191. The Human Element in Project Management with Clint Padgett

💭 Ever wondered how to manage high-stakes projects like the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups successfully?

Learn from Clint Padgett, President and CEO of Project Success Inc., as he shares his journey from a challenging entrepreneurial background and experiences in the Navy to becoming a top leader in project management. Discover how his academic pursuit at Georgia Tech and a transformative project at Coca-Cola led him to develop the Project Success Method, significantly improving project outcomes on a global scale.

Clint offers invaluable insights on balancing logic, math, and people skills in project management, emphasizing the importance of inspiring teams while maintaining rigorous coordination. We dive into the phases that teams experience, from initial uninformed optimism to rising concern as deadlines approach, and how to navigate them effectively. Hear Clint’s firsthand accounts from working on the Olympic Games, shedding light on the necessity of thorough planning and efficient team collaboration for successful outcomes.

Unlock strategies to build accountability and foster team commitment through personal connections and face-to-face interactions. Clint discusses the importance of creating environments where team members feel safe to communicate challenges and ensuring flexible and agile project management. This episode is packed with practical advice on balancing workloads, fostering team growth, and maintaining morale, all crucial for ensuring project success through human connection and regular updates. Don’t miss this deep dive into the world of effective project management with Clint Padgett.

🌐 Connect with Clint:
• Website: http://www.projectsuccess.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clintpadgett/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clint.padgett/
• Project Success IG: https://www.instagram.com/projectsuccess_inc/

📚 You can purchase Clint's books at Amazon:
• How Teams Triumph: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946633305/
• The Project Success Method: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYLJLG1K/

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Chapters

• 0:02 Balancing Leadership and Project Management
• 5:36 Balancing People, Process, and Technology
• 13:44 Building Accountability Through Collaboration
• 15:14 [Ad] Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
• 16:02 (Cont.) Building Accountability Through Collaboration
• 20:55 Fostering Team Commitment and Communication
• 26:15 [Ad] Virtual Rockstar
• 27:06 (Cont.) Fostering Team Commitment and Communication
• 30:30 Building Team Support and Capacity
• 36:03 Adapting and Managing Project Flexibility
• 44:37 Improving Project Success and Human Connection

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

No matter how well a project is managed, nothing happens without inspired and motivated people. But if we focus purely on people, and we have no effective project management, we have chaos in today's episode of The Leadership Project, we are joined by Clint Padgett, the owner of The Project Success Method. Clint specializes in complex project management and has worked on multiple Olympics stemming back from Atlanta in 1996 we explore how we balance people process and technology for optimum project success. Enjoy the show. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Clint Padgett. Clint is the president and CEO of project success Inc, and is the author of two books, The Project Success Method and his latest book, How Teams Triumph managing by commitment. And this brings up a interesting dichotomy for me at the leadership project, this balance between leadership, where we want to inspire people into meaningful action because they want to do things and to give them the empowerment to manage their own decisions and to get on with things, and this balance with project management, where we've also got a coordinated team towards a common goal. We've got critical path to manage. We've got tasks and milestones that need to be met, so both can live together, but it is a balancing act, and that's what we're going to explore today with Clint, and there'll probably be some other things that we unpack along the way. So Clint, without any further ado, I'd love it if you would introduce yourself. I'd love to know a little bit about your background and what inspired you to go into this world of project success and to develop The Project Success Method.

Clint Padgett: 1:57

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate that I grew up in in the US, in the south of the US. My dad was a serial entrepreneur. So what that really means he started and failed at a lot of different businesses. I love my dad, but it was interesting growing up that way, for sure. So I thought I would just punch a clock my whole life, and that was, you know, because I wanted the stable paycheck and not what we lived like when I was a kid, where it was all up and down to based on how the business was going. And right out of high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do in my life, so I joined the Navy, spent six years in the Navy, got out of the Navy, went to work in the shipyard. And there's probably no greater motivation to go to college in the world than to work in a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia in December and January, which is exactly what I was doing. You know, you're walking into the shipyard, which is on the water. Of course, the wind is coming off the water, slicing right through you. I'm laying in the bilge of these boats, running cables, because I was electricians made at the time, which is an electrical person. And I remember this when I discovered my first law of thermodynamics, which is I was not a big enough heat sink, and all the heat was radiating out of my body into the hull of the ship sit into the water. So after two months, I thought, you know, maybe college is a pretty good idea. So I was lucky enough to get accepted to Georgia Tech, where I went and got an electrical engineering degree. From Georgia Tech, my first job post college, walked across the street to Coca Cola. So if you ever been to Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia Tech's on one corner, or more than one corner nowadays, and the Coca Cola is on the opposite corner. So I spent about six years at Coke in the engineering group in coal drain technology, where we developed new drink equipment. In 1994 the city of Atlanta got awarded the 96 Olympic Games. That seemed like a really interesting project that I really wanted to work on. Wasn't going to be able to do that as an electrical engineer at Coke. So what I did was I left the company on a Friday, went back to work on a Monday for a company called project success, and I got to work on the Olympic Project. And then 30 years later, I'm still doing all the Olympic projects for Coca Cola. I work on all the FIFA World Cups, summer, winter Olympic Games, and also all the Euros anytime they have a major worldwide sporting event. I'm one of the people they call in to help plan those efforts. So rather circuitous route of how I got here, and ironically, along the way, even though I did not want to be an entrepreneur, the opportunity did come up about 20 years ago to buy the company that I was working for, and I took that opportunity and was able to buy it from the retiring owner. So I've been here 30 years at the company, two thirds, that is the owner. 1/3 was just working my way up the food, you know, food chain, so to speak.

Mick Spiers: 4:28

Yeah. Well done, Clinton, congrats on your success. There's a side observation I'll make there about the life of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are very purpose driven and and they're very focused on what they want to achieve. There's always a family behind that. And for a entrepreneur to be successful, it's a supportive family, but it's also the roller coaster of the entrepreneur, the family's feeling it as well. Yeah, right. So really interesting observation there. Now tell me like on projects and projects. Successive so first of all, this concept around the Olympic Games, that's pretty much the definition of a project that has an immovable deadline, right? So it's going to be a good reference point for some of the conversation that we have today. What specifically about project management inspired you? Or was it that you were falling in love with the Olympic movement, or was it project management that caught your attention?

Clint Padgett: 5:24

So it ended up being a perfect storm. Mick, what happened was, as a young engineer at Coca Cola, we had a project that went really, really badly, and I write about this in my second book, but it was called the magican project, and I won't go through all the gory details, but basically, it was a failed project, and we said, we have to get better at this. And so we brought in this company called project success, and I took a course called The Project Success Method, which is the topic of my first book, actually from the original owners who came up with the process. We use it. We saw great benefits from it. So I love the process. I really I love doing it really appealed to me as an engineer, the logic based side kicked in, because if you, if you follow critical path method, you know, there's logic involved, and there's math involved, which I've always loved math. And then the other part that I like, though, is the more I got into it was the people side. And one of the strong benefits, I would say, that I got, so there's certainly negatives, I kind of hit on them as you know, you know, paycheck to paycheck when your dad's a certain entrepreneur, but on the positive side, you're forced to work with people. And so that made me maybe I already had it, I don't know, but help develop some people skills, and I got to get along with people and really be able to talk to anybody about anything at any time, which is good in project work. So that was part of the perfect storm. And the other part was I really wanted to try to work on the Olympic Games. When I was at Georgia Tech as a student, I had also worked on the Georgia Tech Olympic Committee, which was the committee that would go out and would greet the people when they would come to Atlanta, as we were trying to win the bid, we'd be out there with balloons and clapping and, you know, really trying to make the superstars feel welcome when they came to visit the city and and hoping to get the game. So it all kind of came full circle. For me, was a perfect storm.

Mick Spiers: 7:07

Yeah, I love it all right. Well done. And it's good when you can have that alignment, something that keeps you motivated professionally, and then the end goal is something that you can be proud of. And those moments of, oh, wow, we did that. We did that, and on this case, we did that on the world stage, and we well, Atlanta was already on the map, but let's say, really, brought Atlanta into the homes of millions or billions of people around the world. And, yeah, yeah, great, great success. And I'm sure you must have been very proud. So let's talk about this. Get into this dichotomy. You already brought up two words that are interesting, people and process. And I could add technology in there as well, because we use tools, etc. So people process and technology, the famous trifecta, and the triangle of that. So let me set the scene for a second Clint, and then let's see where we go from there. So in a project management world, let's say a very purest project management world where I sit down with Microsoft Project or p6 or whatever, and I come up with the perfect project. Nothing happens. Because without people, the tasks don't get done. Nothing achieves. So you can have a perfect project on paper and no action. And then equally, at the other side, if you just go, I just need people, and you've got no coordination. You'll just have people running in all kinds of direction, and you'll have chaos and a big mess. You might have little pockets of success here or there, but it won't be coordinated in a common direction. So how do we balance this world of pure perfection, project management on paper, versus bringing it to life with people. And this balance between people having the autonomy to do things their way and off they go. They go in all kinds of directions.

Clint Padgett: 8:52

So I have a great analogy for that. Have something we call shifting the worry curve, which I think will help describe the two options we have. Then, one is we have a project where we're working at a company. Let's say it's Acme Corporation. And here at Acme Corporation, we have no formal planning process. Business Unit Vice President calls a meeting and says, here's the project. You guys all know your jobs. Go make it happen. Call me there's a problem. So you walk into the kickoff meeting, you already have five projects on your plate, right? You're already doing five things, and they're in various stages of completion. Some are just starting, some are in the middle, and hopefully some will be closing out soon, and then 30 minutes later, you walk out having been assigned to project number six. There's no plan. There's no plan to get a plan. You know two things. You know, you're on the team, and you've got a, let's say you've got six months or a year to get it done. That's what you know. And what happens is when the when I walk out of that kickoff meeting, if I'm the average team member, my level of worry is probably pretty low about this project, because I'm more worried about the other five project, which I have a lot of knowledge of, right? So we call this first phase, uninformed optimism. I don't know anything about the project other than that. I'm on the team, and I've got I'm pretty smart guy. I'm pretty sure I can get it done, but I got five other projects having I've been getting beat up about for quite some time that I need to worry about, and I'm going to get to this. I'm confident in my abilities. I'm confident that I'll be able to get it done. I'm in the uninformed optimism stage, you know, I don't know enough to be scared yet. And then about halfway through the project, my level of worry begins to rise about this project. And while I was pretty sure I get everything done in the year, I'm not as certain I can get it done in only six months. And that's all I've got left yet. You know, this is where you see your team members walking down the hallway, and you hope they don't bring up the project, and if they do bring up the project, you hope they also haven't worked on it, because, you know you haven't worked on it. And let's be honest, we know it's it's okay if I'm late, as long as somebody else is more late. That's what I'm really hoping. Is somebody else more late than I am, right? So we call this phase vague concern. My sense of foreboding is rising. My stomach tells me I'm in trouble. My spidey sense is tingling, saying something is wrong, but I don't have a plan to measure it again, so I can't prove that I'm late. I just got this bad feeling that I'm late. And then, of course, moving to the third and final phase of the project, which is panic. And I like the word you used earlier, chaos. You know, projects are chaotic, and I often joke that the subtitle of project managers should be called the Theory of chaos, because all you're trying to do in project work is you're trying to wrangle the chaos into something you can actually work with and semi control to get that across the finish line. But in the panic phase, we find that three things happen. Costs, of course, rise, because the only way to get things done is to throw money at the problem. And usually when you find the problem, it's late in the game, the only option you have left is to do stupid things, which I've seen done, like air freight, concrete block to a construction site, incredibly expensive, but less than the cost, the opportunity cost, of not opening the hotel on time. Now, what would have been better is to truck ship and still open the hotel on time. But you do stupid things when you get caught in the panic phase. Also quality suffers in the panty phase. All these great ideas you had about full color videos, okay, training before the rollout of the launch, that all goes out the window and suddenly a four you know, here's a black and white photocopy, and just read this and let me know there's any questions, or we'll do a training after the fact. So your quality suffers. And not only is the project expensive financially, but it does. It's also expensive emotionally, because in the panic phase of the project, you lose really talented people. So that's an example of process, where you're letting process drive things. You're not really focusing on the people side. What we try to do is take the opposite approach, and we want to get everybody you want to bring them all together in a room for two or three days and plan the project out in a collaborative way. Because what I need to do is I need to pull people out of their silos and force them to have what you and are having right now, which is a conversation, you know, I'm a big fan of conversation communication is could be one sided, and I want a conversation which is a dialog where we can ask follow up questions and really understand what the intent of the project is, or what the intent of your tasks are, etc. So now what we do is bring everybody together in a collaborative way. In just two or three days, we can actually plan the project out. I understand you're part of the project, and I can see how if I'm late, it's going to impact you, vice versa. I can see where the we fit in the overall span of things. I can see that I'm in the first month of the project. I might think there's no way that if I'm late by a few days, it could possibly impact the end of the project a year from now, but once I do the plan and I'm part of it, I see how it's all fit together. Go, oh, wait a minute. So Joe over here, he could be a day late. Doesn't matter, because he's not on the critical path, but I am. And if I'm late, even though it's a year from now, we're going to be late. And so now what you're doing is you're bringing people into the mix, or you still have your process, but now you're bringing people in and together. That's how you're going to be successful in the project. Work is by focusing on both process and people.

