Going behind successes and failures of projects

Did you ever finish a project with arms high, celebration, and nice words from your boss? I guess you did, and these are often what we remember.

Yet, did you ever go home after a days work asking yourself “What is happening to the current project or task?” Not really moving, not delivering as anticipated, and heading for something uncertain or even towards a direct failure?

In-between these two extremes there are tasks and projects, which get done but you still feel something could have been done better. Faster. More efficient. Perhaps others didn’t notice, but when looking in the mirror, the question has occurred at least to yourself…

Finding the blind spots

Looking across a large number of projects in multinational companies - both my own and others - across various functions, I started wondering.

At first, finding the real root-cause to projects that were less than 100% successful revealed a core of only 4 elements.

The reason for failure could be condensed down to just one or perhaps two of the 4 elements, all related to objectives (WHAT to achieve) and execution (HOW to do it).

This insight was very useful, yet my curiosity also got me to test the 4 elements on the successful projects: Would I see a proper balance between the 4 elements on the projects, which ended up as being highly successful?

And it proved right!

Leadership: Lesson One

The 4 elements represent the core of leadership, the fundamental considerations relevant for any leader, no matter the industry or functional area of responsibility.

And they remain fundamental, no matter the scale of your challenge. It may serve as the back-bone considerations for preparing large scale roll-outs and execution of corporate projects as well as managing tasks and projects on a departmental scale.

Curious for more:

The book Leadership: Lesson One is available as paperback and e-book from the bookstore.

Others ways of getting started with these fundamentals of Leadership is here below: