Center Stage: The Voice of The Project Economy - Re-Envisioning Management through Teaming

Re-Envisioning Management through Teaming

08/03/21 • 32 min

Center Stage: The Voice of The Project Economy

Are you working in an organization where it seems there are lose-lose internal dynamics among managers? If so, why is that and how can you help to change it?
The nature of work today requires collaboration and teaming to drive business outcomes like never before. Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” provides frank advice for organizational leaders, managers and teams tackling tough problems. In this episode of Center Stage, Johanna shares how optimizing individual achievement over that of the team or organization deeply roots lose-lose propositions into organizational culture. Incorporating key concepts and learnings from her books, the Modern Management Made Easy series, she provides practical examples of how organizations are shifting structures and reward systems to create win-win engagements among managers. More importantly, she offers seven principles of modern management aimed at increasing performance, rather than overseeing people and their work. For example, the principle of catch people succeeding flips on its head the traditionally punitive, disciplinary role of management and moves it more toward motivation and recognition.
Johanna also talks about how the impact of subtle change can impact management. She presents examples that illustrate the differences among managers who have a mindset of being “responsible for” versus “responsible to” their teams. She talks about how behaviors, actions and motivations are different for each mindset as well as the impacts of each mindset on individuals and teams.
Having started her career as a software developer, Johanna has also worked as a project manager, program manager, and people manager. Today, as a consultant and trainer/coach, she helps leaders, teams, and organizations create successful teams and projects and manage risk. She has authored more than 18 books on modern management, leading teams, agile and lean program management, portfolio management and related topics. Read more of her blog, articles, and her Pragmatic Manager newsletter on www.jrothman.com.
Chock full of good practices from real-life situations, this Center Stage podcast emphasizes the key role the modern manager can play in helping teams and organizations realize outcomes.

Previous Episode

Preparing Cognitive Athletes to Tackle Disruption

For the past two years, PMI has discussed gymnastic organizations that need to be adaptive and innovative to survive disruption. This session explores how practitioners too need to become cognitive athletes, putting adaptive, creative and sensing muscles into enhanced performance. Listen as Ade McCormack, the founder of the Disruption Readiness Institute, and Joseph Cahill explore how to prepare for an unknowable future.
As work continues to shift from enacting processes to more creative and innovative work, Ade proposes that professionals should similarly adapt:

Develop your brand.
Focus on traits rather than emphasizing skills.
Focus on your humanity, rather than just your work accomplishments.
Shift and pivot from repeatable skills and capabilities that can easily be subsumed by AI and other technologies.
Sense for environmental, social and organizational change so you can experiment early, learn from failure and be in demand as the change wave takes hold.

Ade also identifies that the future of work will create challenges for organizations. Employers will need to shift their talent management approach from viewing people as simply cogs in the machine to treating them as cognitive assets that are the source of market-pleasing innovative products and services. This cultural shift means that instead of promoting efficiency and punishing failure, organizational leaders need to embrace experimenting and determining whether they are “failing enough.”
This podcast is full of insights focused on the post-Industrial age and 21st century talent.
In addition to founding the Disruption Readiness Institute, Ade has worked with some of the world's best-known brands in more than 40 countries. He has authored six books on digital and disruption and wrote for the Financial Times on the theme of digital leadership for over a decade. You can learn more about Ade’s perspectives, by visiting his blog at www.ademccormack.com.

Next Episode

Replacing Brain Drain with Brain Gain

Ronit Avni founded Localized, a platform that unlocks educated talent for global companies, because she wanted to enable talented professionals living in emerging markets to have world-class career opportunities regardless of where they live.
As an immigrant to the United States, Avni knew firsthand that poor local economic conditions often lead to “brain drain” in which educated workers leave their home countries to seek better jobs elsewhere. “Many countries lose 30% of their population to brain drain,” says Avni. “They're losing all this talent that they have nurtured.”
As a social entrepreneur who previously started and exited a successful mission-driven media company, Avni saw an opportunity to help reverse this trend. The combination of mobile device penetration around the world, internet connectivity, and a knowledge economy now makes it possible for people to work and learn from others across geographies and time zones. “None of this is rocket science, but it is a fundamental shift in how these interactions happen,” she says.
With the ability to connect to global firms through technology, professionals no longer have to leave the countries where they’ve been raised to find a job. The resulting “brain gain” can increase the share of knowledge economy jobs in countries that have previously struggled to grow in knowledge-intensive industries.