Mick Spiers: 13:54

Yeah, I love it. Clint say, what I'm hearing here is, if we don't go through a process like that, that we have this, these phases. And I like the way that you describe them, the uninformed optimism, then the vague concern, through to the panic. And yes, that's a very regular thing. What I loved about you bringing people together is then that's going to drive by and people feel invested at that point. You're also going to have the opportunity there, where you're going to have the collection of very bright people in the room, and the project manager doesn't have all the answers. They don't know the best way to do this project, but if they ask the right questions, and everyone's focused on what the goal is, you can share ideas together. And then there's the understanding of the connection between each other. So whether it's the critical path element or even just critical dependencies, that here I am working on this task, but I now know that Joe down the corridor is waiting for me to finish that task, because he can't even do his task until I'm done so critical path and critical dependence. Piece at that point. So tell me more about that process and the ideation process. So when you're bringing people together, how do you make sure that we're holding space for the best ideas on how to execute the project coming into the plan?

Clint Padgett: 15:53

So that's actually one of the powerful things about bringing people together as well, is I kind of mentioned this earlier. I need to turn you, let's say, Mick, you and I have worked together for five years, but you're in Tasmania and I'm in Atlanta, right? So we're not we're never going to walk down the hallway and see each other. And I've just, I know you as Mick, at Acme Company. You know, Acme corporation.com, and I know that when I do my task, I email it to you, and you do some magic, and the company eventually makes money, and everybody's happy, but you're just one of six projects, and I'm working on at any given time. And this week, it's Friday afternoon. I was supposed to get my tasks done today for you, it's Friday afternoon, at six o'clock. I've already put in 60 hours this week. You know, I'm tired. It's not like I've been sitting around doing nothing. I did my part. It's just I ran out of time, and I don't really feel that bad because I put in 20 hours extra this week. It's not my fault. My boss gave me more project work than I could possibly do. And so I just, you know, I don't do your task. And then Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week, I finally get a chance to finish this and a teen and say, Hey, BEC, sorry it's late. Hope you're doing well, mate, and that's it. And then I just think everything's great because the project eventually gets crosses the finish line, and the company makes money, and everybody's happy. But then when we come together and we're in a room, I get to meet you on a regular I get to see you at lunch or on a coffee break or over a breakfast, and I get to learn a little bit about you. And I learned maybe you have a kid and my son's he's saying his name is my son, and your kid plays softball or baseball, my kid plays soccer, and we just we start to learn more about each other. And what I'm really doing is I'm changing you from an email address that I really have no accountability to into a living, breathing human being to which I now begin to feel accountable. I'm going to hold myself accountable. And so over a launcher, we were chatting, we're getting to each other. We go back into the room, and we're looking at the critical path. And I know we really haven't really defined what that is. But basically, to make it easy, the critical path is a set of activities in your project that if they're late, you're going to miss your deadline. That's really what they are. They're connected series of activities. But and look at it and go, Wait a minute. Mick, this says that I'm on the critical path, and that can't be right, because if that was true when I'm late, you would be late. But I know for a fact on that last project, I was about two or three days late, and we still finished the project on time. And you say, well, Clint, you're right. You were late. I remember vividly it was three days because I had to work two weekends to make up for your lateness. And I know that Clint is a five letter word, but in my household, for two weekends in a row, you were a four letter word because I had to miss two big events in my kid's life. I missed this major baseball tournament and my daughter's recital because I had to work those two weekends to make up for your lateness. Well, I start feeling bad because, I mean, look, I got two kids. I would hate for you to have made me miss a big event in my kid's life. So when I go back to Atlanta and you go back to Tasmania, you're still Mick at Acme corporations.com but you're Mick that I don't want to let down. So now what I've done through this, having this meeting, is I've, I've made you a living being, a human being for which I feel accountable now, and nobody can put that on me. You know, we kind of talked around early, but as a project manager, most of us today work in a matrix organization, which means I don't own the people on my team. I can't make anybody do anything. We're networked, you know, they don't report to me. They report to their their, you know, direct supervisor who gives them pay raises and reviews. And yet, somehow I've got to take this project for which I control nobody, and get it across the finish line. On these what I feel like are arbitrarily too short, you know, deadlines. And how do I do that? Well, I do that by having people hold themselves accountable. And we do that by forming connections, and we do that through collaboration. And so the reason we like to bring people together is we find, even in as short as two or three days together in a face to face environment, we can do a two year project remotely, as long as we have those first two or three days together to really form those connection points.

