumed that that, you know, if someone is being that to that level, that's not willing to change. You need to have that conversation. And then eventually, you may have to let the person move on. Let me pick, because yeah, there are too many. How to create mutual respect among elders and perhaps more experienced team members if you are a younger leader project manager? Yeah, probably it's like the situation like you are a young leader and you are more experienced team members or like older team members. Did this happen to you? Yes. So you mentioned before, you were leading all kind of older kind of team members, right? Well, I have, but I mean, either older or perhaps maybe to say more experienced. You know, it's not about age necessarily or even about experience. If you you can rely on those people as experts and I would say go to them and say, I really need you in this area and I'm going to rely on you. If they're overstepping, that's a different thing. But I mean, I don't see that as a problem at all. In fact, I would welcome, as a young project leader where you put into a role, I would really love to have experts who've been around a long time. And as long as they know that you respect them and their knowledge, they're going to get behind you. So you just need to let them know that. And that goes back to meeting with each, you know, with individuals to let them know that. And anyway. Oh, that's interesting. How do you stay motivated? That's an interesting question. Actually, how do you stay motivated and motivate others if your vision and beliefs differ from that of the company? Did that happen to you in Willpool? Stay motivated and motivate others. If your vision at some point in some sense of belief starts to differ, you know, like you often this in the kind of management literature, like leaders and so on, you know, this company used to kind of, I used to kind of buy into those values now is changed because of whatever reason, you know, like the stock markets, the usual stuff and some, but now our values are changed and so on. So how do you keep you stay motivated? Actually, if you kind of and keep motivating others, you know, like if you if you see a misalignment between what were the, you know, values? I can say that at least once maybe more than once in my career, I've had a I actually had a supervisor who I respected, but later when I discovered things about the values of that person and it came down to was not so much company values, but more people values. We're not meeting up with my own like this wasn't the person I thought they were. You know, I honestly had a hard time working for that person and knew it was probably time to move to a different role. And so that's what I did. I was given the opportunity. So it wasn't really that difficult for me, but what I would give advice to is is that, you know, if you can't respect the leader that you're working for or the organization that you're working for, then you probably shouldn't stay there is what I would say because that's not a good fit and it will be demotivating. I've been fortunate to be working for a company with Whirlpool that's had excellent values. It's more of, you know, do the leaders I work with have those same values that the company has stated? Sometimes they don't always match up. Kind of a lucky marriage. So you talk about Joel is asking you talk about tools for tracking who makes and contributes to and moderate action risks, issues, decision accomplishments. Yeah, so interviews to there are there are companies that actually make project management systems that that you can buy. But frankly, we use Google at Whirlpool. And so I've created my own action register that you can do on easily on a spreadsheet. And it's quite simple to do with the technology that we have, where you would you can do drop down menu where you have basically create your columns of action. You know, what type of issue is it an action that has to be done? Is it an issue? Is it a decision that has to be made? So you you give it a choice there, then you might then you have other columns that sort of define it such as what is the issue I even include an item number so that you can refer back to it. And then you have a you have the issue what is the issue very like just a few words what it is. And then we actually then put tracking in so who's accountable for it? When was it when was this issue initiated? So you can say, Hey, this is like two months old, we got to deal with it. And then you would have basically by date. So we have meeting dates. And then each date I go through and I update each one like where are we? Who's who's accountable? What are we doing? And so we can keep track of them over time. This can just be create your own format in a Google Sheet quite easily and simply. And then when it's completed, you can have a column for the status, you know, is it did it just open? Is it in process? Is it on hold or is it completed? And so you just create that spreadsheet. What normally did you take into consideration to set a milestone? These are key points in a project. They're not difficult to see but usually it's maybe a decision point. It might be a financial point where you say, you know, this is a natural place where we're going to decide whether we keep going because the investment is so high. It might be let's say you can divide it up into portions like if you have a particular project that says this is a certain component and we finish that component. That's a milestone. So every project is so