ProjectPerfect

Zen Leadership

If you master Zen you’ll be a great leader. But if you study Zen just to become a great leader you’ll never master it. – August Turak

The practice of Zen in both business and daily life is centered on the paradoxical acceptance above. As instinctually conflicting as it may seem, to truly be a great leader you must release yourself of your innate desire to lead. We no longer live in a world where the business model of leadership is intimidation, and seeing oneself as the all-controlling dictator will only lead to failing performances of your employees. Demands and thre

ats only create fear and sub-par work. If someone is only concerned about being ‘adequate’ enough to maintain their position, then they will never have those singular breakthroughs that occur when they are genuinely interested in the success of the business.

Now this doesn’t mean you have to brew up some green tea and roll out the yoga mats though. Zen leadership simply means that the success and well-being of the entire team has to come before your own personal needs. Experiential wisdom should be the driving force in your organization’s growth, rather than a focus on theoretical knowledge and pre-formulated business models. You need to be willing to grow, adapt, and expand right along with your staff. Here are the 10 Keys to Zen Leadership that will help reveal the potential Steve Jobs inside us all.

1) Lead by Example

- Make sure that you personally are living up to the same expectations you have in others. If you insist on punctuality and enthusiasm, then you too need to be on-time and excited in order for others to live up to your requests. No matter how loud you may talk, people will always be more apt to do as you do then as you say. 

2) Communicate Clearly

- You want everybody on board to have the same vision of objectives and success that you do. If Bill Lumberg taught us anything in Office Space, it’s that silence will get you nowhere. On the flip-side, you also don’t want to over-complicate things with too much information. Be clear and as simple as possible. Honesty is essential, as you don’t want anyone to think you are trying to manipulate them in any way.

3) Encourage Constructive Argument

- Allow for open debate and questioning within your personnel. Not only does vocalized disagreement lead to potential problems being resolved before they happen, but it also alleviates any potential angst between co-workers. People should feel free and willing to discuss issues with one another.

4) Accept Input and Welcome Change

- It should be as easy as possible for persons to give you feedback – both personal and business related. You should have an open channel for any and all comments, and you can not have any fear in potentially revising your vision. The best idea you haven’t thought of may come from the most unexpected employee, and they should not be deterred in any way from expressing their concept. Always believe in the potentiality of someone coming up with a better or more-efficient plan.

5) Give Credit and Acknowledge Others

- Never let anyone doubt that they aren’t an essential member of the team. Acknowledging everyone’s addition to the project, no matter how menial the task, will only improve enthusiasm and work-output from all angles. Do this throughout the course of a project, not just at completion. If praise is lavished upon you, then redirect it to people for whom the credit is actually do. Show pride in your team, while remembering there is no shame in being overly humble.

6) Review and Adjust – Don’t Rank and Punish

- If a goal wasn’t met, then figure out what errors occurred and how they can be resolved. Punishing someone for mistakes will only make them fear thinking out of the box again. Finding the problem and making the necessary adjustments will not only prevent a repeat of the error, but will promote further expansion of new ideas.

7) Have a Clear Vision of Defeat

- Make sure to have a clear understanding of what the warning signs are for a potential disaster. Rather then deny any occurring down-slope, recognize any happening failures before they completely fall apart. Don’t be afraid to start again from the beginning.

8) Be Willing To Adapt

- Feel no necessary commitment to previous business models. Evolution is constant and more rapid than ever – feeling that you need to stick with only one game-plan will result in you losing out to newer and upgraded networks. If there’s an easier way to do something, don’t be afraid to embrace it. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Don’t make things more complex than they need to be.

9) Relinquish Power

- Your goal as a Zen leader is to enable your team to operate successfully without you. Levels of trust should be utilized for maximum output from your employees. You should feel secure in your people’s abilities, and be confident enough to delegate more responsibility once they are prepared. An appreciation for worker’s efforts will make them want to live up to the confidence you hold in them, and subsequently create a desire within them to do as much as they can for the team.

10) The Zen Leader is In All of Us

- Forget the notion of being a ‘natural born’ leader. The true Zen leader can arise from any and all of us. When leading through Zen, you are not controlling a group of people but rather uniting a group in a way that brings out the full potential of what their combined efforts may produce. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the Zen leader has the delicate vision to know how to correctly add them up. The humble desire for the overall success of the greater good is the first and most important step. Once these notions are realized, the beneficial ramifications, both business and personal, are vast and expansive.