Mick Spiers: 19:38

Yeah, I love that. And you're gonna you're gonna find those connection points is a good word, and to know and like each other and build a little trust with each other as well, but then to know that when I am late, it's not just impacting a Gantt chart and a bit of software, it's impacting a real human being who's got a life and a family that wants to spend time with them. It's really good. And what you said was really interesting is that if I'm late frequently, and I never feel the impact of that, there's no incentive for me to do better next time.

Clint Padgett: 20:10

Yeah, I don't even know. I don't even know the negative impact I'm having. All I know is I finish it and it seemed to be okay in the end. I didn't know that that poor Mick had to work two weekends in a row. I didn't see that. So that's another reason we like the collaboration piece, and we also follow that up with bi weekly meetings, you know, at least once a week, if not every two weeks, we have our update meetings where we talk about what actually did happen as opposed to what was supposed to happen, and then we find out that Clint was late. What can we do? So. Doesn't have to work two weekends or go to make up for this lateness. Is there somebody after Mick that can we outsource that task and have it done faster? So together again, in a collaborative way, we work together as a team to really get the project done on time. That's why I say it's How Teams Triumph. Is managing by commitment. It's because and I'm not managing you by commitment. You're committing to me to get stuff done. You're committing you're committing, you're holding yourself accountable, and you're committing to your teammates, and you're they're going to hold each other accountable, plus themselves.

Mick Spiers: 21:06

Yeah, this word commitment, and where you going with it, the people element of commitment like so when i I'll be really open with you here. Clint, when I look at your title, your book, How Teams Triumph managing gut by commitment. It instantly did capture my attention, but my brain went to commitment to the cause, commitment to the project, commitment to the business. But what you're saying is commitment to each other, that you're in this together, and I'm committing to you, Clint, that I'm going to get this to you by Thursday, two o'clock, so you can do your thing by Friday, five o'clock and then go fly fishing on the weekend with your kids or whatever you do, whatever your passion is, baseball, whatever. So it's the commitment to each other, Yeah.

Clint Padgett: 21:47

Yes, it's really important the people side of things. You know, we were joking earlier, when you're first starting off the call, and you did something with your hands. Little balloons came up, and people often asked me, well, you worried about AI taking over your job, and not as long as Billy Bob and Sue are doing the work. I don't think AI can do that, because it's about commitment and holding yourselves accountable. And I just don't think the computer can do that. I think that's people, and there's a connection point that's, I think, really critical to getting work done.

Mick Spiers: 22:15

Yeah, it's really good. Clint. Now, one of the other interesting things you brought up along the way is in most organizations, not every. In most organizations, there's also this portfolio effect that you talk about. So I might be on a team with you, but I might be on three other projects where I'm on three other teams. There's a management element of that, of how do we do resource allocations and balancing workload, etc, etc, but then there's a human element of that, because then I might be in a situation where I'm not wanting to let you down, Clint, but I'm also got two other projects that are waiting for me to do something by the end of the week. How do we balance the fact that I'm not just committing to you a human being, I'm committing to other human beings on other teams that I'm on.

Clint Padgett: 23:03

That's a great, great point, and I think this is where the process can come back in and help. So for those of us who don't know about traditional project management, critical path method is, I was saying the critical path is a set of activities in your project that have to be done as planned, time wise, or the project will be late. And what we found in our 40 plus years of doing this is about 10% of the activities in a project, roughly, will be on the critical path. What that really means is that 90% of them can be late by a day a week. We don't know. I mean, we do know in the software, but they could. They don't have to be done perfectly as planned. They there's some there's some flexibility in that, right? If you use a Microsoft Project, it's called slack. If using p6 that is called float. But there's some flexibility in getting that stuff done. So this is where the process comes in. So now what happens is, I can give Mick a list of all of the tasks across all four projects, the three that you're working on, plus mine, right? And you can any given slice of time. You can say, these are all the things on my plate. And then we can look at that flexibility and say, Well, look, there's 33 things to be done this week, but 25 of them can be pushed to next week or even longer. Here are the eight though that we really, that really need your attention across all of them. And then what we can do is say, although if you can only do five of those, I need to solve the problem for three now. And how can I do that? Another thing is the process comes back in and we're gonna because you did commit to getting something done, but then maybe one of those other free projects blew up, or the boss comes in and says, Hey, we got this customer issue, super critical. You need to go focus on solving this customer issue, which means your project work is going to start to slip. So I am going to hold you accountable, but we also have to have a ground rule that says you can change your answer later if you get better information. In other words, you committed to get it done by Thursday before your boss pulled you off on this customer issue. Okay, so I'm going to hold your capital to Thursday, and you're going to come in and say, Clint, I can't, I won't get it done by Thursday because I'm actually next week. I'm going to be in Melbourne, and I'm going to be, I'm going to be out of pocket. I won't be able to work on this at all until I get back. Okay, so we'll put that in and we'll say, When can you get it done then? And maybe you're one of those tasks that couldn't be late. So okay, you can't fix it because your boss pulled you off. If there's nobody who can do it for you, then we look at all the people after you in the plan and say, We need help. We need three days. How can we get these three days back? Because there's something that we could do in parallel. Maybe it's not as efficient, but that helps solve the problem. Can we outsource it? Is there somebody? Else maybe isn't as good as Mick, but he has availability. She has availability. Mick doesn't have so as a collaborative team, yet again, we solve the problem through process and through people.

Mick Spiers: 26:31

So the key thing there is the communication, I'm going to say, almost the safety as well, to stick up my hand and say, Oh, hang on a second. This is not working. And to do so early, because if we don't do so early, you're not going to be able to make those adjustments that you said. It'll be already too late. We've already hit the critical path.