different. But you try to find those natural points of transition not too long either. You don't want to make them, you know, six months. It might be weeks or just a couple of months. But I hope that helps. Just a few more, sorry about that. So just like that kind of key income. So thank you for the amazing talk. I have two questions. First, how difficult was to mitigate the cultural and language barrier while working in Asia? And second, is it fair to consider your approach to management and leading as employee empowerment and individual development? Thank you again. Okay. So the first one was around. Well, basically mitigate cultural and language barrier while working in Asia, which are normally kind of tall barriers because of the cultural distance. Yeah. I think, you know, as in many countries, if you're able to learn a little bit about the culture first, it's really important. Even a basic understanding. So take some time to invest in that. So you do understand where they're coming from. You don't have to turn yourself into that culture, but you need to understand where they're coming from to a certain degree. Secondly, it also helps to, I mean, the best thing you can do is learn the language. But that's a tall ask, especially if you're there temporarily. So, you know, in deference to that, learning a few words, the basic things and attempting to do it goes a long way toward the people from that culture accepting. Yeah. And is it fair to consider your approach to management leading as employee empowerment and individual development? Do you do that? Do you empower your kind of? Oh, absolutely. I think empowerment is really important. You know, you have to manage it to a certain degree. And individual development, of course, like. And definitely, I mean, that's one of the joys that I have of when I've supervised people. And that's why I enjoy teaching too, is empowering people and letting them learn and grow and seeing them grow and develop. And that to me is almost more valuable than, you know, achieving a milestone in a project or something like that, is seeing the people develop. As a project manager, how do you deal with fighting, infighting between team members? For example, rivalry between specific teams, departments and so on. Do you have that? You know, a little bit. And I think you have to, as a project manager, you have to accept some conflict. You have to be willing to kind of let things play out to some degree. Now, you have to know when to step in, but you can't be afraid of conflict. You have to kind of let it happen, just, you know, but in a respectful way. Yeah. So that's the key. If it gets disrespectful, you shut it down. But I think, you know, sometimes it's a little uncomfortable where you have, you know, you don't want to step in and try to stop an argument because maybe that's how we're going to get to be the best we are to let that play out. Is brainstorming better to do with large or small groups? Is there any advantage or there's advantage with the one you're talking about? Well, you know, brainstorming, there's many different methods to idea generation. Yeah, it's a question from the students, but yeah. But I think it's probably smaller is better. You're going to get more, people are more willing to share. In larger groups, you can do it, but then what you want to do is break down into small groups and then bring them back together and you'll get those ideas generated. So, you know, if you have a large room of people, you want to have breakouts, you know, and have them each work on things and then report back. And that way, you can get all the key thing is getting everyone to have their ideas shared. How can one have good communication with stakeholders when progressing with the project despite any language culture barriers? So how do you deal with stakeholders' communication? So, I mean, they are quite important, right? Yeah, I mean, generally, you know, as difficult as it is English is generally the language of business globally in most cases. And so usually, if you're working in a global organization and you have to go across language barriers, if you're not a native speaker of English, it's a challenge. And so you have to develop enough of a skill to be able to do that. So I think it's getting, unfortunately, that, you know, with stakeholders, that's about the only way you're going to do it is what's what's the culture and generally what I've seen in global businesses that it happens in the English language primarily. Quite often, they've quite often projects have their goalposts moved sometimes quite often. How do you deal with such changes with the team members, especially if work has been wasted? Yeah, you know, projects are going to have issues and you write the goalposts off and move but not because you want them to. Sometimes, you know, they you have a scope change. I just had a project that I've worked on for 15 months. And the problem is nobody liked the project either. But we're going to do it, you know, is that we're going to do this thing. And it just got put on hold because the scope changed. So no, okay, other things have changed, environment change. So now we're going to do it differently. And we still don't know what it's going to look like. So sorry, the way you deal with it is we just need to be practical and assess, okay, the scope has changed or something has changed. What is how do we deal with it? So to be more practical rather than emotional about it, I guess. Yeah, so your job essentially as a