The First 100 Days...

Taking over a software project halfway through can be difficult depending on how well the transition is managed. In the first 100 days of the job, your top priority should be establishing trust between yourself and your team members. You need to trust your team to execute the plan and they need to believe that you will give them what they need to accomplish the plan. To gain their trust, we suggest using the following strategies:

Listening: One of the qualities of being a great project manager is communication. As someone new to the team, practice active listening. This is important because each project team is unique in terms of its culture, strengths and problems.

Learning: Ask the crucial question "Why?" about elements of the project’s schedule and solution. Take time to understand the project's current status, past project decisions, team members' strengths, and stakeholders’ expectations. Being able to understand your stakeholder will help you to better communicate/manage expectations for the path forward. Knowing your team members' strengths will enable you to effectively align the planned tasks with the right individuals.

Leading: In order to earn your team's trust and the stakeholders' confidence, act with highest integrity and transparency. How do you accomplish this in your day-to-day activities? By consistently communicating what you plan to do and doing what you planned.
  
There are always bumps and bruises along the way, but by the end of the first 100 days, your team and you will trust each other to accomplish the goals we set forth.

Iterative vs. Fixed-priced Projects

For those of you familiar with a traditional project management process, you’re probably familiar with a usual project life cycle- plan, budget, design, develop, test and release, A.K.A. waterfall. This style of management can typically be found in fixed-price projects. You may be less familiar with the percentage of projects that utilize this management process, yet fail to stay within the project’s intended time line, budget and scope.

According to the “Chaos Report”, a project management research study on software development companies:

...35 percent of software projects started in 2006 can be categorized as successful, meaning they were completed on time, on budget and met user requirements. This is a marked improvement from the first, groundbreaking report in 1994 that labeled only 16.2 percent of projects as successful...

35 percent! Almost two out of every three software development or integration projects fail.

My experience with 2 project life cycles:

While there are 4 project life cycles adopted for software and web development, Viderity primarily works within the Waterfall (also known as Serial) and Iterative cycles. While all project life cycles have advantages and disadvantages, these two have been widely accepted and adopted by software, IT, and web companies.

Both were developed to manage project risks, but one is probably more suited than the other depending on the amount and type of risk involved in your project. To explain, let’s start by providing a brief overview of the Waterfall and Iterative life cycles.

The Waterfall Life Cycle

Using the Waterfall life cycle, your team is supposed to be able to first obtain every possible requirement (Project Planning and Strategy). Based on those requirements the team moves into design. Once everyone agrees on the “big picture”, the team starts developing or building. All pieces are developed, completed and integrated before testing begins.

Waterfall life cycles take longer because the team is tasked with predicting how much a project costs, how long it will take to implement features, and how quickly defects can be fixed – things that are inherently unpredictable.

Many business stakeholders prefer waterfall life cycles and fixed-price projects up front with a very high-level overview of features and services. It’s very reassuring to know exactly how much a project will cost before you spend any money on it. Small projects (e.g., basic websites that include static, brochure-type pages) flourish from this type of development process because there are less complex programming requirements. However, if your project is more complex (e.g., a website with advanced functionality such as e-commerce integration), I recommend using an iterative, incremental, life cycle. A waterfall approach on these types of projects may result in failure.

The Iterative Life Cycle

Viderity uses an iterative life cycle for projects that require more complex planning and development. The iterative life cycle looks a bit like the waterfall approach at the beginning of the project for the requirements and analysis phase, but uses monthly “sprints” through the remainder of the project. Sprints align and manage expectations by permitting the customer and project team to see working prototypes as they are created. Early review allows greater flexibility for development and testing so that the customer gets exactly what they want.

Instead of spending 2-3 months in low-level requirements gathering, and then building out all features and testing them before release, we recommend spending 2-4 weeks defining the feature sets, determining which features are most important to the customer, then developing, testing and releasing features in monthly sprints.

While the project’s time frame and price are not fixed at the start of the project, the intrinsic nature of developing this way has proven to reduce cost and increase the potential for success.

How iterative processes reduce risk

• Product features are continuously analyzed and negotiated based on need, price, and timeline.
• Project estimates are based on very small chunks
• Business requirements are not written in stone and can be changed
• There are rapid development and feedback cycles early in the project life cycle