Clint Padgett: 26:47

Perfect, thank you so much for saying that, because that's an excellent that's one of the things I always try to hamper on. Is don't shoot the messenger. I want to create an environment as a project manager, where people are willing to tell me the truth. I know that in a project of any size or complexity, if things aren't going wrong, then I'm being lied to, because things are going to go wrong in a project. That's just how projects work. Right? Things don't go as planned. I have a serious it was a real story. But when I my first child was born, my wife said, When are you coming home? And I said, When is the due date? She says, june 13. I said, I'll be home on June 12. And she goes, that's not how this works. She goes, this is not, this is not a project where you could just come in on the day. I said, Well, that's the due date. And so I came home a week early and the kid was born a day late. So, you know, but you things don't go as planned, right? So that's just how life works. And I wanted to create an environment I like the way you said it, because it's so important. I want to create an environment where people environment where people are willing to tell me the truth, because the earlier that I know the bad news, the more time we have to resolve it, if you wait. Because it's human nature to do this. Human nature to say, I got this problem, but I just think I could fix it, rather than get everybody all upset and and get everything and let me just, let me just see if I can't go fix it on my own, but we know that almost never happens, and so what would have been better is telling me early. So I tell people all the time, I'm willing to take bad news. I'm okay with it. What I'm no not okay with this bad news you've known about for weeks or months that I'm just finding out about today, because that is exactly how and this is a real project as well. We had to air freight concrete block to a construction site because somebody thought they were going to fix the problem, rather than saying, early on, I got a problem. Here's what it is. But to that person's credit, maybe their whole history of project work, when they did it in the past, they just got pummeled and they got blown out of the water, and their boss was told this guy is not doing his job. Well, you know what? Then I'm gonna try to fix it without letting anybody know. So we have to create that environment where people feel safe, that they can tell the truth and we don't just beat them up. Now, if the same person is always going to be bad news, and that's maybe I got to pull them aside and say, Hey, let's but maybe you got some rough spots here we need to solve. But in general, I want to create the environment people are willing to tell me the truth.

Mick Spiers: 28:56

Yeah. Yeah. Really good. So interesting one there and and that would be around this concept that sometimes in the culture, people feel like, they feel like and coming back to their emotions again, that seeking up their hand and asking for help is a sign of weakness, whereas it's actually for us, it's a sign of strength. It's a sign of strength. For them to say, hey, there's something wrong here. I need help. It should be encouraged, not not the opposite. If they're always dropping the ball, there might be a performance issue that needs to be addressed, but generally, it should be encouraged, not discouraged. Want to go to another phenomena that often happens in these organizations. Clint around this word commitment. I want to go to a potential negative here is you end up with that someone that gets that personal commitment they don't want to let anyone down, and you turn around and you find that they're working 16 hour days, which is not healthy for anyone. It's not even good for their performance, because if they're working those kind of hours, they're actually going to become less productive, not more productive. They think they're being productive because they're putting in the hours, but in reality, they're progressively slowing down, and they're also the quality of their work is suffering. How do we also make sure that when they do commit to each other, that they're also committing to look after each other and look out for each other?

Clint Padgett: 30:15

So it falls on two different groups. One, of course, is the project manager for that particular project, but they're not going to have the visibility necessarily into all the different work that's going on. They're only going to see their their one project, or maybe their two projects this person is involved with. So what we can see that is, if that person has traditionally been a rock star and been pretty, pretty good about getting their work done on time, but then they start to slip. And one or two not a big deal. It's life. But if it happens more and more often, that's where you got to pull them aside and say, Hey, Joanne, you know, normally you got you're really rock solid on your deadlines. And so you know what? What's happening here? You got too much on your plate. You really got to start digging into it. But that's only if you can see your piece of it. This is also where the team comes in, because maybe two or three people are also on those other five projects with Joanne, and somebody should be raising the flag saying, Hey, she has way more on her plate she could possibly do. But you'll see this in the meetings. And this is really helpful when you do have the empathy, and you can actually see if you're able to read people the same person who at the beginning of the project would. Super energetic and go, go, go, and then all of a sudden they don't come to maybe miss a couple of meetings, or you could read it on their face, they're distracted, or they're frustrated, or they just look tired. And that's when you got to have a side conversation and say, hey, what can I help you with? Because that's really the job with the project manager, isn't he or she's not doing physical work. They're there to support the team and make sure the team has what they need to be successful. And part of that is how you feeling, how you doing, and maybe it's just having conversations that random conference, maybe, maybe the Tuesday I pick a different person that I talk to offline outside of the meeting. Go, hey, just give me five minutes. I know you're super busy, but I just wanted to check in with you. Hey, what's going on? How's your son's this? Your daughter's that, or what's going on, and just chat with them, and you can should be able to be able to pick up on if they really are overwhelmed or not.

Mick Spiers: 32:07

Yeah. Well done, Clint. Now, one of the things that I love about doing the show, in fact, it's probably the number one thing I love about doing the show, is I feel very blessed that I get to have a front seat audience with a expert in the field, and get to ask questions that have plagued in my mind for a while. So I'm going to ask one about this. You mentioned before about the superstar, and we've got this person that is the best at topic X might be some kind of data structure or architecture, or they're brilliant. They're absolutely brilliant, and they become the go to person that every single project manager wants allocated on their project, and whenever a tricky task comes up, they're always the person that gets it. But what I've always been struggling with that concept, although it achieves results, is it then limits the capacity of the business if the same person does the same task every single time and becomes the go to person. It's robbing other people of the opportunity to learn and grow and to also build that skill and may become the future superstar of that task. How do we balance with project managers who just want to get their project done and want to come in under budget and deliver to their customers, delight and deliver on time. There might be this element that we need to invest in our people and to give that task that the superstar would have taken 1000 hours to do, but they say more person with their L plates on, or, I don't know if that translates into the US, but learner plate, the more junior person that's still developing that might take them 1600 hours to do, but it's an investment in the future of the business. How do we balance that?