leader, like, I mean, in terms of leadership, what do you do? I mean, you interpret your job as the one who is trying to explain to the others why we change and the scope has changed or give a reason for it. That's what you invest most of your time, like kind of giving an understanding. So in terms of, in terms of leadership, so you think that would or does help actually because indeed is a wasted word. It depends. I mean, right, even if somebody else is going to change and if it is important to make sure everyone is on the same page, what happened? Why is it changing? It's definitely a big part of the leadership. But it's also the other way is that someone comes in and change, it's up to the project leader to make sure everyone knows the impact of that. What is the result of that? Yeah. So a couple of very quick ones. So then I let you go. It's kind of like it's been quite long. So how do you find or assess the right person for your team? How would you, what's in your mind when you select? So like kind of as a more in the end book, but your experience, I want to know from your experience, like so what do you look for? I mean, I'm sitting, I'm coming to sit in your office and I applied for a job and I said, John, I want to work here and so on. So what do you would look for? Well, I'm going to probably know that at least you have a baseline of whatever the technical issue is because otherwise then it's not really going to work. So I would know that ahead of time ideally from a resume or whatever. But then I'm going to assess teamwork, collaboration, a lot of that in the discussions that we have to try to make sure that we don't accomplish things today by ourselves. And so if the person can't work and hasn't experienced or hasn't shown either through the interview or through their experience that they've succeeded working together with other people and collaborated with other people and not sure what it is, how that could work together. But I think also just understanding their motivation. Are they motivated for success? Are they self motivated and just everyone get out of the way? What's their basis of working? What motivates them? And if they are driven towards success, that's great. So it's a combination of things. Yeah, sorry. Just a couple of more amazing hands. Sorry about that. It's just like, I mean, you know what, I'm going to invite you again so we have it like we can split it over the semester. Okay, so when looking for new project members or new employees, what gets a CV resume to the top of the pile for you? These are good for students because they are at the beginning of their careers. So like in some sense actually kind of, it ties up with one of the things I want to ask you if you have a piece of advice for our students liking your kind of very long experience, like a piece of advice for our students, they're starting their career and so on. So how should they kind of write a CV for John? Well, I like to see a lot of action. I like to see it's important to have experience and it doesn't matter if it's work experience in the industry or if it's other type of work experience, if it's volunteer experience. But I like to see what do you articulate as the accomplishments that you've done in a more action based kind of way. I will say I'm very particular, maybe not everybody is, but about the detail. So I don't want to see any mistakes, not one, you know, spelling layout. We say that all the time. We do and it's really hard because you do it yourself and it's hard to avoid mistakes. But that to me is an attention to detail. It says about the person as well. And so you can ask, you can get a lot of help from people to make sure your resume is free. But that's not the only thing. I mean, it's the attention to detail to is, but it's not about the volume either, it's about the quality of what's there. So talking about, you know, our person articulates the achievements, right? So they see that like kind of, okay, that's very interesting. So I think there was Jennifer with one more question, but I can't find the question. She raised the hands. She's hiding. Sorry, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. So Jennifer, yeah. Jennifer, do you want to ask a question? Oh, no, sorry. No. Oh, yes. Okay. Okay. So she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to ask a question. So well, what can I say? I mean, it was brilliant. Thank you so much. I mean, I think you basically definitely broke any records of questions given to a master speaker. So it makes you eligible for another one automatically. So we always talk about the prize. Sure. Well, thank you. I do appreciate very much. This is very enjoyable. And I love doing this kind of thing. So thank you for the invite. And thank you so much for taking your time. I know you're busy and so on. So we'll talk about the next appointment. But no, thank you. Thank you really so much. I think for our students was kind of like an amazing experience. And your talk was absolutely brilliant. Very clear kind of neat and kind of amazing. So absolutely happy. And thank you again. So it's been a great pleasure to have you here. So looking forward to have you again, John. And thank you for accepting the invitation on behalf of the college and the school of business. Thank you. My pleasure as well. Thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye. Bye. Have a good evening. Well, good afternoon for you. I will. You have a good evening. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thank you.