Clint Padgett: 33:48

So as a project manager, selfishly, of course, I want the superstar right, because I know they're going to do it well, they're going to do it right, even under pressure. They're going to deliver. So of course I want that. But if I put my business hat on, and say, what's better for the organization, not just my one project, but the organization as a whole, that needs to be successful if I'm going to have a continued deployment, and we're going to do well in the universe, right? So then what happens is, it actually does help, because as a project manager, if I go to if I go to sue, and say, Sue, how long will this take you? And she goes, Well, it's probably 40 hours to get that done. Then I say, Okay, well, this is not your only test, though, right? So How available are you? She goes, I'm available about 25% so I can give you two hours a day of my availability. It's all I got for you on this project. So you take it and you divide her 40 hours required by her two hours available, and her duration is, say, 20 days, right? But there's actually maybe the junior person will deliver faster because they're more available. So you go to Fred and you say, hey, Fred, I know you've never done this before, but what do you think it would take you? And Fred says, I don't know if Sue said, 40, give me 80, double it. Okay. Well, How available are you? He says, If I'm brand new, I can give you all my time, so eight hours a day of availability, it means he can get it done in 10 days rather than 20 days. So So selfishly, it's actually better for me, because a junior person has more availability. And what I maybe do as I is, I say, Okay, well, Fred, you're going to do it, but see, what I need you to do is maybe every week just check in with him, just to make sure that he's on track doing what he's doing, and he's going to and that will take some things off your plate, and they'll put more on French plate. So it kind of leverage or balances out the workload. You have to think about it in advance.

Mick Spiers: 35:29

Yeah, nice mindset. Clint, okay, we touched on flexibility and agility a little bit before as well, and I'm going to completely butcher this quote. But you know, strategy only lasts an hour in the heat of battle is it's roughly that. I can't remember it exactly, but you said it yourself. There's no such thing as a perfect project. There's all kinds of things can happen. Circumstances change. There might even be scope changes from the client, or all kinds of things that happen. So how do we when the scheduler on the project might want to have this pristine p6 or project, etc, and, you know, imagine that everything goes perfectly every day, but we know it just doesn't happen. So how do we cope with flexibility and agility, with the team that started off with a good. Plan, but the plan didn't last more than a week without having to chop and change a little.

Clint Padgett: 36:24

That's actually one of the things we have to say going in is, Listen, I'm asking you to predict the future, and you don't have perfect knowledge. Nobody does. I'm asking you to give me a duration for a task that's nine months into the future, and you want to actually know how long it's going to take until you figure out what's happening in the next two months, because that's going to drive the way you attack what happens in Task nine months from now. So there has to we know there's variability. Anybody who thinks you're putting together the plan that's perfect is is not realistic. So we know that the plan we come up with in day one is a good plan. It's the best thing we it's our best guess today for a future, complicated set of activities to deliver something a year from now. What that means is that we have to come back every so often, and we're going to say it's either every week or every other week. I wouldn't go any more than every other week. That's at least every two weeks, if not every week. And we need to make the plan accurate again. So we you said it was going to take you five days, but did you finish it? No, you got pulled up on a customer issue. Okay, so when will you be done? Or what do we know today that we didn't know a month ago when we first planned this project? What have you learned? Seen a situation where it was just almost like a check mark? We had to get this test run. We'd never not passed this test, but this time, we didn't pass that test. We had not planned for that. So you okay, we didn't plan for that. We failed the test. What new steps do we need to add to resolve this issue? And we we make these modifications based on what's actually happening versus what's planned. New knowledge that we've gained since we last met something we didn't see coming, like maybe the factory burned to the ground. Or, you know, all the real life stuff that happens. Joanne got sick and was out for a period of time. We didn't expect that to happen. Or, who knows, there's all these life life happens, right? And so we have to make those corrective actions in the plan of what's really happening. And then we let the software do what it's good at, which is do all the math and say, When are we going to be done? And the software will tell you very quickly in seconds, that as a result of all the changes you just made, we're now going to be a month late. And these are the set of activities making us late. And then again, we look at the team and go, guys and gals, how are we going to fix we need a month. Here are the 35 activities that we need to get a month out of. What are we going to do? And anybody that's on that set of activities, their decisions can help us solve that problem. So to me, it's about going away with the mindset that I don't have to be perfect, because I can make changes later. I've got time to do that, and knowing that I'm going to give you my best guess today for something that's I don't have perfect knowledge of, but then we have to update the plan on a regular basis, make the corrective action. And as a result of that, I can just promise you, anybody who's doing this for the first time know that your schedule will slip, will slip, it'll be late after every update, I've been doing this for a super long time, and after every update, it's gonna, it's gonna be late, because something will have delayed long enough that it, it pushed the deadline out, or the project out. That's okay. That's again, that's just life. And we as a team, as a collective group, we make decisions to get it back on track as a part of the process.

Mick Spiers: 39:34

So when, when those things happen? Another people element here. So things will happen. Things will not go perfectly. How do we make sure that when we're having those check ins and we're and we're resetting, etc, etc, that one that people don't beat themselves up because they can't change what has already happened, they can only change what they do from now on. And how do we make sure collectively, the team attack the problem, not the people, right? So in we've all been there. There's been some projects where it does get really tense, and there can be a tendency for that great teamwork that you set up at the start, where you brought everyone together and they know like and have that connection. You start to see fractures in that teamwork because they're under a bit of pressure.

Clint Padgett: 40:17

This is where the project manager really has to step back in. In in my mind, this is where you have to have the hard skin, because my job, or your job as a project manager, would be to protect the individual team members from from anybody, whether that's upper management that has unrealistic expectations or different team members, whatever that might look like. And so, so if I need to delay my task because I got pulled off on a customer issue, then I'll say, Hey, I got pulled off on a customer issue. And this will continue to be late till somebody else gets reassigned to do this, or somebody else gets put on that customer issue, and I can come back to the project. What we find is that the people on the team hold each other accountable. And so it's if I find that it's being unrealistic. Where they go, come on. Mick, you know you can do that in only one day. You don't need two days or five days. I have to step back in and facilitate a conversation that says, well, well, Fred, why do you think it's only one day? Mick, why do you think you need five days? But in the end, if our rule is, whoever's name is the owner of that task, they get to. Take the duration. And let's say that Fred is your boss, Mick, and you're saying you want a week, and Fred's your boss. And Fred says, Oh, you just need to just put one day down. I'll have that. I'll force, foster that conversation, facilitate that conversation. But in the end, I'm going to look at you and say, Mick, how long, based on this new knowledge that you got, how long do you really need for this task? And if you still say five days. And Fred says, one. I will. I have done this. I'll look at Fred and say, Fred, how do I spell your last name? Because I'm going to assign you to this task. Because Mick's not committed to five one day. If I put Nick on there for one day, he's going to walk out of the room going, well, I'm going to fail, because I need five. So this doesn't make any sense. This is where the project manager, because that can be a difficult conversation, especially if you're inside the organization, maybe, maybe Fred, your boss is a boss, but you have to have that mindset of we as the team have to succeed. And if I let this person sabotage and just beat this other person down, then we're not going to we're not going to be successful. And I just want, I want the truth as early as possible. And so if you need five, explain why you need five, and I'll defend your five. And so I think it's where the project manager has to come in and not let that person get beat up and fractured.

Mick Spiers: 42:25

There's a few dynamics I'm picking up there, Clint. The first one is that ownership. So if I am able to put in my own estimate, and we I can be challenged on it, but once we've been through that, I'm going to commit to it, because it was my estimate, and I will take ownership, and I'll commit, and I'll make sure I don't let people down, because I don't feel like it was just forced upon me unrealistically. The second dynamic is, I'm going to say the there's a thing called the Yerkes Dodson stress performance curve that when you put a little bit of stress, it drives performance, but if you go over a tipping point, the person almost gives up and go, just plummets, right? So the five day task, you might come to me and say, Are you sure you can't get this done in four days? And what would it take to get it done in four days? I might be ready for that conversation, but if you and and I'll go to another extreme, if you know, with Parkinson's Law, if you give me 20 days, it'll take me 20 days. It was a five day task, right? So there's another balance there, but the conversation around five, you might push me to four because there's a good reason for it to be forward, not not not just because you want it for in four days, but there's a good reason why. If I can deliver it in four, it helps my teammates, etc. I'm ready to have that conversation. But if you're trying to give me five days work and tell me to do it in one, I'm not even going to try. Not even going to try.

Clint Padgett: 43:51

You want to get in five now it'll be 20. You know, I'll eventually get to it when I have nothing, you know, no choice. But so I have a saying that durations become self fulfilling prophecies, which I think is you, you said was Parkinson's or and that's, that's why we like to we always ask for realistic durations. And we say, Don't give me your best guess. Don't give me your worst guess. You know, we don't, we don't want best case to worst case. You want what's most likely going to happen. And because we're going to meet on a regular basis to update the project, we're going to make the corrective action necessary. If things are going poorly. We'll give you more time. If things go better than you thought, well, you don't need as much time. But the key is starting off with a realistic number, because if I create and again, I'm going to come back to I live in the real world, and if my boss is Sam, and Sam says, Clint, I want to get that done in, you know, 10 days instead of the 20 you're asking for. I I'm not going to be successful. I'm just going to beat myself up, and I'm going to work 20 hours a day and still going to fail in the end. And so when I work with Sam, the next time, I know that if I want 10, he's going to make me cut it in half. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask for 20, so he cuts it in half. I get my 10 right. So we get this big tug of war thing going, and we end up with unrealistic schedules. So what we try to do is just be realistic. Of your durations, I'm going to hold you accountable, but you can change it if you get better information later begin. So going back to what I said earlier, you know, durations become self fulfilling prophecies. If I put 20 days in a schedule for a task I really only need 10 days for. How often do I get it done in 10 days now that the schedule says 20, never, because now the schedule says 20, and unfortunately, it often doesn't happen in 20 because I keep thinking I got plenty of time, got plenty of time, got plenty of time. Oh, shoot. I just started last week. I had delivered in 22 days. So we just, we want shorter durations that you're going to live with and adjust as we need to.

Mick Spiers: 45:43

So I think this is a good segue to another thing that I wanted to get a bit curious about, which is lessons learned. I'm going to kind of put this to you at two different speeds and dimensions. I think many organizations, they practice lessons learned at the end of a project, and you could say hit and miss affair, as to whether they take action on the lessons learned. To be clear, that's I'm talking about my own personal observations in different companies. The one thing I don't see a lot of is Lessons Learned happening along the project. We had a guest on the show recently that was giving this metaphor about what. Basketball Coaches and help basketball coaches call a timeout in the middle of the game and go, hang on a second. I've seen something here. It's not working because of this. What are your thoughts about how do we make lessons learned actually impactful? So the the first one I mentioned is where people go around and they talk about what went wrong, but they take no action on it. Secondly, how do we make lessons learned a bit more timely so it can impact this project, not the next project?

Clint Padgett: 46:46

I think that's a an excellent point, and one that I've never actually had brought up before. So usually, an experience says what you've seen, which is, we call them after action reviews, but they happen at the end. Now the benefit we have on those is, oftentimes, the next project team that's doing a similar project is a part of the after action review so that we're giving, hey, here's what worked, here's what didn't. So think about that as you launch your project. So it's not completely at the end. It doesn't matter, it's it's, here's what we did, here's what didn't work. Well, think about that as you're building your plan that you're now launching a very similar type project and going off and doing. I think it's a great idea, though. I love that analogy of the of the coach calling it a time out. But to your point here, I've seen something, well, then the project manager, or somebody, has to have seen something that says, here's what we need to do, better or different. And I think that's also where the manager, the project manager, has to step in and say, you know this, we failed three tests. We've never failed before. Something is wrong. Something is different than it ever has been before. And you know, in the military, they would actually pause all operations. They do that all the time. Now, when they have a helicopter crash, they'll have a three day shutdown while they do their deep dive. What's going on? Luckily, the projects I work on are life impacting like that, but you do need to have, I think, if things are going poorly, you need to take the pause. And sometimes that's really hard to do because you're already running late, and you don't really want to take the pause, but you need to take that pause to figure out what we can do better. Do we need a different approach that we need to attack this a different way in order to get better at it.

Mick Spiers: 48:21

Yeah, yeah, excellent. All right. Clint, so we've been going for a while now, and it's been really interesting. We've we've unpacked a lot of things, and what I've loved along the way is everything kept on, coming back to people. Everything kept on so you can have a perfect project management process and the best tools in the world, but everything that Clint has shared with us today come back to the emotions of a human being and whether they're motivated, whether they're committed, whether they're they have a connection with the other human beings that they're working with. Everything came down to that and to remember that it's a human being that wants to go and play with their kids on the weekend and not not be working and slaving away because something went wrong at work this week where they got let down, or whatever the case may be. So I think we've hit the mark Clint that we we said we're going to talk about this difference between leading people and managing a project, and I think we've nailed it, is to remember that all businesses are people businesses, and if we forget that, it's at our peril, it'll be at the peril of the business, and it'll be at the peril of the project. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insights. I'm going to go now to our Rapid Round. These are the same four questions we ask all of our guests. So what's the one thing you know now, Clint pageant that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Clint Padgett: 49:44

I think it said, okay, to make mistakes. Perfection isn't ideal, but I think it's saying is that Perfection is the enemy of good enough. No, not saying we should just take shortcuts. So what I am saying, I wish I could go back and tell my 20 year old self the mistakes where you grow and you know, it's where you learn, and you probably won't do that again, you know? And when you're a toddler and you're a parent, and you tell them, Don't stick this paper clip in the electric outlet, and they do it anyway, and like, okay, that hurt. You won't do that again. Will you right? You have to learn through the mistakes. And I think that it's okay to make mistakes. And for me, at least, it was work as hard as you possibly can to focus on it and work. Nobody can i You can't change how smart you are. You can't change your IQ, but what you can control is how hard you work at something, and nobody is ever going to outwork me. So that was, I think, what I would like to go back and tell my 20 year old self is just work hard.

Mick Spiers: 50:32

Yeah, well done. Love it. What's your favorite book?

Clint Padgett: 50:36

This one is tough. I really like crucial conversations by Joseph granny. It's a great book, and to me, it things come down to Conversations. I'm a big conversation guy, and I think conversations are so super important. And unfortunately, today this this happened before the pandemic set in, but boy, the pandemic sure exacerbated things. And that is, I'm a big fan of conversation because it allows us to not make mistakes in how we communicate. So I think Christian conversations is great.

Mick Spiers: 51:06

Yeah, great. Pick. Love it. What's your favorite quote?

Clint Padgett: 51:10

So my favorite quote is, I think it's by George Bernard Shaw, and it says the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Yeah. So you know, I don't know if you guys play this, but when I was a kid, we played a game called telephone. And if you didn't play the game, it's like five kids in a room, and the first kid has a secret, he whispers in the second kid and it whispers it on down the line. And of course, the fun of the game is what comes out of kid number five is not remotely close to what kid number one said, right? Because the the secret just kept getting changed. Well, unfortunately, that happens in the business world as well. As a leader, I have a message that I send out, I think, in a very succinct way. But how did the per person hear that? Were they having a good day or a bad day? Because how do I define my terminology? Maybe different than the way you define your terminology. So rather than always aphology into one way communications again, I come back to conversation. What would happen is in that, even in the telephone, game, at the first kid the second kid could look back at the first kid and go, Okay, you said turn left. Do you mean turn left like right now at the McDonald's or the next traffic light? By asking these clarifying questions through this dialog. Now, my message gets passed down in a way that's consistent, and I have a much higher probability that my message is received in the way that I intended it to be delivered.

Mick Spiers: 52:23

Yeah, I like that, and the element of asking better questions along the way. We've got to share with you there Clint that with this concept, as you call it, telephone. For whatever reason, in Australia, it was called Chinese whispers. I have no idea, but it was, I've heard that. Yeah, it was the same game, and in a business now I'm going to take it to the business setting. I've seen examples where, not only, like, by the time it got to the seventh person, not only had the message changed, it had somehow actually reversed, like a message of we're going to go in this direction, had somehow gone where, in no circumstance is going to do this. It's like, I'm not exaggerating here. Like, that's how severe it can get with this, this way that the communication gets skewed. All right, brilliant. Now, finally, you've shared so many wonderful things. There's going to be people that are really interested in everything you've shared here, around project success, around The Project Success Method, around How Teams Triumph. And this word commitment, there's going to be people that want to know more. Clint, how do people find you if they would like to have a conversation with you or take advantage of your services?

Clint Padgett: 53:31

Yeah, so the books are on Amazon, like you said earlier, The Project Success Method, and the second was How Teams Triumph. They're both available on Amazon. You can reach me on LinkedIn. It's Clint.Padgett, and then you can reach us @projectsuccess.com as well. Any of those will work.

Mick Spiers: 53:45

All right, wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today. Clint, really enjoyed our conversation.

Clint Padgett: 53:50

Thanks, Mick, I appreciate you having me.

Mick Spiers: 53:52

You've been listening to The Leadership Project. In our next episode on Friday, we'll share our weekly leadership reflections, including my personal takeaways from today's interview with Clint and my leadership reflections on Michael Johnson giving back one of his gold medals. If you are finding our content valuable, we would love it if you could leave us a rating and review on Apple podcast or your preferred podcast service. You can also subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we share weekly video podcasts, curated videos and our weekly live stream show. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.